The book was reviewed at the end of that year in Time magazine, along with Raymond Chandler's last significant work, The Long Goodbye, and the reviewer perceptively noted that Fleming had created a brutal, amoral hero more suited to our times and tastes than Chandler's knight-errant private eye, Philip Marlowe.Įssentially, Fleming's Cold War thriller turns on a battle of wits between the licensed-to-kill British agent and the gambling addict Monsieur le Chiffre, a bagman for the Soviet terror organisation Smersh, who is in serious financial trouble. This was the only Bond book to which the North American producers of the 007 series hadn't acquired the rights, though they only had a share in Thunderball which had started out as a screenplay before Fleming turned it into a novel.Ĭasino Royale was published in 1953, the year John F Kennedy, Fleming's most famous admirer, became a senator, and the year Playboy was launched by Hugh Hefner, whose hedonistic, man-of-the-world philosophy Bond came to embody. In 1954, there was an hour-length TV adaptation with an American Bond (Barry Nelson) and the great Peter Lorre as the villain, while in 1967, there was a witless, non-canonical comic version of the novel. Since before the birth of the 38-year-old Daniel Craig, the new James Bond, we have been waiting for an authentic cinematic version of the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, widely regarded as the best thing Ian Fleming ever wrote.

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