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I will be on this podcast discussing Ian Fleming's first novel Casino Royale, but following yesterday's thread, I came across something that made me realize I have skimmed over a bit of my own research about this novel. It's a bit niche for a podcast so I'll do a thread here. https://twitter.com/spybrary/status/1295394549100158976
Casino Royale was published in 1953. It's not like the films, or Fleming's other novels. One reason for this is the friction between the nature of Bond's mission and Fleming's treatment of it. The mission is to 'ridicule and destroy' a Soviet agent by beating him at baccarat.
It's a preposterous idea: a huge outlay, at enormous risk, with no logical reason for success as it's quite literally a gamble, on a desperate man who is likely to lose it all without British intelligence interfering. But Fleming plays it entirely straight, taking it seriously.
The idea that British intelligence would mount an operation with their 'finest gambler' is an idea only someone who believed in gambling would come up with, I suspect. But Fleming also said in a couple of interviews that the idea was inspired by a real-life incident.
Here is one telling of the story, from an interview with Playboy published after his death:
In his biography of Fleming, @alycett refers to this as 'one of the more heavily embellished incidents in Ian's wartime career'. A key thing, I think, is Fleming's claim he thought beating the German agents in a casino would be a 'brilliant coup'.
A very similar episode to this is related in Come into My Parlour by Dennis Wheatley, a thriller published in 1946. As discuss in my short book A Spy Is Born, Fleming was heavily influenced by Wheatley, and this novel in particular when he wrote From Russia, With Love.
Come Into My Parlour is, as the title suggests, about a lure: the Nazis have some secret weapons and they predict the British will send their best agent, Gregory Sallust, to try to locate them, so pre-empt this by cooking up a trap for him. Fleming used the structure of this
planning meeting to trap Sallust in From Russia, With Love, using the scene's structure as a template for Smersh's plan to trap James Bond, using their Spektor cipher machine and a beautiful woman as their bait.
In the scene following the plan to lure and kill Sallust, Gestapo officer Grauber - Sallust's nemesis - asks the real-life Admiral Canaris what he knows of Sallust. The result is startlingly like Bond's own biography. Canaris also knows Sallust's boss, Sir Pellinore:
What a pleasing anecdote. German intelligence officers, coolly destroyed at baccarat in a casino in Deauville during the war by a Brit in a single sitting. It is, of course, prtty much exactly what Fleming claimed he wanted to do in *Estoril* in 1941.
German agents, baccarat, spies. Along with all the other similarities in the novel to Fleming's work, it can't be a coincidence, I think. Fleming also knew Wheatley. So what's going on here? Did Fleming try this in 1941 in Estoril and tell Wheatley, who then used it in 1946?
That's possible, but still leaves a bit of a mystery, because Wheatley specifies it is baccarat and in Deauville. Casino Royale is set in a fictionalised version of Deauville. So that would perhaps involve even further games between them, with Fleming referring to Wheatley's use.
That's kind of where I left it in A Spy Is Born, but the more I think about it the more unlikely I think it is that Fleming ever tried this out during the war at all. It would involved him changing the location in fiction to the same place Wheatley had previously done...
while closely using the plot and even key scene structure from the same novel by Wheatley. They knew each other, but that's a level of friendliness I don't think many authors share with each other! It seems much more likely that he had this book, and the Canaris incident amused.
Consciously or not, it became the germ for Bond's crazy mission in Casino Royale. We know Fleming picked at things like this in thrillers - as Godfrey's assistant he likely had a hand in The Trout Memo, which referred to an idea in a Basil Thompson novel as a proposed operation.
So let's take this thread and run with it instead. Fleming decides he wants to update Hannay, Bulldog Drummond and so on and have his own go at this sort of thriller. Somewhere in his mind are Wheatley's Gregory Sallust thrillers, and this fictional Canaris anecdote.
He uses this as the seed for Bond's mission - consciously or not. He claims in interviews he tried to do it himself in the war, four years before Wheatley's novel was published. Then in 1957 he returns to this same novel and the previous scene, and that becomes the seed for FRWL.
Alternatively, someone actually did do this, and both Wheatley and Fleming knew of it. It can't easily have been Fleming, though, because what are the chances that Wheatley shifted it to Deauville (while specifying baccarat) and Fleming independently decided to do that, too?
But either way, it seems to be rather unlikely that Fleming was the first to try this stunt - and he might not have ever done it at all.
I might well have failed to consider something here, though, so if anyone has any alternate theories, I'd be delighted to hear them!
