Goldfinger

Fleming wrote the book in January and February 1958 at Goldeneye, his house in Jamaica. The typescript ran to 270 pages, his longest to that point, and carried the working title The Richest Man in the World. He dedicated it to William Plomer, the friend who read every Bond manuscript for him.

The villain’s surname came from the architect Ernő Goldfinger, whose modernist buildings Fleming disliked. The architect threatened to sue when he heard about it. Jonathan Cape settled out of court. It paid his legal costs and agreed to print the first name Auric alongside the surname. The historian Henry Chancellor thinks the character himself owes more to Charles W. Engelhard Jr., an American precious-metals tycoon Fleming met in 1949.

The book went straight to the top of the UK best-seller lists. Pan Books issued the UK paperback in May 1961 and sold 161,000 copies by the end of that year. Anthony Burgess later put it in Ninety-nine Novels (1984), his list of the best novels in English since 1939.

The book carries the prejudices of its author and its decade. The anthropologist Anthony Synnott singled out its treatment of Korean characters as the worst racism in the series. Its two lesbian characters are written as problems for Bond to solve. In 2023 Ian Fleming Publications reissued the Bond books with some racial descriptors removed or reworded, so current editions differ slightly from the 1959 text.

Plot

This summary gives away the ending. Fleming split the book into three parts and named them after a line Goldfinger speaks about meeting Bond three times.

Part one: Happenstance

Bond is waiting for a connecting flight in Miami after shutting down a heroin pipeline in Mexico. Junius Du Pont, an American businessman he once gambled beside in France, asks for a favor. Du Pont keeps losing at two-handed canasta to a man named Auric Goldfinger and suspects cheating. Bond works out the method. Goldfinger’s paid companion, Jill Masterton, watches Du Pont’s cards through binoculars from a hotel room and reads them over a radio to a receiver disguised as Goldfinger’s hearing aid. Bond forces a confession and a refund, and takes Jill with him on the train to New York.

Back in London, M hands Bond the same man as an official target. The Bank of England believes Goldfinger is moving large amounts of gold out of the country. M suspects the gold pays for SMERSH networks in the West.

Part two: Coincidence

Bond arranges a round of golf with Goldfinger at Royal St Mark’s in Sandwich, Kent. Goldfinger cheats again. Bond switches his opponent’s ball late in the round, and Goldfinger loses the match by playing the wrong one. An invitation to dinner follows at The Grange, Goldfinger’s house near Reculver, where Bond meets the Korean manservant Oddjob.

Bond then tails Goldfinger’s Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost across France to Geneva in an Aston Martin DB Mark III. He learns how the smuggling works. The armour plating on the Rolls is white gold, cast at Goldfinger’s refinery in Kent. A factory in Switzerland melts the panels down and recasts them as aircraft seats for Mecca Charter Airline, which Goldfinger part-owns. The planes fly to India, where the gold sells at a large profit.

On the road Bond meets Tilly Masterton, Jill’s sister. She tells him Jill is dead. Goldfinger had her painted with gold from head to foot as punishment for Miami, and it killed her. Tilly has come to shoot him. Her attempt fails, the alarm goes up, and Goldfinger’s men capture both of them.

Part three: Enemy action

Goldfinger has Bond strapped to a table with a circular saw moving toward him. Bond offers to work for Goldfinger. Goldfinger refuses, then changes his mind and flies Bond and Tilly to a warehouse in New York to serve as his office staff.

There Bond sits in on a meeting with the heads of several American crime organisations, including the Mafia and the Spangled Mob. Goldfinger lays out Operation Grand Slam, a robbery of about fifteen billion dollars in gold from Fort Knox. The plan calls for the nerve agent GB in the town’s water supply, an atomic warhead to open the vault, and a Soviet cruiser waiting at Norfolk, Virginia to carry the gold away. One gang leader, Helmut Springer, declines to join. Oddjob kills him on the way out.

Bond writes a warning and hides it in the toilet of Goldfinger’s private plane, addressed to Felix Leiter at the Pinkerton detective agency. A cleaner finds it. When Goldfinger’s convoy rolls into Fort Knox, the soldiers and townspeople lying in the streets are faking, and the army counterattacks. Oddjob kills Tilly with his steel-rimmed hat. Goldfinger gets away.

A few days later Bond is drugged at the airport before his flight home. He wakes aboard a BOAC airliner that Goldfinger has hijacked, with Oddjob and Pussy Galore also on board. Bond breaks a cabin window. The decompression pulls Oddjob out of the plane. Bond strangles Goldfinger with his hands, then forces the crew at gunpoint to ditch in the North Atlantic beside a weather ship. He and Pussy Galore survive.