Goldfinger

Goldfinger is the seventh novel in Ian Fleming's James Bond series. Fleming wrote it in January and February 1958, and it was first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on 23 March 1959.

The story is an investigation by the British Secret Service operative James Bond into the gold-smuggling activities of Auric Goldfinger, a man MI6 also suspects of being connected to SMERSH, the Soviet counter-intelligence organisation. Bond's first encounter with Goldfinger is a game of two-handed canasta that turns out to be thoroughly crooked, and it ends with a beautiful woman dead. Working out how the smuggling is done also uncovers a much larger plot, because Goldfinger intends to steal the gold reserves of the United States from Fort Knox, which turns a smuggling case into an operation against a target at the centre of another country's finances.

Fleming developed the character of Bond further in this book than in the earlier novels, presenting him as a more complicated figure, and he worked with a theme of Bond as a St George figure, which is echoed in the fact that it is a British agent who is sent to sort out an American problem.