Casino Royale

Casino Royale, novel by British writer Ian Fleming, published in 1953 and the first of his 12 blockbuster novels about James Bond, the suave and supercompetent British spy. Packed with violent action, hairbreadth escapes, international espionage, clever spy gadgets, intrigue, and gorgeous women, the books became international best sellers.

Summary

After introducing James Bond, the book sets up the assignment. The villain is Le Chiffre, a spy for the Soviet Union working in France as the undercover paymaster of a communist-controlled trade union. Le Chiffre had diverted Soviet funds intended for the union and used them to purchase a string of brothels shortly before a new law banned brothels in France. He now plans to recoup the money at the gambling tables of Casino Royale in the resort town of Royale-les-Eaux, France, and M, the head of MI6, gives Bond the mission of ensuring that he loses.

In France, René Mathis, who works for the French espionage agency, informs Bond that an enemy microphone has been placed in his hotel room. In a bar he later introduces Bond to the lovely Vesper Lynd, who is to be Bond’s partner. When Bond leaves the bar, two men try unsuccessfully to kill him with a bomb. Later he meets Felix Leiter, an American CIA agent also working on the case. That evening Bond settles down at the baccarat table where Le Chiffre is playing, while Lynd and Leiter observe. Although Bond wins at first, his luck changes, and soon his money is gone. Leiter sends over an envelope containing 32 million francs, and Bond bets it all. One of Le Chiffre’s men presses a gun into the base of his spine, but, by falling backward in his chair, Bond knocks the weapon out of the man’s hand. He resumes playing, and this time he wins, leaving Le Chiffre cleaned out.

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Later that night Lynd is kidnapped by Le Chiffre and his gunmen. Bond gives chase, but Le Chiffre uses metal spikes to cause Bond’s car to crash, and he too is captured. Bond and Lynd are taken to a vacant villa and separated. Le Chiffre tortures Bond in an effort to get him to divulge the location of his gambling winnings. However, he is interrupted by the arrival of an agent from SMERSH, the Soviet agency in charge of dealing with wayward operatives, and the man kills Le Chiffre.

A few days later Bond wakes up in a medical facility and learns that he was rescued by Mathis. Lynd becomes a regular visitor as he convalesces, and, when he is released, she takes him to a small, charming hotel on the French coast. There they spend an idyllic few days, until he catches her making a clandestine phone call. After a period of suspicion and awkwardness, they resume intimacies, but the next morning she is found dead in her bed, an apparent suicide. She has left him a note confessing to having been a double agent.

Legacy and adaptations

Everything in the novel—from the Cold War ideology, to the aura of sophistication around food, drink, cigarettes, and cars in the faded casino towns of northern France, to the potent mix of sentimentality and misogyny—is redolent of the early 1950s in which it was written. The plot is simple, even elemental. The story includes a game of baccarat detailed over 25 pages, a lovingly described scene of grotesque torture, and a curiously lengthy account of Bond’s convalescence with Vesper Lynd, the first “Bond girl.” The prose is hard and unsparing, the detail minutely fetishistic.

Casino Royale was intended as the first of a series, and it received generally favourable reviews and satisfactory sales in Britain. The Bond books gained wide popularity in the United States after the newly elected president, John F. Kennedy, named From Russia With Love (1957) on his list of favourite books in 1961. Though Casino Royale was not the first of the James Bond novels to be filmed, a popular parody of the book, starring David Niven (as Bond), Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, Ursula Andress, and Orson Welles, was released in 1967. A well-received updated adaptation of the book, starring Daniel Craig as Bond, appeared in 2006.

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