These blithering women who thought they could do a man’s work. Then she is abducted by the villain, Le Chiffre, and as Bond races after her in his Bentley, it is just what he had been afraid of. When she turns out to be the stunning Vesper Lind (think Eva Green) that makes his attitude worse, not better. One had to look out for them and take care of them. 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. This pest of a girl … Women were for recreation. When Bond first hears that his sidekick on this job is to be a woman, he is furious. Thirdly, his (Bond’s? Fleming’s?) misogyny, sexism, call it what you will. You can’t imagine how at home that made me feel in Bond’s universe! Now I already knew all about that case in Monte Carlo, from the Authorised Biography. He and the Deuxième bowled them out in the end and 007 turned in a million francs he had won at shemmy. He must be pretty good with the cards or he wouldn’t have sat in the Casino in Monte Carlo for two months before the war watching that Roumanian team work their stuff with the invisible ink and the dark glasses.

He’s tough and M thinks there may be trouble with those gunmen of Le Chiffre’s. “Head of S” has just emerged from M’s room and is telling “Number Two” who has been chosen for this special mission: (remember this is the first Bond book Fleming wrote, and chronologically the first Bond adventure.) I’ll quote the passage. Secondly, there is a reference at the beginning of the book to one of James Bond’s earlier cases. I’d always imagined that Fleming introduced these things, built up this alternative universe, gradually, but no, he had it all there ready in his head before he ever started. You may have read the book once, no doubt long ago, or perhaps seen the film – not Sean Connery, this one was more recent and starred Daniel Craig along with Eva Green, a great favourite of mine since I first saw her as Sibylla in Kingdom of Heaven.Īnd here she is with Daniel Craig in Casino Royale:īut back to the book! All I want to do in this “review” is draw attention to a few points that strike me as interesting,įirstly, we meet “M” and get the whole set-up and a two-page Top Secret document on SMERSH at once. However, now that I am about to embark on Live and Let Die, and have some time free, here goes. I read Casino Royale that night I said I was going to (after reviewing James Bond: The Authorised Biography) but never got round to commenting on it.

07 Casino Royale