Robert Markham is a pseudonym

Pseudonym

A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...

 created by Glidrose Publications

Ian Fleming Publications

Ian Fleming Publications is the production company formerly known as both Glidrose Productions Limited and Glidrose Publications Limited, named after its founders John Gliddon and Norman Rose...

 in the mid-1960s. By 1967, Glidrose, the publishers of the James Bond

James Bond

James Bond, code name 007, is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. There have been a six other authors who wrote authorised Bond novels or novelizations after Fleming's death in 1964: Kingsley Amis,...

 novel series created by Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming

Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer.Fleming is best known for creating the fictional British spy James Bond and for a series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character, one of the biggest-selling series of fictional books of...

, had exhausted all available material written by Fleming before his death in 1964. Desiring to continue the high-selling James Bond novel franchise, Glidrose decided to commission a series of new novels, which would be written by different authors but all credited to "Robert Markham."

Kingsley Amis

The first, and to date, only, author commissioned was Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis

Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...

, who had written a number of Bond-related books, including the popular The James Bond Dossier

The James Bond Dossier

The James Bond Dossier , by Kingsley Amis, is a critical analysis of the James Bond novels. Amis dedicated the book to friend and background collaborator, the poet and historian Robert Conquest...

. It's also been suggested that Amis assisted in finishing Fleming's last Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun

The Man with the Golden Gun (novel)

The Man with the Golden Gun is the twelfth novel of Ian Fleming's James Bond series of books. It was first published by Jonathan Cape in the UK on 1 April 1965, eight months after the author's death. The novel was not as detailed or polished as the others in the series, leading to poor but polite...

, which was published after Fleming's death, although James Bond historians and Ian Fleming biographers have debunked this rumour in recent years.

For the pseudonym, the name "George Glidrose" was initially suggested by Peter Fleming, Ian Fleming's brother, however, this was shot down by Jonathan Cape

Jonathan Cape

Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...

 who claimed the name had no selling power. Markham was then chosen and the novel Colonel Sun

Colonel Sun

Colonel Sun , by Kingsley Amis, is the first James Bond continuation novel published after Ian Fleming's death in 1964; Glidrose Productions used the collective pseudonym "Robert Markham", for British novelist Kingsley Amis, with the intent of so publishing other novels by different writers...

was subsequently published in 1968 to generally good reviews and moderate sales. Amis' involvement as a continuation author was not a secret, and some early editions of the book identified Amis as the author, though the main Robert Markham credit remained.

No further Markham novels were commissioned, although some sources suggest that Per Fine Ounce

Per Fine Ounce

Per Fine Ounce is the title of an unpublished novel by Geoffrey Jenkins featuring Ian Fleming's James Bond. It was completed circa 1966 and is considered a "lost" novel by fans of James Bond because it was actually commissioned by Glidrose Productions, the official publishers of James Bond...

, a Bond novel by Geoffrey Jenkins

Geoffrey Jenkins

-Early life:Jenkins was born Pretoria. At the age of 17 he wrote and had published A Century of History which received a special eulogy from General Jan Smuts at the centenary of Potchefstroom....

 that had been commissioned by Glidrose c.1966 but never published, might have been intended as a Robert Markham release.

Future ideas

According to an introduction in the 2005 Titan Books

Titan Books

Titan Publishing Group is an independently owned publishing company, established in 1981. It is based at offices in London, England's Bankside area. The Books Division has two main areas of publishing: film & TV tie-ins/cinema reference books; and graphic novels and comics reference/art titles. The...

 reprint volume of the Colonel Sun comic strip, Amis had considered writing a follow-up novel, possibly set in Mexico

Mexico

The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

, but never followed through; the introduction also states that Amis approached Glidrose with an idea for a Bond short story that would have featured a 70-year-old Bond coming out of retirement for one final mission, but the publishers refused to allow him to write it. It is not known if either project would have been released under the Markham name.

With the exception of an apocryphal "biography" and two film novelisations published in the 1970s, the next serious attempt to relaunch the James Bond literary franchise would not occur until the early 1980s by John Gardner

John Gardner (thriller writer)

John Edmund Gardner was an English spy novelist, most notably for the James Bond series.-Early life:Gardner was born in Seaton Delaval, Northumberland. He graduated from St John's College, Cambridge and did postgraduate study at Oxford...

.