Goldfinger is the seventh novel in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series. First published by Jonathan Cape on March 23, 1959. In 1964 it was adapted as the third film in the EON Productions James Bond series.

Plot summary: The novel begins in a similar fashion to Moonraker with an acquaintance of Bond (Junius Du Pont from Casino Royale) meeting him in Miami and requesting that he observe a Canasta game between him and the eponymous villain of the novel, Auric Goldfinger. Du Pont suspects Goldfinger of cheating and offers to pay Bond to confirm his suspicions. It turns out that Goldfinger is indeed cheating and Bond forces him to admit his guilt and pay back Du Pont due compensation.

After Bond returns to London he inquires into the background of Goldfinger to find that he’s the world’s top gold smuggler, the richest man in England, and after further investigation Bond learns Goldfinger is a communist criminal working as the treasurer for the Soviet assassination agency SMERSH.

Bond is then sent on a mission to find Goldfinger’s supply of gold that he has been smuggling and bring it back to England. Bond manages to trace Goldfinger to a warehouse in Geneva where the gold is being melted into chairs to be smuggled into India. Bond is then captured and tortured for information until he blacks out.

He then wakes up in New York and is taken to Goldfinger’s warehouse where he is told he will be working for Goldfinger.

Bond learns that Goldfinger intends to finance SMERSH’s schemes by stealing $15 billion worth of gold bullion from the American bullion depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky, an operation codenamed “Operation Grandslam”. Bond, along with Felix Leiter work to prevent the villain from executing his plan, which involves killing the soldiers of Fort Knox with water-borne nerve agent (GB, also called sarin) and then using a stolen US tactical atomic bomb missile warhead to break into Fort Knox’s impregnable vault.

In the novel, Pussy Galore is the lesbian leader of an all-female criminal organisation from New York City called the Cement Mixers. They had previously been circus acrobats and cat-burglars. Her group, as well as various other mobs including the Mafia and the Spangled Mob from Diamonds Are Forever, have been employed to aid Goldfinger in the planning and execution of Operation Grandslam. Martial arts expert Oddjob appears with a lethal metal-rimmed bowler hat, but it is Oddjob who is sucked to his death through the window of the airplane.

In terms of gadgets, this Fleming novel is closest to the Bond films technological underpinnings. The secret agent is issued a battleship grey Aston Martin DB Mark III with some accessories (though not the set of the film), as well as a homing device similar to that seen in the film; however, Q is not in the book.

See also:

• Bond novels: Ian Fleming