For Fleming, this was a means of preserving the 'hard-boiled' detective tradition while at the same time raising uncomfortable questions about what it meant to live comfortably middle-class in cold-war England. So too Fleming's subversive sense of what at last became known as the 'anti-hero' - a man as ruthless as his enemies, able to seduce and destroy women with a glance, then quietly order breakfast in a luxury hotel as if nothing happened. His ability to shock audiences was well known, but his capacity for sophisticated wit and subtle irony were not easy for most Americans to grasp at the time. But despite his popularity, Hitchcock himself remained an anomaly in Hollywood throughout the '50s. And really, prime Hitchcock is the director Fleming would have had in mind while writing this book. And that the producers felt the need to go this route shows that they themselves really had little understanding of where Fleming was coming from - which was really Somerset Maugham's 'Ashenden, or the British Agent,' filmed in the early '30s by Alfred Hitchcock.

Third, the producers of the show were trying to make the British Ian Fleming's break-out novel accessible to American audiences only familiar with American espionage B-movies, a '50s genre that has not gotten preserved, so most people now will not be familiar with the drab back-alley feel of this show drawn from that genre. Secondly, the surviving recording is incomplete and not very good. First, this is a recording of a live performance - when something went wrong, they were stuck with it and since this is cheaply made, they had little rehearsal time, so a quite a number of things go wrong.

There’s an interesting introduction by Jeffery Deaver in the new edition.A lot has to be forgiven here. So I decided to get a copy of the new edition for old times’ sake. I remember devouring my father’s tattered copy of the novel back in the early 1970s. Casino Royale is not just pure escapism surprisingly, its themes are quite contemporary despite the passage of over half a century. Of course, before Casino Royale the movie, there was Casino Royale (Penguin, 1953) the book, Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel published in 1953, the beginning of a series of action-packed thrillers. The last five Bonds, Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan, were very much older than me by many years. You somehow realise that you are growing old when 38-year-old Liverpudlian Daniel Craig is the first Bond who’s much younger than you.

Good to know that the new Bond movie has gone back to basics without too much of the gimmickry and gadgetry that suffused the previous Bond movies. DANIEL CRAIG, the new James Bond, doesn’t really give a damn whether his vodka martini is shaken or stirred.

Casino royale 1953