Casino Royale (book)

Casino Royale is a book by Ian Fleming. It came out in 1953 and was the first James Bond book.

Premise

A British World War II veteran named James Bond works for the British Secret Intelligence Service and got the name 007 for killing a Japanese cipher in New York and a Soviet double agent in Norway. A German Jewish Communist who calls himself Le Chiffre spent the money the SMERSH gave him on pimping in France but then the French government made it illegal. So Le Chiffre tries to win it back by playing Baccarat at a casino called The Casino Royale. Since James Bond is good at Baccarat and Blackjack and Roulette, the SIS sends him to the Casino Royale to bankrupt Le Chiffre.

Story

Two Bulgarians working for Le Chiffre try to kill Bond but accidentally kill themselves. A CIA agent named Felix Leiter and an SIS agent named Vesper Lynd assist Bond. After Bond beats Le Chiffre, Le Chiffre kidnaps Vesper. When Bond tries to rescue her, he gets captured. Le Chiffre has Bond stripped naked and repeatedly hits him in the genitals with a carpetbeater to get him to say where he put the money he won. A SMERSH agent kills Le Chiffre for wasting Soviet money but doesn’t kill Bond since he wasn’t ordered to kill Bond. Instead, he cuts the first letter in the Russian word for spy into Bond’s hand and leaves.

When Bond gets better, he starts dating Vesper and wants to marry her even though she keeps secrets from him and gets paranoid about being followed. She then kills herself and leaves Bond a letter explaining that she was in love with a man from Poland and started to work as a spy for the Soviets when SMERSH said that they would kill him if she didn’t and was actually a double agent all along. But then she fell in love with Bond and wanted to leave only for SMERSH to follow her.

Bond gets angry and wants to kill everyone in SMERSH. Bond calls the SIS and tells them that Vesper was working for the enemy. Bond then says “yes, I said was. The bitch is dead.”

Sequel

Ian Fleming wrote a sequel called Live and Let Die.