Casino Royale

I don’t have to tell you what sort of icon James Bond has become. International adventure, sex, bad humor, fast cars, gadgetry -- ever since Ursula Andress came dripping out of the surf in the first major film and the bad guy got the point. The movies were always entertaining, but got steadily more ridiculous from there.

I’ve always been fascinated with the real Bond, the original, as told in the novels and short stories written by Ian Fleming. After watching the most recent movie on DVD, Casino Royale, I was curious to see how closely it followed the book. I read it years ago. Times have changed, I’ve changed – it was time to read it again.

It is Fleming’s first novel, written in 1952 when he had no idea if the effort would pay off. Often I’m much more interested in an author’s early work, produced before his imagination is spoiled by success. My copy is a Signet paperback, fifty cents new, printed in 1964 after Fleming’s death but before his last novel, which “will be published in the spring of 1965.” I got it used about thirty years ago, at Holmes Books down in Oakland, a wonderful old store piled with old books moldering away in the grimy windows’ dim daylight.

The best thing about reading old Bond books, beyond the writing itself, is the necessity to disconnect this James Bond from the caricature that has developed since the 1960s. The real James Bond was a World War II vet, a naval commander with some experience in behind-the-lines espionage, not too far removed from Fleming himself. Going only from this book, I’d say he was born somewhat before 1920 – this because he bought his first car in 1933, a slightly-used supercharged Bentley (analogous perhaps to a modern Bond starting out with, say, a 1985 Rover Vitesse), and he must have been at the least a precocious teenager by then. Thus for the book he’s in his early to mid thirties and has had the unfortunate experience of having had to kill a couple of men late in the war – thus the double-oh distinction. He was not chosen for the assignment because of his mad secret agent skilz and ability to slaughter a dozen bad guys while seducing countesses and straightening his tie. He was chosen because he was known to be a good and serious gambler, especially at cards, and a gambler was what the assignment called for.

I love the simplicity and the absurdity of this story. Le Chiffre was a stateless man, one of many thousands wandering about Europe in those days, whose country of origin either no longer existed or was simply deemed irrelevant by those who took post-war chaos as an opportunity to reinvent themselves. His earliest known address was Dachau, June, 1945. His role was as paymaster to a communist organization in control of various French labor unions. He invested Soviet money into a chain of brothels and lost his ass when the French upgraded their blue laws. In a bid to recoup his employers’ losses and save his own neck, he sets up a high-stakes game of baccarat at Casino Royale on the French coast. It’s Bond’s job to beat him.

This Bond has no gadgets; there is no Q Branch presided over by a doddering über-engineer. He has only his small Beretta .25 under his arm. Vesper Lynd does not start out as some winking Bond Girl but is a bureaucratic fellow employee who grows on him naturally. In other words, they don't immediately like each other, but after a bit of personal sparring he admits to himself he wants to get her into bed -- as any self-respecting reader in the golden age of men’s adventure magazines would expect. In time he actually falls in love with her and decides to quit the service and marry her.

This plan falls through.

Meanwhile, Le Chiffre and his two henchmen, their rickety old Peugeot, the ill-kept rental house where Bond is tortured (just as in the recent movie), are all decidedly and unpretentiously low-tech. The only honest gadget in the entire book, apart from a botched bomb plot early on, is a cane gun such as you used to be able to buy in any novelty firearms shop. There isn’t even any cheating at cards -- Orson Wells and his x-ray specs are not to be found.

Like old movies, old books are time machines. I love my Bond trips into the 1950s. I’d love to see a period movie based strictly on one of the original novels. It would be so very back to basics. For all its half century of updating, the recent film follows the book reasonably well, and this is a major reason why it is one of the best of the James Bond movies.

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I was at work trying to organize my crap when I found this little essay, written several months ago. I had an intent to say more about the Bond character and illustrate it with some juicy quotes. But in retrospect that would be superfluous, so here and done. Now to go organize more of my crap.