Casino Royale. An alternative title, I suggest, having never quite known how baccarat is played, would be The Gambler's Vade-Mecum. A Secret Service thriller, lively, most ingenious in detail, on the surface as tough as they are made and charm-ingly well-bred beneath, nicely written and—except for a too ingeniously sadistic bout of brutality—very entertaining reading. Bond, a bold and all but heartless British secret agent, versus Le Chiffre, an enigma of a Soviet agent wrapped in M.V.D. mystery. The scene is a rakish small gambling resort near Dieppe, where, with really terrific aplomb on Mr. Fleming's part, the first desperate round is fought at the baccarat table. Enter—or, more exactly, exit—at this point the stunning Vesper, blue-eyed and sensual-lipped, Bond's No. 2 chosen by headquarters. It is, as it happens, the cue for (the prettily imagined) Smersh, the pinnacle of the Soviet secret police structure, a name derived from two words meaning—not "roughly," by the way, but quite literally—"Death to Spies." There are spills and thrills, stratagems and surprises still to come, and at any rate for Bond, by now not quite so heartless, there is a shattering and awful eye-opened at the very last. The public schoolboy in him, I suspect, would be inclined to murmur, "Well done, Smersh!" In its kind, Casino Royale is equally well done.
R. D. Charques, in a review of "Casino Royale," in The Spectator, Vol. 190, No. 6512, April 17, 1953, p. 494.
