Casino Royale

Casino Royale was published in 1953 and was Ian Fleming's first novel after a career in naval intelligence and journalism. He wrote it at his house in Jamaica, and the book introduced a character who went on to appear in eleven further novels and two collections of stories during Fleming's lifetime, before a long series of continuation novels by other writers took over.

The novel is a gambling story before it is anything else. Le Chiffre is a man who has made a specific mistake and is trying to cover it with the service's money, and Bond's assignment is to make that impossible at a table rather than in a gunfight. Fleming knew the world he was writing about and the details are deliberately flat: hotel food, the labels on the drinks and the way a baccarat session runs over several evenings. The second half of the book changes register completely and is the part readers remember: Bond is captured, tortured, and rescued by a colleague, and the story ends in an emotional register the films never used.

The book arrived in the same decade as Graham Greene's entertainments and set the template for the spy thriller that followed: a professional whose competence is the point, an enemy with an accounting problem, and a plot that is measured in days. It is much less patriotic and much more unpleasant than the character's film reputation suggests, and it is the right place to start with Fleming.