“We all think our own secrets are the only ones that matter” (58).
With echoes of familiar criminal smuggling tropes as found in earlier Ian Fleming novels (like Live and Let Die and Diamonds Are Forever), the seventh James Bond novel Goldfinger sends us back to the United States –Fleming’s least favorite country– as 007 trails an exorbitantly wealthy criminal who is planning an elaborate heist of millions of dollars worth of gold bullion, thereby unleashing economic chaos across the globe. In addition to sharing a great deal in common with Live and Let Die and Diamonds Are Forever, Goldfinger is also notably derivative of the plot of Moonraker. In both novels, the villain is a foreign business magnate with a diabolical plot to take down the West (and incidentally both villains share similar physical features), however, of the two, Goldfinger is the more implausible, bland, and mediocre in my view.
Goldfinger is told in three parts: Part One – Happenstance, Part Two – Coincidence, and Part Three – Enemy Action, each part representing a separate meeting between James Bond and Auric Goldfinger. Fleming dedicates Goldfinger to his “gentle reader,” William Plomer, the chief reader and literary adviser to Fleming’s publisher at the time, Jonathan Cape. As the novel begins, we first spot Bond sipping double bourbons and lugubriously contemplating the nature life and death while trapped in the Miami Airport lounge. He is returning home from “a bad assignment, one of the worst – squalid, dangerous and without any redeeming feature except that it had got him away from headquarters” (3). Bond had been dispatched to Mexico disrupt an opium ring which ended with Bond beating a man to death, a “capungo” (or a bandit who will kill for as little as forty pesos), but now feeling morbid, he says to himself: “Cut it out. Stop being so damn morbid. All this is just a reaction from a dirty assignment. You’re stale, tired of having to be tough. You want a change. You’ve seen too much death. You want a slice of life – easy, soft, high” (8).
Then a clean-looking, rich, middle-aged man seems to recognize Bond in the airport. It turns out to be none other than Dr. Junius Du Pont, a familiar face whom Bond previously met in ’51 at Royale les Eaux (as featured in Casino Royale). Mr. Du Pont –“not one of the chemical Du Ponts”– and his wife Ethel were seated next to Bond at the baccarat table, an infamous game which brought about the demise of Le Chiffre. When asked by Du Pont if he is a secret agent, bond slyly quotes Le Chiffre in Casino Royale and replies, “I used to dabble in that kind of thing… One still thought it was fun playing Red Indians. But there’s no future in it in peacetime” (12).
At any rate, stuck in Florida amidst flight delays, Du Pont manages to persuade Bond to help him with a unique quandary. He has been losing money at a game of “two-handed Canasta” to a mysterious figure he suspects of cheating. The man is a fabulously wealthy 42-year-old unmarried broker with a stout and ruddy “red as a lobster” complexion named Auric Goldfinger (Fleming unflatteringly named him after Ernő Goldfinger, a modernist architect who was cousins with John Blackwell –one of Fleming’s golfing partners– and Fleming despised Ernő Goldfinger’s efforts to replace Victorian architecture in England leading to a minor legal dispute settled by Fleming over Goldfinger’s name-use in the book). Fleming drew upon other inspiration for Goldfinger, such as American precious metals tycoon Charles W. Engelhard Jr. At any rate, in the novel Goldfinger is described as a refugee to England in 1937 from Riga, where he became a jeweler and goldsmith like his father before him (a man who once refined gold for Faberge). Prior to the war, Goldfinger started buying up small pawnbrokers in England, naming his shops “Goldfinger,” and he began selling cheap jewelry and quietly buying up as much gold as possible. He kept his pawnbrokers in operation while working in a machine tool firm in Wales during the war, and then set up his factory called “Thanet Alloy Research” a smelting business run by a German metallurgist and a cohort of Koreans, one of whom Goldfinger has trained to become his chauffeur. In spite of being generally “quiet, careful, law-abiding,” Goldfinger was caught smuggling gold when one of his boats ran aground in India revealing a scheme to transform gold as dust under the guise of “fertilizer.” Why is all of this important, you might ask? Well, as M and Colonel Smithers explain to Bond, all currencies are still backed by the gold standard at this time, and Goldfinger’s attempt to own a significant share of England’s gold bullions could cause significant economic disruption. Luckily, Goldfinger leaves a unique calling card on his gold bars –a minuscule “Z” which is carved into each bar, you just need a microscope to spot it. Goldfinger is one of those “rich men who use their riches like a club… He was the kind of man who thought he could flatten the world with his money, bludgeoning aside annoyances and opposition with his heavy wad.”
Bond first meets this mystery man beside the pool, noting that Goldfinger is a plump, short man, just the type Bond despises, like Napoleon or Hitler. The two are briefly introduced and Bond maintains his cover while Du Pont continues losing money at cards, however, Bond notes that Goldfinger claims to be agoraphobic, and as a result, he needs to be facing the hotel façade at all times. Goldfinger also claims to be slightly deaf which requires the use of a hearing aid. With this in mind, Bond rather quickly unravels Goldfinger’s cheating scheme when he breaks into Goldfinger’s suite and finds an underwear-clad blonde woman with a pair of binoculars feeding secret information to Goldfinger through his earpiece. Her name is Jill Masterton, Goldfinger’s “companion” rather than his “secretary.” With this mystery solved, Bond instructs Goldfinger through his earpiece to pay a hefty sum to Du Pont, which includes a payout of $10,000 to Bond from Du Pont.
During this little misadventure, Bond makes sure to comment on all the empty opulence and waste in Florida. At one point, while glancing down at a newspaper in Florida, Bond spots another article lamenting that an American ICBM has failed –a headline which reminds readers of Fleming’s limitless distaste for the United States, numerous jabs are peppered throughout these books. After Goldfinger has been sufficiently embarrassed in this case, Bond and Jill flee together and become caught up in a torrid love affair aboard a speeding train (“Some love is fire, some love is rust. But the finest, cleanest love is lust”). In this moment, I was careful to note that Bond quotes Saint Augustine’s famous maxim in his youth: “Lord make me chaste and continent –but not yet!” Bond then decides to return to London and Jill heads back to Goldfinger (Bond winds up giving her the full $10,000 payment). Notably, as a stuffy Victorian chap, M strongly disapproves of Bond’s womanizing. At any rate, back in London Bond begins working the night shift handling station work at headquarters for “Station H” (or Hong Kong) –Bond comments on his disgust for Chinese people and culture—but this kind of station work requires adjustment for a man who has been in the double-0 section for six years. Apparently, M wants all senior officers at MI6 to undergo a station rotation, but at least it allows Bond the chance to work on a handbook he is drafting of all secret methods used in unarmed combat (it will be called Stay Alive! and will contain all the best tactics from secret services around the world, like the OSS, CIA, Deuxieme, and of course, SMERSH). These are some intriguing albeit slightly tedious scenes at headquarters as Bond decides to use an “Identicast” machine to help identify Goldfinger –it is a machine for building up an approximate image of a suspect.
However, Bond is quickly summoned to the Bank of England where one Colonel Smithers, Head of the Bank’s Research Department, informs Bond of a significant “gold leak out of England.” He says that gold is the foundation of all currency and international credit, and its allure attracts only the biggest, most hardened criminals. “…the great thing to remember about gold is that’s the most valuable and most easily marketable commodity in the world. You can go to any town in the world, almost to any village, and hand over a piece of gold and get goods or services in exchange” (58). Gold is also problematic because it is untraceable and has caused numerous manias and panics throughout human history, such as in Ancient Egypt, Mycenae, Montezuma, Incas, Croesus, Midas, the Balkans, India, the Americas, the Gold Coast in Africa, and even the Klondike and California gold rushes. With this in mind, Goldfinger is suspected of stealing some twenty billion from England, and he may, in fact, be the foreign banker –or even treasurer– of SMERSH, the fearsome Soviet agency that has popped up from time to time throughout the Bond novels.
Bond is then tasked with tracking down Goldfinger and retrieving his enormous pile of stolen gold. Posing as a salesman for Universal Export (but with a desire to leave his job), Bond is outfitted with his familiar Walther PPK and a sleek grey Aston Martin DB Mark III which is actually a trick car riddled with hidden compartments and secret gadgets all over (the likes of which we often see in the Eon films). Appearing as “a well-to-do rather adventurous young man with a taste for the good, the fast things of life,” Bond pretends to stumble upon Goldfinger, and they decide to play a round of golf together (Goldfinger cheats but Bond actually wins the game). This golfing scene drones on and on in the novel. In a moment of repartee, Bond makes the terse observation that Goldfinger’s agoraphobia no longer seems to be afflicting him. Later, at Goldfinger’s mansion known as “The Grange,” Goldfinger departs on urgent business and Bond is left to his own devices for about a half hour and he secretly wanders the building only to discover he is being captured on camera. He quickly destroys the tapes and devises a scheme whereby a housecat is blamed for the vandalism, but when Goldfinger returns, the cat is punished by being handed over to Goldfinger’s Korean henchman, Oddjob, who delights in eating cats as a delicacy. Fleming continues his theme of creating villains who are ill-shapen and morally degenerate. Goldfinger demonstrates Oddjob’s extraordinary physical strength which shows that Oddjob’s hands and feet are seemingly indestructible, not unlike lethal machines (he is one of only three men in the world to achieve black belt status in karate) and he wears a steel-rimmed bowler hat. Again, Fleming’s trademark brand of racism in his commentary on Koreans — Koreans are described as “the cruelest and most ruthless people in the world” (137), and as “rather lower than apes in the mammalian hierarchy” (195).
“Mr Bond, the word ‘pain’ comes from the Latin poena meaning ‘penalty’
– that which must be paid” (183).
While continuing to investigate Goldfinger en route to Switzerland using a “homer” device installed in Bond’s Aston Martin (Bond is trailing Goldfinger’s Rolls Royce which Bond believes is covertly transporting gold), Bond happens upon Tilly Masterton, Jill’s sister. Tilly bitterly explains that Jill was murdered by Goldfinger in a most unusual way –she was painted entirely in gold and then suffocated to death (this is the infamous and scientifically false case of “skin suffocation”). Apparently, painting women in gold is Goldfinger’s strange perverted fetish (in the film, Jill is memorably shown splayed out on a hotel bed covered head to toe in gold, though Bond never actually sees her again in the book). In vengeance for her sister’s murder, Tilly plans to kill Goldfinger. Both she and Bond team up, but they are quickly captured by Goldfinger and taken to a “pressure room” where they are both strapped to tables with spinning circular saws set to slice them in half (in the film, Bond is memorably tied to a table with a laser set to kill him). But after neither Bond nor Tilly reveal their true purpose, they both black out and are awoken on a plane (Bond wonders if he has died and crossed the threshold; his top concern is if his past girlfriends like Vesper Lynd from Casino Royale will meet one another) but when Bond and Tilly come to their senses they are instead offered a truly farcical proposition –to serve as administrative employees of Goldfinger in one of the most absurd plot twists in any Bond novel. I mean, Bond serving as Goldfinger’s secretary? It’s an unusually boring twist.
The final act of the book is crammed together, as if Ian Fleming sought to quickly wrap this one up (the climax of the novel is squeezed into the last three chapters). Goldfinger gathers the six largest gangs in America –Jack Strap of The Spangled Mob (whom we previously encountered in Diamonds Are Forever), Helmut M. Springer of The Purple Gang in Detroit, Jed Midnight of the Shadow Syndicate in Miami and Havana, Billy “The Grinner” Ring of The Machine in Chicago, Mr. Solo of the Unione Siciliano, and “Pussy Galore” from Harlem, the “only woman who runs a gang in America.” She is a former trapeze artist whose troupe of Lesbian acrobats now call themselves “The Cement Mixers.” Goldfinger’s plan (dubbed “Operation Grand Slam”) is to conduct a high-brow heist of Fort Knox, stealing fifteen billion dollars-worth of gold bullion; Fleming includes a unique art graphic of a map of Fort Knox in the novel (while this heist would be physically impossible and a logistical nightmare, in the film this impossibility is corrected as Goldfinger intends to detonate a “dirty bomb” and thereby render the gold radioactive and unusable, instantly increasing the value of Goldfinger’s personal gold stash). Anyway, in the book the heist will either be a “bust or the Crime de la Crime.” America is about to be robbed by SMERSH and only Bond can stop it. Bond manages to distribute a note out into the ether offering a $5,000 reward to be delivered to his old straw-haired Texan counterpart, Felix Leiter of the CIA. It somehow manages to arrive at its destination and Felix storms into Fort Knox (under the leadership of the U.S. President) and Goldfinger’s ploy is disrupted just as it seems to begin. In the ensuing chaos, Tilly expresses her open amorous attraction to Galore, much to Bond’s dismay. Note Bond’s cringe-worthy internal monologue about Tilly, in which he blames women’s suffrage for the rise of lesbianism among other things:
“Bond came to the conclusion that Tilly Masterton was one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up. He knew the type well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women and ‘sex equality.’ As a result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet completely homosexual, but confused, not knowing what they are. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits – barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied. He was sorry for them, but he had no time for them” (237).
Well, no one ever turns to the pages of Ian Fleming novels when looking for enlightened modern sensibilities. Bond’s archaisms notwithstanding, Tilly is quickly killed in a flash when Oddjob chucks his hat, striking her in the neck. Somehow, Goldfinger then escapes from this collapsing situation with a few of his cronies aboard a train. Bond is then awarded the Medal of Merit but cannot accept it in order to preserve the integrity of the secret service (M declines the award on Bond’s behalf). In an epilogue, as Bond boards his flight home he is given a strange dose of medicine and then spots Oddjob dressed in a BOAC disguise before blacking out. He is later awoken to find that Goldfinger has commandeered the plane and intends to bring Bond to SMERSH in Eastern Europe where he will face interrogation (Pussy Galore secretly hands Bond a note stating that she is on his side). With a bit of quick thinking, Bond manages to bust open a window on the plane which sends Oddjob hurtling out into the sky like toothpaste through a tube (in the film, it is Goldfinger who is memorably sent hurtling out into the sky). The plane then heads into a downward tailspin as Bond attacks Goldfinger and strangles him to death. After the plane crashes in the ocean, Bond and Galore manage to float to safety and, as if there wasn’t enough ridiculous reactionary nonsense from Fleming in this novel, we end with a farcical love scene between Bond and Pussy Galore. Bond claims “he felt the sexual challenge all beautiful Lesbians have for men” and Galore affectionately confesses she has fallen for Bond. Why? Because in her words: “I never met a man before… I come from the South. You know the definition of a virgin down there? Well, it’s a girl who can run faster than her brother. In my case I couldn’t run faster than my uncle. I was twelve.” In other words, Galore was sexually assaulted as a child and has lived all of her adult life as a gay woman, but now that she has encountered Bond’s irresistible machisimo and his “Tender Loving Care treatment,” she has apparently decided to change her perspective in this awkward, ill-conceived conclusion.
Thus concludes Fleming’s longest Bond novel –and easily one of his worst in my view. In keeping with the tradition of prior novels like Live and Let Die and Diamonds Are Forever, Bond’s American mission is once again a rather mediocre outing. I still have many lingering questions with this novel like: If Goldfinger works for SMERSH, how is he unaware of James Bond? Wouldn’t he want to confirm his suspicions with SMERSH? Why does Bond use his real name instead of a cover if he knows that Goldfinger is affiliated with SMERSH? And how in the world does Goldfinger decide to spare Bond and Tilly’s lives when he already suspects them of treachery? Too much of this novel relies on odd coincidences –like the Secret Service sending Bond after the very same man he just happened to encounter in a card-cheating scam, or Bond stumbling upon Jill Masterton’s sister by a miracle of contrivance, or Goldfinger embracing an inexplicable change of heart instead of killing Bond and Tilly so that he can hire them as administrative secretaries.
Also Goldfinger gives Live and Let Die a run for its money when it comes to racist screeds and bigoted ramblings littered throughout the text –Bond complains about Chinese people, he distrusts short people, he has contempt for Koreans, he believes the women’s rights movement is apparently causing women to become gay, and he continues his open contempt for American culture and its “soft, easy living” (at one point, he even bemoans the low quality of American cars). And if that isn’t enough, he somehow compares Masculinity/Femininity to a Master/Slave dynamic. It’s true that nobody ever looks to James Bond for moral guidance, seeing as how these novels are simple, wild, escapist, pulpy adventures, but Goldfinger is still a pretty outrageous novel –it seems Fleming decided to let loose any lingering inhibitions he might have concealed with this one.
Apparently, the publication of Goldfinger marks the end of the SMERSH narrative in the Bond novels, as well. Going forward Fleming’s books now begin to turn toward SPECTRE instead. I will look forward to continuing this amusing jaunt through the literary Bond and seeing how SPECTRE shapes the future of the series. On a final point of note, Goldfinger is one of those rare instances in which the film adaptation of Bond memorably outshines its literary predecessor –in this case, I much prefer the film to the book. In the movie, Gert Fröbe delivers the quintessential Bond villain performance as Auric Goldfinger.
Fleming, Ian. Goldfinger. Thomas & Mercer in Las Vegas, NV c/o Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. 1959 (republished in 2012). Paperback edition.