Just Finished Reading Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming was a British naval intelligence officer who, after World War II, became the highly celebrated creator and author of the James Bond spy series in the 1950s and 60s, which became an incredibly popular and long-lasting movie franchise with other writers continuing the exploits of Secret Agent 007 long after Fleming's death in 1964.  His first novel, the 1953 Casino Royale, was initially made into a puzzling satirical movie in 1967 having little relation to the book and later on with another same-titled movie, starring Daniel Craig as Bond, that followed the story line more closely.  Still, the characters, settings, and plot of Craig's Casino Royale sometimes diverge quite a bit from Fleming's original novel.  For one, the author characterizes his protagonist as more naïve and prone to mistakes and self-doubt than the cinematic version.  In Fleming's story, Bond plays a high-stakes baccarat card game against villain Le Chiffre, a double agent for the Soviets, at a French casino...in the movie the game is poker, Le Chiffre is more of a free-lancer with a debt to a shadow organization (later identified as "Quantum"), and the setting is Montenegro.  Timewise Fleming's book is the middle of the Cold War while Craig's movie is in the present time, loaded with advanced computer technology. Little of the movie's background story leading up to the casino drama is in the book, and Rene Mathis, here a French intelligence officer, like Felix Leiter of the CIA is shown with no suspicion about his unimpeachable integrity.  Some of the scenes are eerily the same, though, and the enigmatic figure of Vesper Lynn leads our hero astray in both stories.  I liked both versions and look forward to reading Ian Fleming's second James Bond book, Live and Let Die...