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Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

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Ian Fleming said that he wrote Casino Royale as “a counterirritant or antibody to my hysterical alarm at getting married at the age of forty-three.” After a distinguished career in British Intelligence, and decades as a womanizing bachelor, Fleming had decided to settle down, his partner an aristocrat who had been married to a Lord and then a Baron, and was now pregnant by him.

Depending on which friend does the telling, or which way Fleming’s own comments are read, either he wanted to prove his worth as a writer-husband or run from his new relationship. On the day after his marriage, he retreated to his study, finishing the first draft of Casino Royale in two months —2,000 words each morning, without any pausing to reread or revise.

Casino Royale gives us the first of the heady, spy-story cocktails which Fleming would shake and reshake in the dozen Bond books which followed over the next decade. It also gives us the recipe for the famous Bond cocktail, named at a first meeting with Vesper Lynd, the first of the double-dealing femmes fatales:

“I can’t drink the health of your new frock without knowing your Christian name.”

“Vesper,” she said. Vesper Lynd....”

“I think it’s a fine name,” said Bond. An idea struck him. “Can I borrow it?” He explained about the special Martini he had invented and his search for a name for it.

“The Vesper,” he said. “It sounds perfect and it’s very appropriate to the violet hour when my cocktail will now be drunk all over the world. Can I have it?”

“So long as I can try one first,” she promised. “It sounds like a drink to be proud of.”

“We’ll have one together when all this is finished,” said Bond. “Win or lose.”

The Fleming marriage was volatile, and by most accounts a predictable failure. Before marrying, the future Ann Fleming feared that her fiancé was one in whom “the deserts of pomposity between the oases of wit are too vast”; after he achieved superstardom in the sixties, she scoffed at his FabFour status, calling him “ThunderBeatle.” But the biographers are unsure what to make of the verbal jabbing, as both partners seemed to enjoy or need abuse. In her letters to her husband, posthumously published, Ann Fleming talks fondly of their sadomasochistic sexual habits, the whippings and the making up. Love is risky business in Casino Royale, too. Bond’s final words to Vesper are, “Sleep well, my darling. Don’t worry, everything’s all right now.” His final, eyes-wide-open words of the book, a few pages later, are to London: “Yes, dammit, I said ‘was.’ The bitch is dead now.”