I just finished "Casino Royale," Ian Fleming's first novel. The premise: Le Chiffre, a SMERSH (counter-espionage) agent seeks to recoup, by winning at baccarat, the Soviet money he lost investing in a French brothel, or else pay the Soviets with his life. The British Secret Service sends its best gambler, James Bond, to ensure he loses.

The novel doesn't have much of a plot. Bond eats, drinks, plays baccarat, gets into a car chase, gets captured, gets tortured, and along the way, avoids death through a couple of deus ex machina escapes.

What strikes me about the book is how different the literary James Bond is from the cinematic one. In the movies, Bond is an unsentimental hard-ass, who never thinks twice about killing. In the novel "Casino Royale," Bond is close to proposing marriage and questions the morality of killing for his country, so much so that he actually considers resigning.

I'm interested to see what producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson do with the upcoming film version. "James Bond matches wits with a casino owner who uses his winnings to fund terrorism"--that is how the imdb describes the film's premise. The producers need to find new Bond adversaries, since the Soviet Union and SMERSH are history. So in "Die Another Day," they used a North Korean terrorist and in "Casino Royale" they're using a terrorist financier. I know they're trying to make the films au courant, but I, for one, am sick of hearing about terrorism. Couldn't they just make the bad guys belong to a generic criminal organization like SPECTRE?