NEWS

Posted on 28 November, 2025

The cover of the first 007 continuation novel after Fleming’s death required something special: it marked a new juncture for the series and a new future for James Bond. Tom Adams was the artist selected for the job and he didn’t disappoint, creating an iconic design with intelligence and a signature surreal quality.

Born in 1926, Adams’ talent touched a broad cultural landscape – traversing Eagle children’s comic, 100+ Agatha Christie book covers, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lou Reed’s first album cover… and Colonel Sun. The son of Constance and James, a Scottish town planner, Tom was born in Providence, Rhode Island. Not long after his birth, the family moved to Kent in England where he showed early artistic promise. He served in the Royal Navy in WWII and spent a year at Cambridge University before studying at Chelsea School of Art and Goldsmiths College, graduating in 1950. After painting signs for pubs, working on Eagle and Swift comics and setting up his own creative agency, Tom began designing book covers in the early 1960s. He produced a series of Agatha Christie’s novels, starting in 1962, and was later approached to work on Kingsley Amis’ Colonel Sun, the first James Bond continuation novel, in 1968.

What makes his artwork so distinctive? Adams uses a bold colour palette and surreal, dream-like subject matter to draw us into a strange and mysterious universe. His work is informed by the book’s themes and plot points: his cover for Colonel Sun has a Daliesque quality, featuring an oversized melting gun and a central hybrid ear/nose figure – a reference to the novel’s most infamous scene in which a needle is inserted into 007’s ear. Incidentally, this sequence is recreated in EON Productions’ 2015 Bond film, Spectre. The backdrop of the scene is a volcanic beach cove, drawing on the Greek island location of the story, complete with Chinese dragon volcanic cloud. Idyllic ocean blues and warm, optimistic yellows welcome us in, and set up an unsettling contrast with the intense, unnerving mood of the story. A floating eyeball takes the position of the sun, perhaps reflecting the sense of being watched throughout the book. Despite the dreamlike style, Adams maintains elements of realism and his eyeball has particularly intricate veins.

Bond is not depicted on the cover, so these abstract elements are a fascinating way to bring humanity to the image, whether they represent parts or the whole of the character, elements of a fractured psyche, or something else entirely. These anatomical symbols could imply constant surveillance, hinting that nothing goes unobserved, including smells, sounds and sights.

Adams’ artwork draws on a range of styles, making it even more eye-catching and unusual for mainstream literature. Colonel Sun is of course firmly planted in surrealism, but when it comes to Agatha Christie and others, he plays with elements such as collage. His ability to combine realism with surrealism, reality and fantasy, and utilise visual storytelling to enhance the reader’s experience is surprising, pleasing and arguably unmatched, setting him apart from other illustrators.

His design for Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Mr. Quin feels very reminiscent of Richard Chopping’s celebrated covers for Fleming’s 007 novels, such as the From Russia with Love 1957 first edition. Chopping often used highly realistic depictions of unsettling objects such as flies, guns and flowers to create a sense of danger and psychological intensity. Both Chopping and Adams use hyper-detailed, almost falsified realism, but Adams takes it further by meticulously blending it with dreamlike elements. Whilst the covers are striking at first glance, the mixture of imagery forces the observer to go deeper and spend time deciphering the art.

The Colonel Sun cover is an enigma and asks questions. It underlines the saying ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’, since the artwork is so abstract that, without prior knowledge, you certainly wouldn’t have any idea what the book is about. On first glance it entices the viewer to discover the story inside. Upon reading the novel, the audience are invited to decode how the elements present in the cover relate to the plot.

The perfect cover is subjective. Sometimes, simplicity can be enough to make one pick up a book. Yet a more complicated – even abstract – cover can enhance the story and play with the reader’s mind, just like Colonel Sun‘s does. When it works, it works; Tom Adams’ art strikes the perfect note that both draws you in, and keeps you there.

Discover the paperback edition of Colonel Sun, with a new introduction by Anthony Horowitz, here at the Ian Fleming Shop.