I cannot say what the book's reception was in the 1950s, but six decades later, the impression one gets is that Fleming was creating a deliberately unromantic and incident-free depiction of espionage as a frankly unexciting and somewhat pokey affair, well-suited for the elegant but somewhat dull and thuggish spy.īond's cinematic career didn't start until 1962, with eight bestselling novels and a short story collection making the spy a full-on literary phenomenon, but this was not the first time that Bond's adventures were dramatised. Later fans of the character, knowing only the subsequent novels or more likely, only the monumentally successful film series loosely adapted (and eventually, not adapted at all) from the book series, would have a hard time recognising not just the character of Bond but the very idea of a spy thriller at all in this sleek, plot-light text, which consists predominately of two sequences: a lengthy one in which Bond wins at the esoteric and frankly kind of stupid card game of baccarat, thereby bankrupting Soviet flunky Le Chiffe, and a shorter one in which Le Chiffre's thugs beat the crap out of Bond, who survives thanks to a deus ex machina.

The literary career of James Bond, Agent 007 on Her Majesty's secret service, began in 1953 when 44-year-old Ian Fleming, late of British Naval Intelligence, completed his dream of writing a spy novel that reflected his own awareness of the live of an espionage agent, with the publication of Casino Royale.

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