Ian Fleming created Tiffany Case for Diamonds Are Forever, the fourth James Bond novel. Jonathan Cape published it in London in 1956, and Macmillan handled the American edition. Fleming had served in British Naval Intelligence during the Second World War and drew on that background for the Bond books. For this novel he also used research on the real diamond smuggling trade out of West Africa, which he later turned into the nonfiction book The Diamond Smugglers (1957).

Tiffany is a courier handler for the Spangled Mob, an American gang that moves stolen diamonds from Sierra Leone through London to the United States. She takes her orders by telephone from a voice she knows only as “ABC,” who turns out to be Jack Spang, the mob’s European manager. She also deals blackjack at the Tiara, a Las Vegas hotel and casino run by Jack’s brother Seraffimo Spang.

M sends Bond to break the pipeline. Bond poses as a small-time crook named Peter Franks and meets Tiffany in a London hotel room, where she is his contact for the run to New York. The story then moves through New York, the Saratoga racecourse, and Las Vegas. Tiffany helps Bond escape after Wint and Kidd beat him at the Spangs’ ghost town, Spectreville. On the voyage home aboard the RMS Queen Elizabeth, Wint and Kidd abduct her. Bond rescues her and kills both men.

Her backstory is darker than most Bond women of the period. Her father wanted a son. When she was born, he gave her mother a thousand dollars and a powder case from Tiffany’s and left, which is where her first name came from. Her mother later ran a brothel in San Francisco. When Tiffany was 16, her mother refused to pay a gang for protection, and the gang members raped Tiffany in revenge. She ran away, worked a string of low-paid jobs, drank heavily in the Florida Keys, and eventually fell in with the mob. Felix Leiter tells Bond this history, which explains her distrust of men. By the end of the book she and Bond are lovers, and she returns to London with him.