“History is moving pretty quickly these days
and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.”
Ian Fleming’s inaugural James Bond novel (Casino Royale) invites us into the fictional French town of Royale-les-Eaux, a coastal enclave perched near the mouth of the Somme where a lavish casino sits. The casino –a vast opulent victorian baroque edifice– has been tenderly restored to its former glory from the Belle Epoch. As Fleming poignantly writes, “The stench and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning,” here, we meet a portly Soviet operative who goes by the name Le Chiffre (among other aliases like “the Number” or “Herr Nummer” or “Herr Ziffer” etc). He has a certain peculiar licentious taste for all things masochistic and depraved –his chief weakness being women– and he ceaselessly sucks on a benzedrine inhaler. Like all Fleming villains, he is grotesque. Presently, he is on the brink of a financial crisis after a poor investment went sideways. Using funds that were granted to him by his communist-controlled trade union, Le Chiffre rather carelessly invested the money in a string of French brothels, all of which went bankrupt following the passage of new legislation in France intended to crack down on illicit activities like brothels –in a word, “fate rebuked him with terrifying swiftness” (9). In total, Le Chiffre lost about 50 million francs in the scheme, though the fearsome Soviet anti-traitor agency SMERSH has apparently yet to catch onto his reckless gamble. Had Le Chiffre perceived that SMERSH was on his tail, he surely would have already committed suicide. Therefore, he has now turned to gambling in the hopes of regaining his lost money and thereby preserve his station within the communist party. However, it should also be noted that Le Chiffre is not some minor villain. He is connected to a potential sleeper cell of communists called the “fifth column” (or Leningrad Section III, which is controlled by the USSR). If activated, it could claim large swaths of Northern France in a hot war. Thus, the stakes are very high indeed.
Pausing for a moment, I offer a brief note about SMERSH. What is SMERSH? Fleming explains SMERSH as a conjunction of two Russian words meaning roughly “death to spies.” “It’s task is the elimination of all forms of treachery and back-sliding within the various branches of the Soviet Secret Service and Secret Police at home and abroad. It is the most powerful and feared organization in the USSR and is popularly believed never to have failed in a mission of vengeance” (15). In other words, it hunts down spies and traitors. In James Bond’s world, SMERSH is rumored to have murdered Trotsky in Mexico and during Hitler’s attack on Russia in World War II, it struck again and sought out double agents during the Soviet retreat in 1941. In Casino Royale, Western intelligence believes that SMERSH has only a few high quality agents left who can hunt down Soviet traitors. We are told British intelligence once captured an agent of SMERSH in 1948 but the agent quickly consumed a cyanide pill disguised as a button on his coat and with his suicide went any hope of discovering further information about SMERSH’s shadowy activities.
This is the setting in which we find ourselves in Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale. Unlike in the film, the novel is a far more concise story which is a welcome change of pace in my view. The opening chapters introduce us to the Secret Service’s chain-smoking British agent James Bond, who is quickly sent on assignment to bankrupt and demoralize Le Chiffre at the baccarat tables in France. So, who is James Bond? We are told he is a hard-drinking, cold-blooded assassin. Bond recounts how he previously killed two people in the line of duty –the first was a Japanese cipher and expert code-cracker in Rockefeller Center in New York (Bond and a fellow agent sniped him from a nearby rooftop), and Bond’s other kill was a Norwegian in Stockholm who was doubling for the Germans (Bond chose to kill him slowly with a knife while inside his flat, but disturbingly, we are told the man did not die very quickly). For these kills, Bond has been awarded the elite “Double O” agent status, a title which means “you’ve had to kill a chap in cold blood in the course of some job” (131). For the present mission in France, Bond is joined by agents from France (René Mathis of the Deuxième Bureau), the United States (Felix Leiter of the CIA), and a beautiful young woman sent from headquarters named Vesper Lynd. More about her later. I was delighted to read the carefully crafted intelligence reports which were meticulously devised by Ian Fleming in the opening chapters of Casino Royale. They offer us a sense that we are truly on the ground in this paranoid Cold War tale of high espionage and dark intrigue. Is the story a bit far-fetched? Yes indeed –it seems extremely unlikely that British, American, and French secret service organizations would collectively invest so much time, money, and manpower into merely bankrupting a single Soviet operative during a high-stakes gambling scene. Nevertheless, Casino Royale is not as ridiculous as some of the latter day Bond stories –it forces us to believe this little narrative in quite a captivating way.
As in the film, Bond battles Le Chiffre in a game of baccarat but he tragically loses all the funds granted to him by the British government, so Bond is then bailed out by the Americans (in particular through Marshall Aid funds provided by Felix Leiter, even though Mr. Leiter does not actually play at the table in the novel the same way he does in the film). With a new infusion of American cash, Bond defeats Le Chiffre in a sweat-inducing bet –narrowly dodging an assassination attempt in the process– before his counterpart, Vesper Lynd, is soon captured which leads Bond on a wild car chase ultimately ending with his tires being blown out by spikes (of course in the 2006 film, Bond swerves off the road when he sees Vesper Lynd bound and gagged). In the novel, Bond is captured by Le Chiffre’s crew and he is hideously tortured. Bond’s most sensitive male organ is savagely brutalized –Le Chiffre whips Bond’s genitals while he is strapped nude to a seatless chair (in the book, the location of Bond’s infamous torture sequence overlooks the ocean in a coastal French villa; but in the film, Bond is tortured in an underground sewer of sorts). Despite the excruciating pain, Bond does not reveal the location of his money. After about an hour, Bond is surprisingly rescued by an unknown masked assailant from SMERSH who claims his orders were to only murder Le Chiffre and his henchmen, so the assassin decides to leave a barely conscious James Bond alive –thus our protagonist is rescued by a mere accident (in the film, he is actually rescued by a rival criminal named Mr. White). However, before the SMERSH assailant departs, he takes the time to painfully carve the shape of a Cyrillic “M” into Bond’s outer hand in order to permanently brand Bond as a spy for the rest of his life. Eventually rescued by Western forces, Bond spends the rest of the story recovering from his brutal injuries in a French hospital (even bitterly contemplating his retirement because he now sees his work as merely a game of “Red Indians” as Le Chiffre once told him). When he recovers, Bond goes on vacation together with Vesper and they fall in love. Finally, life is worth living again for Bond at the end of the book. However in an epilogue of sorts, Vesper is found dead one morning with a suicide note addressed to Bond revealing that she was actually working as a double agent for the Russians the whole time (in the film, she somewhat deliberately drowns herself while entrapped in an elevator in Venice). In the book, it is also revealed that she’s had a lover in Poland, but she quickly fell in love with Bond and intended to remain with him until she noticed that she was being tracked by SMERSH. At this point, Vesper knew she had to end her life. Both the film and the book conclude with a scene of Bond merely pausing for a moment after learning of Vesper’s death before coldly contacting M, his boss, to report that “…the bitch is dead” (178). It is a chilling end and a terrific start to the James Bond saga.
It’s worth mentioning that there are many other distinctions between the book and the film for Casino Royale I did not mention here –such as Le Chiffre being a Soviet communist in the book versus a global terrorist in the movie, or René Mathis being a friend in the book versus a suspected traitor in the film– but all things considered, I found Casino Royale to be a captivating, and at times shocking, piece of Cold War literature. Even in the pre-Jason Bourne era, James Bond was not an invincible hero with limitless confidence in himself, staring down megalomaniacal villains and rescuing helpless damsels. In Casino Royale, his obstacles are believable and concise –and Bond barely survives the ordeal. I was careful to note his ambivalence about his own employment, something we rarely see in the pre-Daniel Craig James Bond era of films. Indeed, Bond soberly recognizes his own international espionage career as something of a racket: “Be faithful, spy well, or you die. Inevitably and without question, you will be hunted down and killed” (178).
Ian Fleming initially began work on Casino Royale while splitting his time between a flat in London and his stately Jamaican bungalow dubbed “Goldeneye” (partly named after a 1941 Carson McCullers novel entitled Reflections in a Golden Eye, and also inspired by the “Goldeneye” WWII contingency plan which was developed by Fleming and sought to create a back-up plan in the event of a Nazi invasion of Gibraltar through Spain). At the time of writing, Fleming was set to marry the woman with whom he had been having an affair, Ann Rothermere (née Charteris). She had been previously wedded to Shane O’Neill, 3rd Baron O’Neill (with whom she had two children), but Baron O’Neill was tragically killed-in-action during WWII in 1944. She then married Esmond Harmsworth, 2nd Viscount Rothermere, but the marriage ended in divorce when it was discovered that she was having an affair with Ian Fleming. Once the divorce was settled, she and Fleming were quickly married while she was pregnant with Fleming’s only child, Caspar. Tragically, later in life, Caspar Fleming would commit suicide in 1975 by overdosing on narcotics. At any rate, Fleming claimed he wrote Casino Royale as a distraction from the stress of his upcoming nuptials and the arrival of his son. The publication of Casino Royale marked the first appearance of many classic James Bond motifs like the smoke-filled casino, the alluring Bond girl with a dark past, and even M’s secretary Miss Moneypenny (though her name in Casino Royale is listed as “Miss ‘Petty’ Pettaval” which was borrowed from Kathleen Pettigrew, the personal secretary to the longtime head of MI6, Stewart Menzies). In conclusion, Casino Royale is a classic espionage thriller and a wonderful start to the Fleming Bond novels.
Fleming, Ian. Casino Royale. Thomas & Mercer in Las Vegas, NV c/o Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. 1953 (republished in 2012). Paperback edition.
Film Review: Casino Royale (2006)
The differences between source material and visualized versions for the cinema can quite often be astonishing. Particularly in the case of James Bond. Thank you for this article.