Casino Royale
by Ian Fleming
Summary
Secret Service agent James Bond, sent to bankrupt the Soviet backed union treasurer Le Chiffre at the baccarat tables of the French resort town of Royale les Eaux, loses badly on his first night before a late infusion of American money lets him break the man completely. Le Chiffre, desperate and exposed to his own Soviet masters, kidnaps Bond and Vesper Lynd, the British agent assigned to assist him, and tortures Bond in a chair with the seat cut away, beating his exposed genitals from below with a carpet beater in one of the more explicit scenes of violence in a thriller published to that date, until a SMERSH assassin arrives and executes Le Chiffre for his failure before he can finish the job. Bond recovers in hospital and falls in love with Vesper during his convalescence, planning to leave the service and marry her, until she kills herself rather than confess that she has been a double agent all along, coerced by SMERSH through a Polish lover it was holding hostage. The book ends with Bond, informed by headquarters that Vesper had indeed been working against him, radioing back a colder verdict than a lover might offer: the bitch is dead now.
Fleming writes in short, propulsive chapters that each end on a small cliffhanger, and the novel reads fast and coolly cruel, closer in tone to the hard postwar spy fiction Fleming had lived through himself than to the gentlemanly thrillers that came before it; some early reviewers found its violence and its casual misogyny startling rather than exciting, an argument about Bond that has never really ended.
Fleming wrote the entire draft in about two months at Goldeneye, his house in Jamaica, working from his own wartime service in naval intelligence, and he built Le Chiffre partly out of the occultist Aleister Crowley's physical bulk and taste for cruelty, and named his hero after the real ornithologist James Bond, author of a field guide called Birds of the West Indies that Fleming kept on his shelf.
Historical Context & Significance
Jonathan Cape published Casino Royale on April 13, 1953, and its first printing of 4,728 copies sold out within a month; no crime fiction prize was old enough yet to weigh in, since the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for best novel began only in 1954 and the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger not until 1955. The Manchester Guardian's Hugh I'Anson Fausset called it a first rate thriller with a breathtaking plot despite finding it schoolboy stuff overall, and The Times Literary Supplement's Alan Ross praised it as extremely engaging; The Sunday Times went further, naming Fleming the best new English thriller writer since Eric Ambler.
American sales lagged badly at first, only around four thousand copies a year after Macmillan's 1954 edition, and Bond did not become a phenomenon until later books and, especially, the film series caught on; a 1954 CBS television adaptation even renamed him the American agent Jimmy Bond. Columbia's 1967 spoof version, a commercial hit despite bearing little resemblance to Fleming's book, held the film rights until Eon Productions finally adapted the novel straight in 2006 with Daniel Craig, more than half a century after Fleming wrote it in two months at his Jamaica house.