Casino Royale (with interview)
Ian Fleming Audio Book

‘The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning...’

Listen to the opening sentence of Casino Royale and be transported a 1950s’ world of gambling and espionage, which features foreign travel, fine food and champagne.

In this audiobook we meet the original James Bond who went on to become a worldwide phenomenon. 

Dan Stevens (Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey and Edward Ferrars in Sense & Sensibility) has a voice that’s ideal for Bond. In fact, he becomes Bond.

His timbre conveys perfectly the brutality and coldness of 007, a man who can never really let his guard down. Yet Bond comes across as fallible and can bleed, and yet who is able to laugh at himself. Dan will soon having you caring for this cold killer. 

He makes the scenes between Bond and Vesper Lynd positively sizzle and you can tell just how menacing and ruthless Le Chiffre becomes.

Dan Stevens also captures the voices (and accents) of Rene Mathis, Felix Leiter, remarkably well, and introduces us to M and Miss Moneypenny.

Ian Fleming is famous for his detailed descriptions and this audiobook builds up the atmosphere and underlying tension nicely. Dan can also expertly increase the pace as danger threatens.

As for the language of the time: ‘women were for recreation – on a job they got in the way’, surely it’s only a matter of time before someone calls Bond a ‘sexist, misogynist dinosaur’...?

The Bond novels have been criticised for their escapism, but we say they’re pure pleasure. After all, you won’t be in better hands than Dan Stevens.

Ian Fleming would have approved.

Listen out for: 

• The first physical description of Bond
• Bond ordering his special martini
• Le Chiffre and Bond’s face-off at the baccarat table
• The chilling torture scene, which haunted Raymond Chandler

Forget your preconceptions of James Bond and go back to the original source.

First published in April 1953, the month after Joseph Stalin died, Casino Royale

It was the first of Ian Fleming’s novels to feature James Bond, 007, and his

More than escapism – the stories are dark, gritty, down-to-earth, with a protagonist who is brutal and cold.

But we also discover in Casino Royale that Bond can laugh (sometimes at himself), isn’t pretentious and is sometimes fallible. He even feels sick when his life is in danger.

Perhaps fellow agent Vesper Lynd, aka ‘the girl’, will bring him luck at the baccarat table? Though with Bond’s view that ‘women were for recreation – on a job they got in the way’ it may bring up thoughts of a sexist, misogynist dinosaur...

Casino Royale also introduces M, Felix Leiter and Miss Moneypenny, who ‘would have been desirable, but for her eyes which were cool and direct and quizzical’.

Hear a brand new recording - complete and unabridged – of the book which launched a global phenomenon.

Dan Stevens played Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey. Other TV credits include Edward Ferrars in Sense & Sensibility and Nick Guest in The Line of Beauty.