Goldfinger (novel)

Goldfinger (novel)

Goldfinger is the seventh novel in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series. The story centres on the investigation by the British Secret Service operative James Bond into the gold smuggling activities of Auric Goldfinger. Goldfinger is also suspected by MI6 of being connected to SMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence organisation. The novel was broadly well received by the critics and was favourably compared to the works of the thriller writers H. C. McNeile and John Buchan.

About Goldfinger (novel) in brief

Summary Goldfinger (novel)Goldfinger is the seventh novel in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series. Written in January and February 1958, it was first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on 23 March 1959. The story centres on the investigation by the British Secret Service operative James Bond into the gold smuggling activities of Auric Goldfinger. Goldfinger is also suspected by MI6 of being connected to SMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence organisation. The novel was broadly well received by the critics and was favourably compared to the works of the thriller writers H. C. McNeile and John Buchan. It was serialised as a daily story and as a comic strip in the Daily Express, before it became the third James Bond feature film of the Eon Productions series, released in 1964 and starring Sean Connery as Bond. In 2010 Goldfinger was adapted for BBC Radio with Toby Stephens as Bond and Sir Ian McKellen as Goldfinger, with the latter starring in the role of the eponymous villain for the first time. The book was written by Fleming, who used the names of people he knew, or knew of, throughout his story, including the book’s villain, who was named after the architect Ernő Goldfinger and threatened to sue, before the matter was settled out of court. Fleming developed the James Bond character in Goldfinger as a more complex individual than in the previous novels, and bringing out a theme of Bond as a St George figure. In a desperate attempt to escape being cut in two by a circular saw, Bond and Goldfinger are taken to Goldfinger’s operational headquarters and tortured by Oddjob, a Korean factotum.

The gold at a large profit fits at the aeroplanes of Mecca Charter Airline, in which he holds a large stake. Bond manages to trace Goldfinger to a warehouse in Geneva, where he finds that the armour of the Rolls-Royce is actually white-gold, cast into panels at his Kent refinery. Bond foils an assassination attempt on Goldfinger’s sister, Jill Masterton, to avenge her death at his hands: he had painted her body with gold, which he then killed her body in a suicide attempt. Bond and Tilly are captured when the alarm is raised, but are captured by Goldfinger when he refuses to confess to his role in the plot. In a final action, Bond is finally able to kill Goldfinger in a secret operation to steal the gold reserves of the U.S. from Fort Knox. In the book, Goldfinger offers Bond a ruse that initially refuses to work for him, but then accepts it in exchange for a job at his company, the Goldfinger Group, which is run by his brother-in-law, the American businessman Charles W. Engelhard Jr. The author also used his own experiences within the book; the round of golf played with Gold Finger was based on a 1957 tournament at the Berkshire Golf Club in which Fleming partnered Peter Thomson, the winner of The Open Championship.