A sum total of twenty-one words were devoted to the James Bond wristwatch in the 1953 novel, Casino Royale.
It was ten minutes past one by Bond’s watch when, at the high table, the whole pattern of play suddenly altered.
When I last discussed it on my James Bond Watches Blog some fifteen years ago, I put 399 to the subject [1]. Significantly, I thought, was a look to the 1959 Goldfinger by way of “dating” the Casino Royale watch to “‘on or after 15 June’ in 1951.” But the in-person conversations that I’ve had about that watch — well before and in the many years since — have so very often gone on far longer.
As I started considering format for Version 5.0 content related to the original Ian Fleming stories, I decided to stick with the “Bullet Points” opening that leads many of the other pages here on James Bond Watches. Like most such setups, the idea here was to provide what someone looking for a quick departure point en route to taking next steps in their own pursuits would essentially need to do so.
But the next section for Literary entries proved more challenging. It seemed trite and maybe even lazy to “summarize” plots. Everybody does that; and even quoting from esoteric sources à la Dennis Miller [2] would only go so far. So I thought about the best and better conversations that I had had. And, of course, the structural implications of what I had written on January 16 about The Importance of James Bond Watches™ as core and differentiator of this content.
- What if you could only look at any given Ian Fleming thriller in terms of time or timekeepers?
- What if the process of looking for any given James Bond watch was at least as important as finding that James Bond watch?
While staying firmly within the bounds of the mission of this website, I saw that there was a lot to be learned about “James Bond’s choice” in watches by looking at some of the broader ways in which Ian Fleming had viewed timekeeping as a plot device, the thinking he ascribed to Double-0 Seven viz watches worn by others, and watch selections in service to defining (other) characters in novels and short stories.
I also saw that, as a fixed, completed body of work, the Ian Fleming writings could and should be taken as a whole in many cases where a given watch in a given thriller was the focus. One such instance, referenced above, was where the publication of Goldfinger in 1959, pointed to the latest date for the James Bond wristwatch worn in Casino Royale, published in 1953. Another came via reaction to a fan letter that had criticized James Bond watch performance in Dr No.
The Version 5.0 Literary watch page here for Casino Royale is now 2¾-times the length of what had previously been available since 2008. And that’s important as yet another illustration of how a real understanding of James Bond watches is not just something more than “a list.”
It’s also what makes it fun!
OFF-SITE REFERENCES
- “‘Casino Royale’ (novel) wristwatch”
March 22, 2008 / Dell Deaton / James Bond Watches (via Internet Archive, accessed January 28, 2024). - “Dennis Miller: Not So Black and White”
July 3, 2013 / Justin Gray / Vulture (accessed January 28, 2024).
