'Le Chiffre' is ostensibly the head of a communist-controlled trade union in France, and actually a minion of SMERSH, the dreaded spy-killing agency of the USSR. The plot is quite simple, the story brief. All that in his first and one of his shortest Bond novels. In Casino Royale, he even gives the reader baccarat and roulette lessons.

And if you like descriptive detail, Fleming draws a vivid picture of cars, clothing, drinks, food, cigarettes, seaside towns, and French casinos. He's making no effort to be 'literary,' but he's not writing crap either he describes every character in crisp detail, sometimes going into their backstories, and if there is a certain sameness to his villains, and an inevitable sameness to his women, he does differentiate between them enough that they are distinct characters each with their own motives. He writes in terse, compact sentences and most of the Bond stories are short, quick reads that pack a lot of plot into a few pages. That said, I've read criticisms of his writing accusing him of all manner of bad writing sins, and I disagree with most of them. Ian Fleming is unapologetically writing for men who want to be James Bond. the Commies), but they're cracking good stories if you can squint sideways at lines like 'Bond had found that all of the Asiatic races lacked courage' and Bond's constant griping about how useless women are except when he needs something to decorate the end of his dick. By today's standards (hell, even by 1950s standards), the Bond stories are full of rabid misogyny and racism and a faint whiff of imperialism (though after WWII it's Democracy vs. James Bond is one of my guilty pleasures. But some people just refuse to play by the rules, and Bond's attraction to a beautiful female agent leads him to disaster.and to an unexpected savior. It seems that lady luck has sided with 007 when Le Chiffre hits a losing streak. This, the first of Ian Fleming's tales of secret agent 007, finds Bond on a mission to neutralize a lethal, high-rolling Russian operative called 'Le Chiffre' by ruining him at the Baccarat table, forcing his Soviet spymasters to 'retire' him. Introducing James Bond: charming, sophisticated, handsome, chillingly ruthless, and licensed to kill. Inverarity Britain's biggest dick is almost unmanned.

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