My first Fleming/Bond novel and it's far more interesting than I expected. Sure, it's 1950s pulp but Bond himself is portrayed as both super-cool and as more emotionally and psychologically vulnerable than we might expect. After an explosion, for example, which he dodges, 'Bond felt himself starting to vomit', so sickened is he by the bloody fragments of flesh surrounding him. It's fascinating, too, to witness his inner thoughts during that torture scene.

There are, of course, objectionable moments but they, arguably, are attributed to Bond rather than necessarily to Fleming. For example, 'the conquest of her body... would each time have the sweet tang of rape' sounds hideous to modern ears, but Bond's inner monologue goes on to clarify that this feeling stems from Vesper's ultimate unpossessability: 'she would surrender herself avidly, he thought, and greedily enjoy all the intimacies of the bed without ever allowing herself to be possessed.'

That it's Bond who falls in love and plans to propose after resigning from the service, while Vesper (admittedly also in love) is playing him made this book less misogynistic than I had expected. (She does, though, cry an awful lot!) It also feels like a kind of prologue to the rest of the series, giving us a backstory to what I presume will be Bond's psychological armour against women and emotional involvement. He's not, as one of his colleagues claims at the end, 'a machine'.

Fleming keeps the whole plot sharp and short, no faffing about, and the casino scenes are genuinely tense. I found this a surprisingly engaging read and will certainly read on.

I have come across a few audiobooks and I thought well lets finally give these 007 books a try then.

I love the movies and can still watch the re-runs without getting bored so I am curious as to how the books are actually written.

Casino Royal the movie is definitely >>>> than the book version and I have a feeling it will be the same for all the movie version of the books . The narration by Simon Vance made it a lot more fun and quick to listen to the audiobook.

Book: ⭐⭐⭐
Narration:

I think I read From Russia With Love first (and, FRWL will always be my favorite Bond book and movie), but I had to go back to the beginning a read the Fleming bond books straight through. I was afforded the opportunity a few years ago when the entire Fleming collection in paperback was available for $20 at Sam's Club! Still one of the best book buys I have ever come across!

Casino Royale did not blow me away - it is a bit dry and slow. I wasn't going to let that deter me from my quest to work through the series, but it did take some getting used to. I am not sure if it is just that it is from early in Fleming's writing career or if it is just tough to feel comfortable with my image of Bond as I was reading words from his creation. I am reminded of when you go back to watch the first episode of a sitcom while you are 8 or 9 seasons in and none of the characters are developed or comfortable yet.

One thing that surprised me was that the more recent Casino Royale movie did include most of the story from the book trading Texas Hold-Em for Baccarat. It had been years since a bond movie include plot lines or plot points from Fleming's works, it was kind of cool to see!

If you just want a taste of Fleming's Bond, go to From Russia With Love, but if you want to experience the whole adventure, be sure to start at the beginning!

Daniel Craig is my Bond. I've never seen Brosnan's or Connery's or Dalton's Bond, or anyone else's. As such, Casino Royale was the first Bond movie I ever saw, and I friggin LOVED it from start to finish. Being as how I've seen the movie numerous times, I was initially leery of reading the original novel -- I hate reading the book AFTER I've seen the adaptation, because I never get the full enjoyment out of it that way. Happily though, it seems the film people stuck very close to the source material in their adaptation, aside from the ending. Here I was, expecting that high-adrenaline ending with the heartbreaking loss of Vesper, and Bond going out to hunt down his next target, when it ended with Vesper committing suicide rather than the climactic fall of an ancient Venetian waterfront building. Le sigh.

I do appreciate the way they updated the film, since the novel was written in the 1950s. I imagine it may have been a bit scandalous back then, the amount of graphic sex and violence mentioned in these pages, but then again perhaps not? I wish I could ask my grandfather if he'd ever read Fleming's novels and see what he thought of them back then. And thankfully the film portrayed Bond as more of a charmer and ladies' man than the asshole who completely views women as objects in the book. He's extremely cold and methodical here, where in the movie he is much more warm-blooded.

I also LOVED Simon Vance's narration. Will be looking up more of his voice work in the future! If you can't tell, I recommend the audio xD And I didn't realize how short this was going to be! Time to go find something else to listen to! And I'm TOTES watching this movie again when I get home tonight.

My name is Bond. James Bond.

This is my first Ian Fleming's (1908-1964) novel about MI6 agent called James Bond. My dad used to bring us, his kids, to 007 movies when we were kids and I can still remember all the expensive cars exploding on the screen, shapely Bond girls in their bikinis, the high-powered guns and James Bond running, being chased by bad guys, escaping death in a millisecond precision.

I am heartened to know that Casino Royale, first published in 1953, was the first James Bond book. So, it was the intro book to all Bond novels. It also explained his character: why did he become an agent and more importantly how he became tough. So, I would think that this book has the more human James Bond. In fact, there are fewer actions here compared to what I saw in his movies. Here he was tortured without any clothes on and I could not believe how he was able to escape death. He also fell in love with his gorgeous partner whose secret was revealed in the end that made my jaw dropped. So I kept reading till the last sentence that again made my jaw dropped. Yes, this book can make your jaw drop several times. Easy read. Action packed. Masculine. Tightly written. Great until the last word.

I saw the 3rd movie adaptation several years ago and I liked it. Wiki says, however, that the original one was in 1954 and Bond was played by an actor called Barry Nelson.

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But the 2006 most recent version was starring Daniel Craig.

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It's amazing to see what 42 years can do to the character. Nelson looked plump, hairy, slightly cross-eyed and looks feeling cold while Craig is fit, buff, hairless, green-eyed and loves the sea. It could be the global warming!

I'm pretty sure I've read this before, but for some reason I had no track of it. It's an excellent introduction to the world of James Bond, but should it be one of the "1001 Books To Read Before You Die"? Not sure.

It is definitely a game-changer as thrillers went. We have a character who can be cold as ice, but probably because he has to be. It is also emblematic of a time. The time where everyone's life was circumscribed by the two big elephants in the room: US and USSR. In many ways, a simpler time. And, it's nice to revisit it.

I know next to nothing about James Bond. I have seen a few of the films, but none of the recent ones, and I don’t think I’ve ever read any of the original books. My interest and expectations were low, but this series of audiobooks, each volume read by a different actor, piqued my interest (and even then, honestly, only because book three is read by Bill Nighy).

This first entry, Casino Royale, is quite different from what I expected of Bond. The main surprise is that Bond, though he believes himself to be the Sherlock Holmes of international super-spies, is actually not very good at anything. He doesn’t notice that Mathis has gone through his room; he doesn’t figure out on his own that other people in the hotel know he’s a spy; he nearly loses the card game that’s his entire mission objective; he runs hotheadedly right into the enemy’s trap instead of coolly planning a rescue or ransom. He doesn’t seem to understand his job even as well as the non-spy reader does. For example, after defeating his opponent, he thinks it’s a great idea to stick around and take a woman out to dinner, in public, in broad daylight, in the very location in which he brought his enemy to utter ruin. ??? Dude...

But by far his worst moment is that he doesn’t figure out that Vesper is a double agent who’s been working against him the whole time. Like, come on, seriously?? How could you possibly not see all the clues that were completely obvious to everyone but you? Anyway.

His flaws make him more interesting as a character, and I enjoyed his moments of self-doubt, and his questioning whether we can really know who’s an enemy, and whether we ever have the right to eliminate someone. This monologue is immediately ridiculed by Mathis, and it seems like the reader is meant to accept Mathis’s view as the more correct one. I doubt things were so neat and tidy in 1953, and they certainly aren’t now. But the book raises thoughtful points, perhaps in spite of itself.

There are also some intriguing points in the second half of the novel in which Bond struggles with his identity as a man, and what the torture he’s endured might mean for his idea of who he is. Again, the book shows us his unbelievable chauvinism but also invites us to question all of it and wonder whether to go along with what Bond thinks relationships are like, or if perhaps there’s something more that he’s missing out on.

Overall, I enjoyed the book more than I thought I would, and more than the first half of the story led me to believe I would; the second half goes much deeper than I expected, becoming surprisingly introspective. The audio version is narrated by Dan Stevens, who does a great job distinguishing all the characters with different voices (though I found it distracting that his Le Chiffre sounds exactly like Alfred Hitchcock).

Extra points, of course, for this line: “Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them came from Texas.”

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n  BOND, JAMES BONDn

I've fan of James Bond films all my life and I've seen them all.

However I hadn't read any novel (at the moment of this review) so I thought that it was good idea if I'd read a first novel of James Bond has to be the first book where everything started.

Hardly I was a newbie on Bond world as to need to read the first book, but I thought that it was the proper thing to do.

I have clear that each story is self-contained, so I will read more Bond novels in the future but not in the publishing order.

Well, it's clear that since it was the first novel, the character and his world is just starting to get into place and it's still in a heavy development.


n  LICENSE TO KILL - BRAND NEWn

I feel that this book is not the best way to show the character.

Since Bond doesn't do anything so extraordinaire and he is saved several times by others, when he got into troubles where he is unable to get out by himself.

Hardly the scenario that one wants to read about of THE super spy, the most famous of all.

Also the events are set in an odd way in the narrative, since the novel is titled Casino Royale, and while Bond was a lot of time there, a lot of happening in the story occured after of the events in the casino, and even there are a lot of happening after dealing with the main villain.

So it's hard to understand where is the real climax of the story.

One big merit is the dark tone of the novel, since there are a lot of gruesome events and situations that I think it wasn't so regular in novels in the 50's.

The good thing is that it's short book, barely less than 200 pages, so you don't invest much time to read it.

I wasn't sure what to expect because I had only ever seen Bond movies and never read any of the books but this was thoroughly entertaining. Everything in the book was there deliberately, there was no extra fat or unnecessary language, the characters all had rich back stories and the plot was really only getting started by the climax.

Just have to say the movies tone down some of James more unflattering qualities. I think even for the time the book was published those qualities were a bit unflattering....having said that, it was fun to see where "it all began". I had a hard time separating my memory of the most recent Casino Royale movie from the book. There is lots of description of actual gambling, which...is a bit boring, gambling needs to be watched, participated in....and the game they are playing is so boring...at least that is what my mom told me back in the day's of her card dealing career. There were no jangling sound of slot machines in the back ground of this casino.

James liked to be pampered more in the book than in the movies I feel. I liked how he actually ate large meals and drank more than he should. The book talks about how James liked gambling, that it was his thing. I am surprised we don't see more of it in later movies, I am not sure if I will read any more books to see if this is true. I was bothered by the ending of this one. We went from this huge "high" to this very "low". I get it, James had his heart broken, we knew it was inevitable from the first chapter. Still....it bothered me.

It was an easy read. I think I will stick with the movies..... for me Pierce and Daniel show us the essence of James in the books.

There is a time for every man and this man is of his time.

I might go a step further and say, a profession for every man and this man is of his profession, for James Bond is a psychopath and one would need to be in order to do the things his job requires of him. He is a controllable psychopath. He's not the loner, loose cannon type. He's the loner, well-aimed cannon type. He's not going to fill up his closet with the severed limbs of his random victims, because the voices in his head told him to. He's going to fill up his closet with the severed limbs of his victims, because his boss told him to, and the victims won't be random.

Bond objectifies women, often referring to them as "bitch," seeing them only as a sexual commodity, and so many complain that they simply do not like this literary version of Bond. The movie versions of the books have conditioned people to like James Bond, portraying him as a dashing man's man who takes what he wants and discards the remains when he's done. It's cold-hearted, but we realize he's got a job to do...and gosh darn it, he's so dang handsome and charming! I can't deny the difference between the two. One is lovable, the other is loathsome. One is exciting to watch, but is otherwise a boring person. The other is exciting to watch and is an intensely interesting person. You watch the movies for fun and come away with a warm-fuzzy. You read the books for fun and come away leery of humanity.

I'll put it simpler. Movie Bond likes to make ravaging love to his women. Book Bond has rape fantasies.

I don't deny anyone's subjective tastes to like or dislike one over the other. I see good reason to hate Book Bond. But I wouldn't read Ian Fleming's work for pure fun. He's created a singular character type. In his work with Intelligence during WWII, Fleming must have come across numerous spies that fit Bond's description: cold and calculating cut-throats with anti-social tendencies and a warped world-view. James Bond is not a hero. He's a man paid to do a job. What you think of the man and your opinion of the job is entirely up to you. But real versions of these things have existed in our world and they are horribly fascinating.

The casino where the first James Bond adventure begins is located in Royale-les-Eaux, a fading resort town near Dieppe on the coast of northern France. It is a surprisingly déclassé locale, one might think, for a James Bond novel – not the sunny beaches of Monaco, but rather the grey mists of the windswept Norman shoreline. Yet that touch of the noir-ish gives an added degree of authenticity to Casino Royale, the 1953 novel with which Ian Fleming launched the career of the world’s most famous secret agent.

Fleming worked in British Naval Intelligence during the Second World War, and therefore he knew a thing or two about the world of espionage. As the war ended, giving way to a Cold War between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, there was heightened interest among the reading public in Western countries regarding what their intelligence agencies were doing to protect democracy. Fleming, in short, had the good fortune of releasing his James Bond novels into a world of readers who were eager to learn what they could about the secret world of spies – particularly if that information could be relayed via the medium of a sexy and action-packed novel.

Casino Royale, as the first of the James Bond novels, introduces the reader to a number of the storytelling archetypes that will become de rigueur in one Bond story after another. After an in medias res opening chapter that takes place at the novel’s title casino, Fleming takes us back to British Secret Intelligence headquarters in London, where “M” (code name for the director of MI-6) receives a dossier regarding a proposed plan to neutralize one “Le Chiffre” (“The Number”), a Frenchman who is a Soviet spy, influencing trade-union activities in Alsace-Lorraine.

As Le Chiffre is a compulsive gambler, who has been spending Soviet espionage funds on both his gambling habit and an array of organized-crime activities, the plan presented by Station S of the British Secret Service is as follows: send Bond to Royale, and have him ruin Le Chiffre by defeating him in a high-stakes gambling match. His embezzlement from the U.S.S.R. having thus been made clear to Soviet authorities, Le Chiffre will then be eliminated by Soviet SMERSH agents, saving the British the trouble. SMERSH (СМЕРШ), by the way, was a real-life Soviet counterintelligence agency; it was established by Stalin, and it stood for Смерть шпио́нам (Smert' shpiónam, “Death to Spies”).

My response to Section S's master plan for neutralizing Le Chiffre was: Really? British Intelligence has been the world’s finest espionage service since Sir Francis Walsingham was protecting Queen Elizabeth the First from a wide array of would-be assassins, and this is the best plan that they can come up with? Give an undercover operative a sizable bankroll of pounds sterling, and have him out-gamble a gambler? It seems evident that this weak plot element of Casino Royale is introduced so that Fleming can later share with us his considerable knowledge of the fine points of high-stakes casino gambling.

Bond learns, upon accepting the assignment, that he will be assisted by René Mathis, a top agent for France’s Deuxième Bureau. That news pleases him. He further learns that he will also be assisted by a woman named Vesper Lynn from his own country’s intelligence service. He is distinctly not pleased by that news: “And then there was this pest of a girl. He sighed. Women were for recreation. On a job, they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around. One had to look out for them and take care of them.”

At a later point in the novel, when a woman agent seems to have been kidnapped, Bond indulges in more misogynist musings: “These blithering women who thought they could do a man’s work. Why the hell couldn’t they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men’s work to the men?”

Well, “Good God, 007!” – as “M” has been known to say when he is impatient with his ace secret agent.

And yet I can’t help thinking that there may be something of a “meta” element to Bond’s seemingly bottomless misogyny – as I am reminded when, in the second chapter of Casino Royale, the reader meets M’s administrative assistant, Miss Moneypenny. “Miss Moneypenny,” the book’s narrator states, “would have been desirable but for eyes which were cool and direct and quizzical.” It is passages like that make me wonder whether, in presenting the oh-so-sexist mind of James Bond, Fleming just might be having us on.

During his time in British Naval Intelligence, Fleming would have known many agents like Moneypenny – smart, courageous, able women who risked and in many cases gave their lives for Great Britain and democracy. It is as if Fleming is saying, subtly, that any man who would look at Moneypenny only in terms of her potential desirability, who would fail to appreciate her intelligence and her gift for observation – or, in other words, any man who would think about women the way James Bond does – is a bloody fool for thinking that way.

Bond may not like working with a woman colleague, but he does like the S section’s scheme for gambling Le Chiffre into a traitor’s grave: “Above all, he liked it that everything was one’s own fault. There was only oneself to praise or blame. Luck was a servant and not a master. Luck had to be accepted with a shrug or taken advantage of up to the hilt. But it had to be understood and recognized for what it was and not confused with a faulty appreciation of the odds, for, at gambling, the deadly sin is to mistake bad play for bad luck.”

Bond likes the scheme because of his history of good luck with cards and with women: “[H]e was honest enough to admit that he had never yet been made to suffer by cards, or by women. One day, and he accepted the fact, he would be brought to his knees by love or by luck. When that happened, he knew that he too would be branded with the deadly question mark he recognized so often in others, the promise to pay before you have lost: the acceptance of fallibility.”

At the casino, Bond meets Felix Leiter, a CIA agent from Texas, and likes him at once: “Bond reflected that good Americans were fine people and that most of them seemed to come from Texas.” Readers of the series already know that Leiter will play a vitally important role in many of the novels – one that reflects the “special relationship” between the governments, and the intelligence services, of Great Britain and the United States of America.

Part of why people who are interested in reading Fleming’s James Bond novels might want to start with Casino Royale is because of the narrator’s s description of Bond as Bond looks at his reflection in the mirror while getting ready for the gambling match with Le Chiffre:

His grey-blue eyes looked calmly back with a hint of ironical inquiry, and the short lock of hair which would never stay in place slowly subsided to form a thick comma above his right eyebrow. With the thin vertical scar down his right cheek, the general effect was faintly piratical. Not much of Hoagy Carmichael there, thought Bond….

Readers can decide for themselves whether this description best matches Sean Connery, David Niven, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, Daniel Craig, or some other actor.

One surprise from Casino Royale is how much Fleming focuses on what Bond eats and drinks. After meeting Leiter, Bond orders a drink – one that I suppose is shaken-not-stirred. “Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel.” Later, over dinner with Vesper, Bond orders a Taittinger Blanc de Blanc Cru 1943 – “probably the finest champagne in the world,” as he tells Vesper – and then feels obligated to explain what he finds to be a pretentious statement:

“You must forgive me,” he said. “I take a ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink. It comes partly from being a bachelor, but mostly from taking a lot of trouble over details. It’s very persnickety and old-maid-ish, really, but then when I’m working I generally have to eat my meals alone, and it makes them more interesting when one takes trouble.”

And Casino Royale does have its surprises in terms of how Fleming delineates Bond’s character. When Vesper tells Bond that her officemates were jealous of her for getting to work with “a Double O,” Bond’s response is interesting. Suddenly the arrogance and the alpha-male posturing is all gone:

Bond frowned. “It’s not difficult to get a Double O number if you’re prepared to kill people,” he said. “That’s all the meaning it has. It’s nothing to be particularly proud of. I’ve got the corpses of a Japanese cipher expert in New York and a Norwegian double agent in Stockholm to thank for being a Double O. Probably quite decent people. They just got caught up in the gale of the world…. It’s a confusing business, but if it’s one’s profession, one does as one’s told.”

Gambling aficionados will enjoy the ups and downs of Bond’s baccarat game with Le Chiffre. There is much information regarding the intricacies of the game – even if I still think that Section S’s plan has to be one of the silliest in the history of espionage.

There is also a grueling torture scene – one that is faithfully reproduced in the Daniel Craig film adaptation of Casino Royale. Many male readers will probably cringe their way through this scene, even whilst knowing that, as this is only the first of what will be many James Bond books, Bond’s got to get out of this ordeal somehow.

A thought-provoking chapter titled “The Nature of Evil” shows Bond, who is then recovering from the injuries that he suffered at the hands of Le Chiffre, actually saying that he wants to resign! To Mathis, as he had earlier for Vesper, Bond recounts the story of the two men he killed to earn his “Double O” designation, and recalls having felt like the hero who had killed some villains. “But,” he adds, “when the hero Le Chiffre starts to kill the villain Bond and the villain Bond knows he isn’t a villain at all, you see the other side of the medal. The villains and the heroes get all mixed up….History is moving pretty quickly these days, and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.”

It is left to Mathis to remind Bond that there is a difference between democracies like France and Great Britain on the one hand, and dictatorships like the U.S.S.R. on the other hand – even if the distinction may not always seem clear when one is elbows-deep in the dirty work of espionage. Mathis reminds Bond of the importance of trying to maintain a moral conscience, even under the most difficult of circumstances, and adds a healthy bit of advice: “Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.” I was not expecting to encounter something so thoughtful in the midst of the sex and sensationalism of a James Bond story.

A long, seemingly idyllic interlude of erotic romance with Vesper follows – interlaced with the sense that something is wrong, that there is trouble in paradise. “People are islands,” Vesper says to Bond at one point, adding that “They don’t really touch. However close they are, they’re really quite separate – even if they’ve been married for 50 years.” The alert reader will have noticed long before this point that Fleming has diligently scattered many clues foreshadowing that Bond’s romance with Vesper will not end happily.

Casino Royale started it all. Fleming wrote 14 Bond books; other novelists, licensed by Fleming’s estate, have written 36 more. There have been 27 Bond films to date, with the character being played by seven different actors. The films alone have generated over 7 billion dollars in box-office receipts. It is fascinating to reflect that it all began, in a literary sense, over a game of cards in a dreary little town on the northern coast of France.