35. Goldfinger: The Ultimate James Bond Novel

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3:29Dominic Sandbrook: Tabby, as I was saying to you the other day, I don't get to do as much daydreaming as I used to. I used to go into these great reveries when I'd come up with my best ideas. I don't have a chance anymore because I spend so much time doing my life admin. It's the same for you, isn't it? You know, I used to spend a lot of time rewriting my favourite books so that I would get the endings that I'd always hoped for. But you know how you can get that time back, Tabby? I've started using Klarna to handle my real world money admin and that gives me the headspace for the more important things like thinking about books.

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4:41Dominic Sandbrook: She whispered almost to herself. He killed my sister. You knew her, Jill Masterton. Bond said fiercely, what happened? He has a woman once a month. Jill told me this when she first took the job. He hypnotizes them. Then he paints them gold. Christ, why? I don't know. Jill told me he's mad about gold. I suppose he sort of thinks he's that he's sort of possessing gold, you know, marrying it. He gets some Korean servant to paint them. The man has to leave their backbones unpainted. Jill couldn't explain that. I found out it's so they wouldn't die. If their bodies were completely covered with gold paint, the pores of the skin wouldn't be able to breathe.

5:26Then they'd die. Afterwards, they're washed down by the Korean with resin or something. Goldfinger gives them a thousand dollars and sends them away.

5:35Dominic Sandbrook: Bond saw the dreadful odd job with his pot of gold paint, Goldfinger's eyes gloating over the glistening statue, the fierce possession. What happened to Jill? She cabled me to come. She was in an emergency ward in hospital in Miami. Goldfinger had thrown her out. She was dying. Goldfinger had had her painted all over. He had murdered her. It must have been out of revenge for for going with you. So hello, everybody. A chilling moment there from Ian Fleming's Goldfinger, his seventh James Bond book published by Jonathan Cape in March 1959. And there we have the dashing and athletic James Bond played by the person who I hear is one of the front runners for the role in the forthcoming movie, Dominic Sandbrook, stepping into the role he was born for as James Bond.

6:30Dominic Sandbrook: And Tabby, you are? I'm Tilly Masterton. Ill-fated lesbian. Yeah. And if you've seen the film you will remember which i did last night actually i re-watched it jill dies in the same way she's painted entirely with gold but in the film this is sean connery's bond we actually see that he walks into his hotel room in miami and it's a really really striking and memorable image this beautiful girl on this bed totally covered in gold and it's one of the defining images of the bond films and the kind of opening sequence in that which have become so famous in the bond films are these kind of images of women with golden faces.

7:06Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, the title sequence. Yeah, exactly. And Dominic, I know, obviously, you've written a lot about James Bond, surely inspired by your aspirational love of heavy drinking and golf. Yeah, to be honest, I don't really care for golf. I'll take a bourbon, but I won't take a nine holes of gold for Goldfinger or whatever it is. I can live without that. But the point is, this is very, very much home turf for you. Yeah, so I wrote about Bond in my first book, which is called Never Had It So Good, which is about Britain in the late 50s and early 60s. And in another book I did about popular culture called The Great British Dream Factory, because I think Bond is such an important part of modern British pop culture.

7:42Dominic Sandbrook: And he really is the ultimate post-war male fantasy figure. He's the idol. He is the standard that lots of men thought they had to achieve. and well the bond phenomenon goes back to 1953 casino royale the first book and fleming wrote that at a time when two things were happening great britain was losing its empire but also it's becoming the affluent society sort of rich consumer society and bond becomes the symbol of of that i think he's a sort of compensation for the loss of empire but he's also a fantasy figure it's comforting i suppose you know isn't it you know allows you to believe that you're sort of a great nation with yeah of course there's that element to it and then there's also that bond is basically how as we'll discuss a how-to guide on how to how to dress what wine to order you know car to drive he's a lesson in how to behave in the new kind of affluent world of the 1950s and 60s he's britain's very own lovable patrick bateman well patrick bateman is the kind of person who would want to be james bond with similar attitudes to women yeah yeah you're not wrong there actually casino rail was 53 then there were 11 more novels and two short story collections by the time that Fleming died in 1964, two of which were published posthumously.

8:56Dominic Sandbrook: And by the time Fleming died, the Eon film series, so that's the sort of canonical film series, was up and running. And it's the films that made Bond into an international phenomenon. So there've been 25 films. And thanks to the films, people see James Bond as a British cultural icon, but also as a sort of embodiment of masculinity, of cool, of courage, of social ease, of sex appeal, all the things that are there in Goldfinger, which we'll be talking about. It's why the debates rumble on about who should play him in whichever next movie is coming out, because he does mean a lot to the nation. Exactly right.

9:31Dominic Sandbrook: And it's seen as a sort of symbol of, you know, where we are as a country almost, who you choose for James Bond. Now, the funny thing is that pretty much as soon as the series started, people said it was out of date. So I'm talking about back in the 1950s, the first critics said it's reactionary it's offensive it's old-fashioned but actually i i think it shows no sign of losing momentum there are spin-offs there's the young bond books there are video games and as you were saying tabby there's a huge uh debate right now i mean there's been loads of stories in the papers this week about who denny villeneuve and co will choose as the new bond in the film that amazon because amazon had bought the rights to the bond franchise So Amazon spent a billion dollars on the film rights in 2025.

10:17And yeah, there's so much speculation. Every time a new film comes out or, you know, there's going to be a shift in the guy that plays Bond. They actually thought it was going to be before the final film, which was No Time to Die. And then Daniel Craig stepped back into the role because he is definitely the most iconic, the most well-known figure in cinema. And not just in this country, worldwide.

10:39Dominic Sandbrook: There are not many characters, possibly Sherlock Holmes, I suppose. who have appeared in so many iterations in the cinema, played by so many different actors, and everybody has their favourites. Now, actually, the similarity between those three characters is they're all literary characters. So people sometimes forget, I think, that Bond began as a literary construct in a series of books that were written 70 or more years ago. Goldfinger is obviously one of the best known because of the film, and that's why we thought we'd start with this. And Tabby, I know you've seen the films, but you had never read a Bond book before doing the show.

11:10Dominic Sandbrook: Is that right? No, I never had. My dad's a big fan of them though. So it's kind of one of those things I'd always said, oh, I will, and then I never did. So when I first started reading this, I think when you have such a strong idea of something, when something is as integrated into culture as James Bond is, you think, well, the reality surely can't be as Bond-like as, I don't know, popular culture would have you believe. And literally on the opening page, I was like, this is the most Bond-y thing I've ever seen in my whole life. It opens with something like Bond contemplated the man he had killed while sipping on a double bourbon at 8am in the morning.

11:45And I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it. As a read, it's so much fun. It's funnier than I expected, but that's because I think it's inadvertently quite funny. And it's certainly a book of its time.

11:57Dominic Sandbrook: It is. It is. There's no overlooking that, but I did enjoy it. So I first read the Bond books when I was a teenager. and basically, like a lot of people, I read them, I assumed they'd be absolutely full of sex. Did you? See, I didn't. I didn't. I thought maybe that had been overplayed. It hasn't, by the way. Do you think it has? And I think it has. You know, there aren't genuine sex scenes. There are the allusions to the fact that Bond is having sex with people are frequent. Yeah. So why don't you, I mean, obviously lots of people will be familiar with the story, but do you want to give people a quick summary?

12:32Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. So it's a book that falls into three parts, happenstance, coincidence, and then enemy action. That intelligent insight is actually not my own. It comes from a remark made by the book's villain, Goldfinger himself, because he and Bond keep bumping into each other. And he says, Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago. Once he's happenstance, two is coincidence, the third time is enemy action. So giving himself away there in a big way, I would say. So in the first part of the book, Bond, he is 007, an agent of the British Secret Service, but being a 00 is unique. There aren't many of them. It means that they have a license to kill.

13:11And he is changing planes in Miami after having completed a mission when he meets the billionaire Ulrich Goldfinger. And Bond discovers that Goldfinger is cheating at cards. And in a sort of quite comical scene where he charges into a hotel room and busts him, he manages to blackmail him and this is when he meets jill and she's the one that ends up covered in gold paint then we're back in london and then this is where bond meets up with m this is always always a feature of the books but m tells him that he needs to so although the bond has bumped into goldfinger this wasn't really a mission or anything m actually tells him he needs to invest investigate goldfinger because they suspect him of smuggling gold out of britain and being an agent for the soviet counterintelligence group smirsch and then in the second part bond is playing golf for just chapter upon chapter upon chapter with goldfinger and it's at this point that he meets goldfinger's sinister korean henchman odd job called odd job by goldfinger because he does you know odd jobs yeah strange and sinister odd jobs for him bond then trails in switzerland he then teams up with Jill's sister Tilly actually after very unchivalrously crashing into her car and he discovers that yes Goldfinger is indeed smuggling gold but he's smuggling it hidden inside his vintage Rolls Royce and it's actually it's in the body of the car or for instance when he's smuggling it on cargo ships it's it's melted into the wood of the ships then in the final part he's been captured by Goldfinger Bond and Tilly persuade him to let them work for him rather than lose their lives and they now learn of his great master plan.

14:52And what he's going to do is he's going to use nerve gas and an atomic warhead to break into Fort Knox and steal the United States' greatest gold reserves. And it's only in this part of the book that Bond meets the person. So at one point we think maybe Tilly's his love interest, but no, we meet the person that is his real love interest. And this is the infamously named Pussy Galore. surely one of the most famous Bond girls.

15:21Dominic Sandbrook: A memorable name, should we say. So where did Fleming get these ideas from? Let's kick off with the origins of Bond himself. And in order to do that, we can talk about Ian Fleming because they're basically the same, aren't they? But the same in so far as Bond is kind of the man that Ian Fleming wishes he was. I think Fleming said that Bond was his own pillow fantasy. He did. He was very open about that. In 1963, he told an interviewer, he said it was this is very much walter mitty syndrome the feverish dreams of the author of what he might have been bang bang kiss kiss that sort of stuff see that's that's quite that's quite self-knowing self-knowing exactly i didn't really credit um ian fleming with that yeah because i think you're absolutely right i think bond is the person is not who ian fleming was he's the man that ian fleming wishes he had been ian fleming must actually be one of the best known post-war writers yeah purely because his name appeared on the credits of every single bond film So tens of hundreds of millions of people have seen his name, even though they haven't necessarily read his books.

16:20Dominic Sandbrook: Fleming is actually quite a strange and sad figure, I think. He was born in 1908, Scottish ancestry like James Bond. His father was called Valentine Fleming and was a barrister and banker and conservative MP, MP for Henley. And Valentine Fleming fought in the First World War and he was killed in 1917. Ian Fleming was only eight years old. And Ian, all his life was obsessed with his father, completely unsurprisingly. in his house he kept a framed copy of the tribute that his father's friend Winston Churchill wrote in the times when he was killed. Do you think then in Bond there's an element of the man that Fleming kind of imagined or hoped his father was because he never got the reality so you project greatness.

17:04Dominic Sandbrook: Definitely I think his father and his brother will come to actually. So Ian grows up in Hampstead he goes to Eton like his father and his older brother Peter he was um good at sport but academically he was completely useless and his mother basically said get into the what they had a thing called the army class which trains you to go to sandhurst officer training he's prince harry yes there's a bit of do you know what that's not a bad comparison i mean it sounds a bit mad but it's not a bad comparison he went to sandhurst he was useless at sandhurst as well he didn't like the discipline he caught gonorrhea from a prostitute in soho and his mother basically bullied him into pulling out as she said you know this isn't you're not cut out for this it's the right passage for every uh old etonian right so this is the pattern for the next few years so to quote myself in i think the great british dream factory fleming took the entrance exam for the foreign office and failed to get in he went into banking and failed at that too he went into stock broking but never settled basically tries a whole load of things and is never really good at them and what's worse for fleming his older brother peter is brilliant at everything so his older brother peter was a star at eton he was a star at oxford where he got a first class degree he married a film star called celia johnson who's in brief encounter he literally is but completely he is he went and explored the amazon in the 1930s he wrote a best-selling book about it in 1933 and then he became this intrepid foreign correspondent and basically all in fleming's life or for a lot of it people said to him you peter fleming's brother oh my god he's amazing so that's terrible that's that's every younger brothers every younger siblings worst nightmare isn't it of course you're a younger sibling and you're not well i'm a twin so by about 10 minutes by about 10 minutes i have 10 minutes worth of bitterness and envy exactly in every in every fiber exactly i by the way i'm a classic older sibling so just annoying and patronizing so what's ian doing at this point ian grows up and he basically spends a lot of time hanging around smoking, wearing dressing gowns unnecessarily, drinking, fantasizing about beating girls.

19:02There was a big leap that you made there, but we'll go with it. And listeners will discover why in due course. Anyway, then the Second World War breaks out and this turns out to be transformative for Fleming. He manages to get a job as a personal assistant to the head of Royal Navy Intelligence. And this is a guy called Rear Admiral Sir John Godfrey. And this guy, which I think is so cool, is the model for M in the Bond books. And Fleming finally has found something that he loves and is possibly quite good at. He's writing secret reports. He's liaising with American intelligence. He helps to plan sabotage operations.

19:40He's directing commander units, et cetera. He gets to travel to Washington, Tangiers, Lisbon, and he gets the title of commander, which he's very proud of. And he's dabbling, genuinely dabbling in lots of top secret things. He's sitting in on lots of committees. Obviously, none of this would have mattered. No one would have cared about this. Some bloke that was up to his elbows in secret shenanigans were not for the Bond books. None of us would have remembered him. I mean, his brother, who did remarkable things, is not remembered because he's not the author of James Bond.

20:14Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, you're right. I think Ian Fleming had a very good war, but no one would write books about him. And actually, after the war, he just goes back to drifting again. So he basically is managing the team of correspondents for the Kemsley newspaper group, the most famous title, which is the Sunday Times. And that's quite an easy job. It's a soft job. So he's doing that. He also writes the diary column for the Sunday Times. He writes articles about slightly exotic things, sort of boys-owned things, like he writes about underwater treasure hunters or smugglers in the Caribbean and stuff. And he spends a lot of time hanging around with his posh mates, like kind of Noel Coward, at his estate.

20:50Dominic Sandbrook: because he's bought an estate in the second world war in jamaica called golden eye i wouldn't have put him and no coward together but i enjoy envisaging that combination he's friends with david niven as well so basically people who the kind of people who in the 1950s are smoking cigarettes with colossal cigarette holders they're possibly wearing a cravat you know just performatively yeah there's almost certainly a silk dressing gown at some stage um there's that kind of vibe basically a very sort of 50s raffish posh vibe and there's a brilliant book on the james bond phenomenon called the man who saved britain by simon winder who used to be my editor at penguin my long-term editor simon says in this book you know the funny thing about ian fleming is he is so camp he's wearing a bow tie you know he's sipping he's got all this he's very prissy about his cocktails they have to be done the same way he's got a cigarette holder he's a man of routine he's obsessed with like brand names and fine foods yeah simon describes him as a parody of a less talented younger brother he's bertie worcester there was a slight element of yeah hanging around and where and and somebody bringing him yeah exactly exactly there's one way in which he most certainly is not bertie worcester and that is the fact that he's an enormous womanizer yes like james bond so he's been having this sadomasochistic affair with this queen of society a very posh woman called Anne Charteress.

22:17And she is married to Viscount Rothermere. And then in 1951, Rothermere divorces her and Fleming asks her to marry him. It's not a very happy marriage as is so often the case with the authors that we discuss on this show. They have a son, Casper, but they're both having affairs consistently. She has an affair with the Labour leader, Hugh Gateskill.

22:39Dominic Sandbrook: That's a twist. Ian is having an affair with his Jamaican neighbour. she's the heiress to Cross and Blackwell which is a famous British food brand and this is Blanche Blackwell then in February 1952 at Golden Eye Fleming decides to start work on something that he's always wanted to do and you remember we said in our episode on the 39 steps that that was the the influence for James Bond well Fleming had always wanted to write a spy novel in the same vein as the 39 steps he said at the time that he partly wanted to write it to distract himself from his wedding. This is an inspiration for you. Marital bliss all around.

23:17I know, why do you think I do this show?

23:20Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. And then, so he writes 2000 words a day. This is the book that becomes Casino Royale. And in a very familiar way, he pretends that he's ashamed of it. So he tells one friend, oh, it's a dreadful, oafish opus. He tells his editor, it's a miserable piece of work. But later, he's actually quite defensive about the Bond books. and I think that does make sense to me. I think that maybe you write something, you think it's a bit of fun. Loads of people then come on board and they love it. You think, well, why the hell not? And you step into that role of it and then you, maybe in your mind, your estimation of it rises.

23:58This is what Fleming said in an interview from 1963. I have no message for suffering humanity and though I was bullied at school and lost my virginity like so many of us used to do in the old days. What do you mean the old days?

24:10Dominic Sandbrook: I think money changed hands is probably what it's... Excellent. Good. I have never been tempted to foist these and other harrowing personal experiences on the public. My works do not aim at changing people or making them go out and do something. They are not designed to find favour with the Cometern, left-wingers. They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airport, aeroplanes or beds. It's an interesting statement that, but you've got to respect his honesty. you know i we said we've said about books before you know i wish it didn't try to be something that it wasn't at least he knows he knows exactly what exactly what it is that he's doing and i think that's the attitude you probably have to bring to your reading of bond novels as well anyway casino royale is published in april 1953 by jonathan cape it's not a massive hit it does get some nice reviews but sales are kind of so so but it does well enough that cape commission some more books So for the next five years, he publishes one a year.

25:08He's pretty prolific. I was impressed by that detail. So these are written a golden eye over the first few months of every year. So Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Diamonds of Forever, From Russia With Love and Dr. No. And they pretty much all follow the same formula. This must be familiar to anyone that has watched a Bond movie. Exciting opening. There's a briefing from M. Loads of travel. Loads of local colour. Food, drink, girls, lots of sex. Bond then meets the villains. There's a series of mental and physical challenges that he overcomes. Bond inevitably wins. End of story.

25:45Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. But this is sort of the point, right? This formula. Completely. The formula is the point. It's what you expect. And if you went to see a Bond film and it diverted from the formula, you would be disappointed. You would say it didn't feel like a Bond film. In our sort of sister show, The Restless Entertainment discussed this and people had voted about what they most wanted to see in a bond film and it's always the formula it's always like in the movie case of the movies it's the um gadgets or whatever and it's it's the same reason that you know jack reacher books do well people like a formula completely they do completely i mean the best person on this is um believe it or not umberto echo so hard to believe the author of the name of the rose who was an italian semiologist and literary critic very distinguished umberto echo wrote a study of the bomb books and i think the very early 80s and he said when you read the bomb books it's like you're watching a game of chess you know it's a very circumscribed kind of board and the pieces all move as you expect they can only move a particular way and he said the reader's pleasure consists of finding himself immersed in a game of which he knows the pieces and the rules and perhaps the outcome and he's drawing pleasure simply from following the minimal variations by which the victor realizes his objective yeah i think that's absolutely right you're watching the pieces fall into place in the approved way you you are you know fleming did something mad and it went off piste which he actually does in the spy who loved me because it's narrated by the girl then that would throw you and people don't like that book they want it to follow the formula now umberto echo loved the books or at least respected them some critics right from the start hated the bond book so 1958 the literary scholar bernard bergonzi said the books have a sorry air of vulgarity a strong marked streak of voyeurism and sadomasochism and a total lack of any ethical frame of reference but the most famous attack on them was written by same year by in the new statesman by paul johnson who ended up becoming the editor of the new statesman reviewing dr no and he said it was the nastiest book i've ever read wow basically it's made up in equal parts of the sadism of a schoolboy bully the mechanical two-dimensional sex longings of a frustrated adolescent and the crude snob cravings of a suburban adult and that basically if you don't like james bond that's probably what you think of him and what people have said ever since imagine what he'd say about american psycho in the mind boggles the thing is though most critics actually don't feel that way they like the bond books they find them exciting well written which i thought was kind of interesting and fantastic thrillers which they are undeniably their greatest champion though is a great hero of yours dominic and that's kingsley amos he loved them he loved yeah again i was pleasantly surprised by that so he wrote the first ever critical study of the bond books and said that they rank alongside conan doyle and will be read long after all the critics are forgotten which is true it's again and it's often the case with books that we do on the show, but it's absolutely true.

28:47Look at the afterlife of these books. And then when John Le Carré wrote an article slagging Bond off in 1981, which I think is a bit poor because you slightly get the sense that, you know, he writes spy novels. So he's trying to distinguish them. He's trying to say, my spy novels are of a whole league above.

29:05Dominic Sandbrook: Well, Le Carré hated Bond. Yeah, hated Bond. So he wrote this article slagging Bond off in 1981. and then Amos wrote to his big mate Philip Larkin who's this British poet and they had this wonderfully well-known correspondence between them so he wrote to Larkin he said that Le Carre's article about Bond was a piece of bubbling dog shit I noticed how you said you basically shouted that because I know it's so rare that I get to swear on the show well calm down something anyway back to the fortunes of the series so the real game changer is the paperbacks so paperback sales were booming in 1950s britain and they're aimed at middle class working class readers people can carry them around with them easily on public transport whatever it may be and they start to have much more sensationalist covers so i think two particularly famous examples of this are the catcher in the rye and casino royale and there's a bit of a war going on a publishing war going on between Penguin and Pan at this time.

30:05So the James Bond books become one of Pan's secret weapons. And the publishing house really pushes them as sexy and exciting commercial hits, really. So sales take off in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. And then, because they're taking off, they catch the attention of the producers, Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli. Albert R. Broccoli's daughter is still the producer.

30:31Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, Barbara Broccoli. Yeah, Barbara Broccoli, the producer behind the shows. And they buy the rights. And then they bring out the first Bond film, Dr. No, in 1962. It's not like a global sensation at this point, but it does really well. And it later explodes. Well, Goldfinger is the film that makes it. Goldfinger is the film that makes it and actually turns Sean Connery into a superstar as well. Yeah. But at this juncture, Dominic, I'm going to give you three fascinating James Bond facts. Yeah, please do. Yeah, I'd love to hear them. In 1965 alone, Bond books sold more than 27 million copies worldwide.

31:04A third of all pan paper book sales in the 1960s were Bond books. That's a third. Of the first 18 books to sell a million copies in Britain, 10 were Bond books.

31:16Dominic Sandbrook: I mean, that's every aspiring writer's dream. So we'll come to Goldfinger specifically in a few minutes. But because it's the seventh book, when this formula that we discussed is already established, we should say a few words about the character of Bond and the series that has struck such a chord in 50s and 60s Britain and actually America. Why did the Bond book strike such a chord? First of all, we've already talked about the model. Spy stories have a long history, the 39 steps. Yeah. There's a lot of Richard Hanna and James Bond. They're what critics call clubland heroes. so people are used to the um the idea of a hero who basically swans around in mayfair inst james's in london who uh fights sort of subversive threats and brings his sort of public school gentlemanly code to bear against dastardly foreigners pencil mustache that's what i imagine in the hero or the villains both okay right wow that's a twist so bondo is a lot to richard hane and also to a character from the 1920s called Bulldog Drummond, who is nastier and harder than Hanna.

32:22Dominic Sandbrook: And Bulldog Drummond was created by a writer called Sapper. And Bulldog Drummond fought Bolsheviks and Jews and Germans and various people who didn't fit in Sapper's very reactionary view of kind of Stanley Baldwin's Britain. And Bond has a lot of Bulldog Drummond in him. So that's point number one. As a result of that, the Bond character is quite backward looking. And he's basically a public school hero. Yeah. M actually writes Bond's obituary in You Only Live Twice. He thinks that Bond is dead. And we learn that Bond half Scottish, half Swiss. He went to Eton. He went to Fetis in Scotland, and then he joined the Royal Navy.

32:58Dominic Sandbrook: Everything we know about Bond, it's sometimes said that Bond is classless. And I just think that's totally wrong. Bond wears Saffil Row tailored suits. He wears handmade shirts. He likes casinos. He likes going skiing. He opens a wine list and he recognizes every name i mean how could he possibly be classless exactly so again if i can quote myself with gross self-indulgence bond doesn't just happen to be a member of the british elite if he'd been born on the back streets of bolton or worked his way up from suburban sutton coldfield he would not be the same man at all his elitism isn't just what makes him tick it's what makes him special and and basically bond offers you if you i think there's lots of people who like james Bond will recognize this.

33:38Dominic Sandbrook: You study James Bond and you think, well, if I'm like him, if I order the same jam and if I behave in the same way when I check into a hotel and if I have suits like James Bond's, then I will be an elitist, I'll be an exclusive sort of person. His name comes from an American ornithologist called James Bond. So James Bond wrote a coffee table book called Birds of the West Indies and Ian Fleming had it on his table when he was writing. Of course, because he's in the Caribbean. So he's got a book about the local birds. And people have often said, again, what a clever classless name. You know, James Bond is an everyman's name.

34:12Dominic Sandbrook: The funny thing is, actually, I looked into this. The real James Bond was also very posh. He went to a boarding school in New Hampshire. He was American, but he went to a boarding school, then to Harrow, and then to Cambridge. The politics of Bond. Their political appeal is very obvious. I think it's related to Britain's relative decline. People often say there's Cold War books. And of course, you've already mentioned Goldfinger is a smush agent. That's a Soviet counterintelligence group from the forties called Schmiert-Schbionim set up by Stalin. Death to spies is what Schmiert-Schbionim means apparently.

34:40Oh, that's great.

34:41Dominic Sandbrook: A nice bit of Russian for you, Tabs. But the Cold War element, I think, is actually relatively small in the Bond books. It's not like Smiley's People or anything. It's so not in the foreground. The world of Bond is not one of the bleak, stripped back, concrete feel of the Cold War. Yeah, agree completely. I actually think they're much more end of empire books. so precisely the point when Fleming is writing these books 50s 60s Britain's colonies are breaking away and basically he's created Bond as a compensation Bonds is flying the flag smiting foreigners Kingsley Amis pointed this out he said if you look at Bond and his CIA mate Felix Leiter who is in Goldfinger Bond is cleverer Bond is wittier he's more resourceful he doesn't have the resources of Felix who has the CIA but Bond basically bails Felix out time and time again in the books because basically britain is still the best that's the message but also i mean he actually says at one point in goldfinger some secretary offers to make him tea and he says i don't drink tea tea brought down the british empire you know oh god yeah so actually talking of tea this is a key element of the bond books i think is about what bond buys wears and uses we could spend the next hour listing all the brand names in the bond books the product placement does not begin with the films it's there in the books so to give you just a taste coffee from de brye in new oxford street tip tree little scarlet strawberry jam fortnum's norwegian honey turkish cigarettes from moorlands of grosvenor street a mark ii continental bentley shirts by turnbull and asser even bond's shampoo we are told is pinot elixir shampoo it's just a succession of commodities and brand names and the point is that bond is basically like a walking witch magazine the consumer magazine he's gq gq is very very bond coded so in 1959 you are richer than your parents were or your grandparents were you're more even if you're working class or lower middle class or something and you don't know what to what's the right thing to do how could you look fashionable what how would you look stylish and how will you be accepted by your inverted commas social betters james bond will tell you you copy james bond well the labor leader hugh gateskill said that this was why he read the books he said the combination of sex violence alcohol good food and nice clothes yeah you know exactly it's a little bit of like obviously it's a very different vibe but you know part of the reason people love the devil wears prada is the endless like it's like a fashion show of nice clothes you know we all we all have that with various things i mean obviously for me i don't feel that way about bond but i can see that for men that is the case exactly and you see this with the travel in goldfinger so there's so much time spent at miami airport there are descriptions of bond changing planes hanging out in departure lounges drinking double triple quadruple bourbons at like 4 a.m then there's all the stuff with the french swiss road trip bond is constantly thinking about what he's going to have for lunch for instance there's there's one point where he gives tilly very very strict instructions about exactly how much french sausage he wants the cheese he would like it with and the three bottles or whatever it is a red wine that he plans to drink with it whilst on the road yeah every meal is minutely described categorized but that's the pleasure of it for the reader if you're in 1959 the idea of driving a bentley through france the idea of changing planes at miami airport for most people if you're like living in Barnsley in 1959, that is utterly fantastical.

38:19Dominic Sandbrook: And the thought of doing that is so exciting. And so you actually, you want to hear what the wine is? You want to hear Bond had multiple courses? Of course, yeah. What do you have as a starter? Every single Restless History dinner we've ever had, this is what's going on in the back of your mind, isn't it? What would James Bond order? Exactly, exactly. All right, and then there's the Bond girls. So obviously a huge element. So the Bond books are, I think, the first mass market bestsellers in which sex is an absolutely central element of the hero's character of the plot of the marketing so in his new statesman piece dissing them paul johnson described them as straight pornography and you read them now i mean they're not pornographic but that was how they were perceived i remember when i was a teenager reading the bond books and my granddad saw that i was reading them and he kind of chuckled and like raised his eyebrows looked at you knowingly yeah looked exactly like this is why he's reading because there's only one reason why you would read these books and i think it's very telling that casino royale the first book came out in 1953 the same year as playboy magazine and there's a sense of the war is over you know let's have some fun morals are being relaxed all of this kind of thing yeah the sex elements the sex has a very particular quality you can't not see it we're told again and again that Bond has a cruel, cold, ruthless face typified by his scar and his gray eyes.

39:42And there's so much, I mean, so much, sodomasochistic action that you can't not spot the pattern. So John Lanchester even says Bond books are at heart a series of lavish beatings strung together with thriller elements. I think lavish beatings is maybe taking a bit too far. But you can't help but notice in every encounter that Bond has with women, he always takes on this domineering, somewhat chastising, slightly paternal role. Yeah, of course. They're always, always beneath him in the social hierarchy that he creates as he goes.

40:21Dominic Sandbrook: But you say slightly chastising, Tabby. Yeah, I know. I mean, if you go through it, in Casino Royale, Bond muses to himself that making love to Vesper Lind, his love interest, will, and I quote, it will always have the sweet tang of rape. Ooh. In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, he gets married to Tracy. Tracy says to him, be rough with me, treat me like the lowest whore in creation. Now, you might kind of say, well. Murky waters, Jesus. but this is part of a pattern in The Spy Who Loved Me which I already said was narrated by a woman Vivienne Michelle it's the only Fleming book that is narrated by a woman Fleming gives her some absolutely terrible sort of thoughts and lines Vivienne tells us the readers all women love semi-rape oh my god and I mean not only does Bond dish it out by the way he also receives it so the most famous scene in Casino Royale you must remember this from the film so so well done in the movie with Daniel Craig Daniel Craig and Mads Mikkel So Mads Mikkelsen is playing the chifre who's captured Bond and who basically strips him and beats his genitals with a cane carpet beater.

41:31Dominic Sandbrook: And in Casino Royale, Ian Fleming tells us, just while all the people who are blokes who are wincing will be astounded to hear that Fleming wrote, There came a wonderful period of warmth and languor leading into a sort of sexual twilight where pain turned to pleasure and when hatred and fear of the torturers turned to a masochistic infatuation. I mean, I've never been beaten with a cane in such an environment, but I find it hard to believe that there's ever a moment where that pain would turn to pleasure, however. Can I ask though, at the time, with all the allusions to rape, particularly with the women, were people not very unsettled by that at the time?

42:08Because that seems a very stark sentence in any, like even for the 50s, you know?

42:13Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, some of the critics did point this out. In the late 50s and early 60s, there was a strain in British writing, which is very, very aggressive. towards women and it's um so our assistant producer alfie who's a man of the north will surely enjoy this there's all these books set in the north like room at the top or this sporting life and all these kinds of things they're like working class heroes they're all made into films in the early 60s black and white films for people like albert finney in them and in these films and books there's often a male protagonist who is held down by women in some way and he likes to kind of they're the kind of angry young men and they i mean they're quite free with their fists and the women actually sometimes they're raped sometimes they're beaten up there's so much of this in british fiction of the 1950s and 1960s that i think it's not a coincidence and i think it actually reflects a bigger picture and fleming is part of this so 50s and 60s young women are freer more independent more assertive than ever before in modern history yeah so they're staying in school they're going to university they're going into the professions all of this kind of thing birth control is suddenly a thing as well well birth control will become will become a thing exactly so they're becoming more assertive they're more visible all of this and actually the affluent society is associated with women consumers so older men or young men who maybe don't feel socially confident are probably a bit threatened by this in a way that we're quite familiar with in the 21st century i mean absolutely i was about to say yeah and i think fleming you You know, you read the Bond books, like so many books at the time, and they're basically putting women back in their box.

43:46So it's almost like a reactionary thing, a bit like the Manosphere now, whatever. It's in reaction to...

43:51Dominic Sandbrook: Definitely. I mean, Bond is so reactionary when it comes to his sexual politics. In Casino Royale, he thinks to himself, like he's annoyed that Vesper Lind is getting in the way, and he says women were for recreation on a job they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around. Vesper has been kidnapped by Smirsh, and Bond says to himself, these blithering women who thought they could do a man's work, why the hell couldn't they stay at home and mine their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and their gossip and leave men's work for the men?

44:22Dominic Sandbrook: Oh, Bond. In the Bond books, you don't get any woman who's really a character. No, and I was actually struck by reading Goldfinger how many of the briefly mentioned female characters, the pretty ones, they're always defined in the way by how they look the pretty ones are always giggling at him and smiling at him and delighted to bring him cups of coffee and then there's one uh intelligent woman we assume who works in a bank and we are essentially told that she's plain because bond says sort of thinks to himself she obviously got a first at cambridge and is appalled by that yeah exactly there are basically you can divide women i think it's two categories women with normal names who are just Bond doesn't even notice.

45:06Dominic Sandbrook: And then women with a Bond girl name who he's going to sleep with. So Honey Rider, Kissy Suzuki, and of course, above all. Pussy Galore. But after the break, we're going to be asking a couple of big questions. Is Oddjob the most racist character in all British fiction? Is Pussy Galore really a lesbian? And who was the real Auric Goldfinger? Did you know that psoriatic arthritis may progress over time and could cause permanent joint damage if left untreated?

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47:31Welcome back to The Book Club. I've got a public service announcement for you. If you, our listeners, like expensive wines, bourbon at breakfast, strong bulk and cigarettes, and men with cool faces and disturbing kinks, then we at The Book Club have a massive treat for you. Because every Saturday morning, you will get all of those things completely free in our newsletter, Book Club Notes. There's loads of info about books. There's feedback, thoughts from Dominic and I, you can let us know what you think you can give our books a rating so in order to join this pleasure island sign up at thebookclubhq.com right on that note let's get into goldfinger what is the story

48:14Dominic Sandbrook: behind it in fleming begins work at golden eye on the book in january 1958 he's published five bond books at this point and the sixth dr no is about to come out and the inspiration i think is very simple fleming likes gold simple as that he's fascinated by as goldfinger is he collects spanish doubloons and you can see why somebody living in the caribbean you can know looking out over the spanish main would be like oh i'll collect old doubloons he's he's interested in smuggling and shipwrecks and all that sort of thing he's got a gold tip pen he's actually got a gold plated typewriter which is just for show really he doesn't really use it i still think that insists upon itself it does but there's loads of other elements on the tabby from the rest of his from his life generally?

48:56The sadly extended golf scene. So six months earlier, Fleming had played a golf tournament at Berkshire Golf Club. And he uses this as the background for the scene in which Goldfinger and Bond play golf for hours. And then there's Pussy Galore. She is based on Fleming's lover in Jamaica, Blanche Blackwell, who we mentioned earlier. Though the name Pussy comes from a friend of his wife, Anne, which I'm sure Anne was delighted by. But then even the plane scene has a precedent. So Oddjob is sucked out of the plane window. In the film, it's Goldfinger that's sucked out of the plane window. Fleming himself was a nervous flyer and he had read about this happening to a US tourist in the Middle East and he obviously took note of it.

49:42And I think you could definitely argue that there are times where you can see Fleming has gone a bit too far with his research. He puts it in too meticulously. like a lot of journalists turn novelists. He loves these big info dumps. It's kind of a weakness of his prose for me. There's a lot of telling not showing. He wants you to know that he's done his reading. So for instance, Colonel Smithers gives Bond this big lecture about gold that goes on forever. And it is so intricate and it's so in depth. But then the slightly clever thing he does is that Bond is bored by that as well. So I guess he's playing with the info dump.

50:18Dominic Sandbrook: but of all the elements that are drawn from real life obviously the most visible one is the title which is the name of the villain and that's auric goldfinger so auric au gold obviously there was a real goldfinger and he was a modernist architect called erno goldfinger who was a hungarian jewish emigre who had moved to paris after the first world war and then moved to london and became established in london and goldfinger was a very well-known architect. He was a Marxist. His stuff was seen as very avant-garde. And he was best known in Britain for Trellick Tower, which you can see, I think, when you come in the train to Paddington from the West.

50:56Dominic Sandbrook: So Trellick Tower, this brutalist building, very well known, a kind of West London landmark in some ways, for a time very unfashionable. Now, I think much more fashionable. So Goldfinger was quite a controversial architect. He was very difficult. He was very humorless. He his hard work and he was married into the Blackwell family. So Fleming's golf partner, John Blackwell, was Blanche's cousin. And John Blackwell was also the cousin of Goldfinger's wife. Now, it's often said that Fleming hated Goldfinger because he didn't like his architecture and he thought he had despoiled Hampstead. When I looked into it, Fleming didn't really care about architecture.

51:33Dominic Sandbrook: What actually happened was this bloke he was playing golf with said to him, god my relative goldfinger is a monster of a man and the name fleming just thought what a brilliant name for a villain it's a perfect fit for this story he used the name and then when the book was improved stages publishers got cold feet you can't really name the book after this bloke and uh fleming there was a big lawyer's correspondence and fleming was outraged and he said tell goldfinger that if he complains we will put a slip in every book a kind of erratum slip correcting the name Goldfinger to Goldprick and explaining why.

52:10Dominic Sandbrook: Basically. That's Riz. Not surprisingly, Goldfinger did not pursue it. Yeah. And actually, he doesn't seem to have been that cross about it. They sent him loads of complimentary copies of the book. It's always fun to be immortalised in prose. But I think that seems to have been the only slightly difficult part of the process of writing the book. Otherwise, it was a bit of a breeze. Fleming has a very set routine. It actually sounds like a delightful routine. He writes for three hours in the morning. Then he has a lovely long lunch. Then another hour in the afternoon. And he writes about 2 ,000 words a day and almost never rereads or revises.

52:45I think if I was an author, I'd like to work like that.

52:47Dominic Sandbrook: Do you know what? This is a classic journalist turned novelist thing. Because you've got quick deadlines, I guess. Yeah, and you get used to it when you're writing for the newspapers. Fleming would have had to turn around copy very quickly. And I think as well, if you're used to writing for the newspapers, you're less precious about your prose. Totally. And get it done, move on. And that's how Fleming writes the Bond books. It only takes him about three months. But he tells a friend that this is his last Bond book. So it's a bit like we discussed with our Sherlock Holmes episode, Arthur Conan Doyle said this.

53:14He's run out of ideas. He said, I shall never be able to give him 70 ,000 words again. The book is published a year later in March 1959 with a cover designed by Fleming himself. And it's a skull holding a rose in its teeth and it goes straight to the bestseller list. The reviews are good, but a lot of critics remark on the fact that his books are getting increasingly fantastical i mean you can imagine why you must just start running out of ideas the observer mr fleming seems to be leaving realism further and further behind and developing only in the direction of an atomic sophisticated sapper so this is the guy that wrote the bulldog drum and thrillers in the 1920s but despite what he said fleming does go on to write more bond books he writes five more novels and these actually get darker and darker reflecting Fleming's deteriorating health.

54:03He's a massive drinker. He's a massive smoker. And then he has a heart attack at the age of only 53 in 1961 and then dies of another heart attack in August 1964. And I don't want to be flippant at all, but that's quite a Bond way to go.

54:19Dominic Sandbrook: A Bond way to go. Heavy drinking, heavy smoking. Yeah, I mean... Lived a good life, but a short one. Yes, I guess so. I mean, if a good life is like wearing a lot of bow ties and dressing gowns and smoking a lot, which I know actually is your definition of a good life, Sabi. When I write my Bond-Akata crossover, this is how I shall live. It's how you live now. So the film of Goldfinger came out actually just a month later, and it was a massive, massive hit. I think only two other Bond films. When you adjust for inflation, only two Bond films have made more money. They were Skyfall and Thunderball.

54:55really skyfall yeah skyfall i'm pleased to hear that good well skyfall is a brilliant film no one

55:01Dominic Sandbrook: can sort of dispute that skyfall is a great film yeah and goldfinger establishes the template for the series so it has the shirley bassy theme it has the gadgets it has the mad henchman odd job it has bond making sort of doing witticisms while he kills people it has the girl killed by the villain he's such a psychopath honestly it's like you just killed a man why are you punning tabby i think this is mad from you i think it's completely self-explanatory why you're a psycho that's the film let's just concentrate on the book the opening sets the tone perfectly james bond with two double bourbons inside him sat in the final departure lounge of miami airport and thought about life and death and he's he's brooding isn't he he thinks to himself well it's my job to kill people i don't really like doing it i do it as well as i can it's his duty to be is cool about death as a surgeon if it happened it happened regret was unprofessional worse it was death watch beetle in the soul and as so often fleming loves to tell us how hard and cruel bond is so we then are told he smiled to himself a hard cold cruel smile yeah but i actually think it's interesting and something i hadn't expected to find in the bond books bond has feelings in this book he has conscience and he actually even feels guilt so in the opening chapter he keeps telling himself that the Mexican that he killed had deserved to die but he can't help thinking that when he killed him life had gone out of the body so quickly so utterly that Bond had almost seen it come out of his mouth as it does in the shape of a bird in Haitian primitives I mean that's that's quite a beautiful image in a way it is yeah and then Bond feels bad doesn't he and then he feels really bad about it you know he says you're stale tired of having to be tough you want to change you've seen too much death you want a slice of life easy soft high and then even more strikingly he actually feels really guilty about the death of jill masterton which i was actually amazed by because he feels guilty for he didn't kill her but because he was a bit flippant and he had a bit of fun in conning goldfinger he did inadvertently result in her death he says bond closed his eyes tight fighting with a wave of mental nausea more death more blood on his hands this time as a result of a careless gesture a piece of bravado that had led to 24 hours of ecstasy with a beautiful girl who had taken his fancy and in the end rather more than his fancy yeah and he feels really bad about it doesn't he says he is going to pin this murder on goldfinger whatever he does but goes on this death he would not be able to excuse as being part of the job this death he would have to live with so actually when people say of the films well i wish they would get back to the bond of the books and make him harder and less flippant i mean this is a bond who is actually troubled by guilt who is introspective who is moping morbid it's daniel craig's bond he is daniel craig's bond he's a man who was sitting on his own in the departure lounge of an airport with a load of drinks staring into his drinks and looking very miserable yeah you're completely right or like that bit when he's convalescing in um i think it's casino royale and he's like, oh, I'm just exhausted.

58:16I've had enough of this all. But the fact that the book kicks off with Bond necking two double bourbons is absolutely no accident. The amount he drinks is extraordinary. And it's the case in all the books, isn't it? Because in 2013, an article in British Medical Journal, based on the books, put his average intake at 92 units a week.

58:39Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, that's a lot. And then in Goldfinger, he has almost 100 units, including 18 units at a single dinner with Goldfinger. And by the way, he has a double gin and tonic before that. I've forgotten the double gin and tonic. So it's a double gin and tonic. Then he has, Goldfinger gets out a bottle of German white wine, Hock. Yes. And then he gets out a bottle of Mouton Rothschild 1947. And the key thing here, they're just for Bond. Goldfinger doesn't drink. And the mad thing, what does Bond do afterwards, Tabby? He drives himself home. Yes. Yes. Road safety not high on his agenda. How long does he get home?

59:14Yeah, but then even, this is mad. Even when he's on a plane, which has been hijacked by Goldfinger and he's like facing imminent death. He is strapped to his chair. There is no way out. You know what he does? He has a stiff bourbon and a smoke. Yeah, of course he does. And lo and behold, everything works out fine. Anyway, the medical research's verdict. Bond is at considerable risk of developing alcoholic liver disease. Cirrhosis impotence, that wouldn't work for Bond at all.

59:43Dominic Sandbrook: No wonder there's no talk of birth control. Bond is actually impotent. He's actually impotent. We conclude that James Bond was unlikely to be able to stir his drinks, even if he would have wanted to, because of likely alcohol-induced tremor. That's the thing, when Bond levels his pistol at you, his hand is shaking so much. But of course, Goldfinger doesn't drink or smoke. No, that means he's a baddie. Of course, this is an absolute giveaway for Ian Fleming, that Goldfinger is a bad sword. That's how you feel about people, to be fair. Totally. If they don't drink, I don't want to know them. Yeah.

1:00:15Dominic Sandbrook: So Goldfinger, there are loads of signs, actually, that Goldfinger is a bad sort. First of all, he's a foreigner. He is a British citizen, but he is a Latvian émigré, and this is poor from Goldfinger. He can't help it, but it is poor nonetheless. Yeah, and also he does the Jay Gatsby thing of dressing too perfectly. Well, he does this brilliantly in the film, in the film when he's in his golf clothes. Yeah, it's hilarious. He doesn't know how to behave because he's a foreigner. he cheats at cards and golf he's over the top in every conceivable way um he's hideously ugly isn't he tabby yeah all fleming villains are ugly so this is the description of him everything was out of proportion goldfinger was short not more than five feet tall and on top of the thick body and blunt peasant legs were set almost directly into the shoulders a huge and it seemed exactly round head it was as if goldfinger had been put together with bits of other people's bodies Nothing seemed to belong.

1:01:08Dominic Sandbrook: I've got a very round head myself, so I find this a little bit too close to home, to be honest. Oh, no. Is this triggering? Although there's a massive difference, Tabby. Goldfinger, unlike me, is a prize boar. You're a big drinker. Thanks. I mean, the number of times you said this, people are absolutely going to believe it. And you don't like golf, to be fair. I don't like golf. Goldfinger has no sense of humour. He's a massive boar. He's always lecturing Bond. Even when he's about to kill Bond, he's wittering on about the Latin definition of pain or whatever it is. my favourite line growing up because even though I hadn't watched the movie yet my dad would always go to my brother and I you expect me to talk and we go no Mr Bond I expect you to die no but that's not in the book no exactly so when I came and when I met Goldfinger in the book I thought god there's absolutely no drama or theatre to him what about Oddjob are you a fan of Oddjob am I a fan of Oddjob of his work I mean you can't be a fan of Oddjob in this book can you he's nothing but strange contorted thumbs and bowler hats and and also i mean bond is just i mean he's a long way from jeeves put it that way he can't speak for one thing he's monstrous he always turns up exactly when you don't want him to he's quite frightening so this is how he's described bond had had a look at the chauffeur he was a chunky flat-faced japanese or more probably korean with a wild almost mad glare and dramatically slanting eyes that belonged in a japanese film rather than in rolls royce on a sunny afternoon in kent murky waters these he's got these hands with no fingernails with this kind of hard ridge which means he can kill you with a chop goldfinger gets him to smash up his house to demonstrate how hard he is then goldfinger gives odd job his cat because the cat's transgressed yeah and then at one point he threatens to give tilly to him for dinner he does so that all sounds quite dodgy yeah but it does get actually worse because goldfinger then gives respond a huge lecture about why he employs our job and he says the koreans have no feeling for human life that's why the japanese employed them as guards in the war which is just tosh i mean also by the way he confused the two bond confused the two when trying to work out who our job was they are the cruelest most ruthless people in the world my staff are hand-picked for these qualities and then he goes on to say when they want women women are brought down from london well remunerated for their services and sent back the women are not much to look at but they are white and that is all the koreans ask to submit the white race to the grossest indignities there are sometimes accidents but money is an effective winding sheet you're like jeez this is strong stuff but bond bond is totally unmoved by this because later on bond says to himself he's looking forward to putting quote odd job and any other korean firmly in his place which in bond's estimation was rather lower than apes in the mammalian hierarchy if i was a korean i'd be pretty offended by all that you would be exactly yeah now you are you're not korean but you are a woman i am a woman and the ladies in goldfinger do you feel like this is a nuanced and sensitive portrait of the fairer sex tabby the fairer sex that's such a james bond thing to say by the way yeah i mean for god's sake um do i no not really i mean you can't be too puritanical about these things right like i'm not going to say that james bond isn't a fun read but every woman in this book is a sex object for example when bonds first sees tilly masterton driving in france he is immediately preoccupied with her beautiful profile and her beautiful leg coming out of the car and loses himself in a fantasy about the two of them meeting over lunch driving to south together and that will lead to yeah yeah exactly it's pussy galore though that i think is the real problem she's introduced very late she gets less much less page time than tilly she's the only female gang leader in america she's a trapeze artist who founded a team called pussy galore and the acrobats no they were called the abracats you thought there was a typo it was actually a brilliant pun oh this is what i mean enough with the punning but then they retrain as cat burglars it grew into a gang of outstanding ruthlessness it is a lesbian organization which now calls itself the cement mixes can i just say when you first meet Pussy Glore, she's really cool.

1:05:22She's always, you know, it's a room full of men and it's her and she's really classy and elegant. She's always mouthing off against them all. But she's allowed to be mouthy and, you know, outspoken because what he's doing is he's stressing her lesbianism again and again and again. And Bond secretly loves it because he sees it as a challenge.

1:05:41Dominic Sandbrook: The passage here is hilarious. Bond liked the look of her. He felt the sexual challenge that all beautiful lesbians have for men. I mean he was amused by the uncompromising attitude that said to Goldfinger in the room all men are bastards and cheats don't try any masculine hocus on me I don't go for it I'm in a separate league he realises Pussy Galore is a lesbian and it's at this point that we have the answer to the mystery that has puzzled the reader throughout the book which is why won't Tilly Masterton get into bed with James Bond Tabby what is the answer Tilly Masterton is a lesbian who fancies Pussy Galore so that is that's the only reason bond can't have a woman is because uh it's because she's a lesbian and now bond gives us i was about to say he's excellent but actually i'm going to rephrase that yeah his insane views about post-war feminism bond came to the conclusion that tillie 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 i'm laughing because i can't cry a consequence of giving votes to women and sex equality.

1:06:48As a result of 50 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 were. 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. It's just insane.

1:07:18Dominic Sandbrook: The good news is Tilly's going to get her comeuppance for her mixed up hormones. Surely she'll get to give Bond a slap or kill Goldfinger, surely. No. Tilly disgraces herself because in the final shootout at Fault Knox, Bond says, come with me, come on, you fool, or whatever. And she says, no, I want to stay close to pussy. And I'll be safe with her. And as a result, of course, Tilly pays a very heavy price for staying close to pussy, as it were. Rather than to penis.

1:07:48Dominic Sandbrook: it's that'd be unbelievable from you tilly is dead and we've spent a lot of the book with tilly but also she she dies like that she achieves nothing in the novel in the book except to sort of get in bond's way or look moony eyed a pussy galore and with one frisbee throw of his bowler hat odd job just gets her and bond's epitaph for her poor little bitch she didn't think much of men this is what happens so anyway um people that aren't watching and are listening she's got my head in my hands obviously we're having a laugh at some of the elements that haven't aged well i will say i think there's some excellent writing i think fleming is a much better writer than he's given i genuinely do i think it's i think it's well and amusingly written for a thriller of this kind it's no yeah it is a brilliantly written thriller i think there are some really nice moments though the moments when bond is is being contemplative i think a very feming is a skillful writer i think he's very good at communicating kind of sort of a sense of looming danger so there's a bit when the car with goldfinger and odd job is coming closer to the and bond looks out and he says the six pairs of eyes the eyes of the two men and the great twin orbs of the car seem to be looking straight through the little window and into bond's eyes like that it's kind of like they're coming closer towards him he's quite a cinematic writer he builds tension exquisitely and i think there is he's a really good in character so my favorite bit of the entire my favorite line of the whole book it's just a small thing it's when bond goes for another actually very boring lecture at the bank of england by colonel smithers and fleming says of colonel smithers colonel smithers looked exactly like somebody who would be called colonel smithers that is such a nice line you know exactly you know exactly what he means and the cliffhangers are great i mean the cliffhanger when bond has been captured by goldfinger and goldfinger does this sort of you know the once is happenstance twice is coincidence and then just says our job the pressure room and you're like yeah oh my god and you can't wait to find out what's going to happen next yeah it is it is very well done but there's one scene in particular that you're a very big fan of isn't there oh yeah the fort knox so when they're arriving at fort knox and uh they think that basically uh they put a nerve agent in the water supply goldfinger's plan at this point by the way is absolutely deranged he's going to use an atomic warhead to blow up the doors of fort knox to steal all the gold and he's poisoned everybody in the town he thinks with this nazi nerve agent that they put in the water the scene when they enter the town is like something from a cold war science fiction film or something you know that everybody the cars had crashed everybody's lying in the streets now the train was moving at walking pace into the town and everywhere down every street on every sidewalk there were the sprawling figures singly in clumps in rocking chairs on the porches in the middle of intersections where the traffic lights still and hurriedly ticked off their colored signals in cars that had managed to pull up and others that had smashed into shop windows death dead people everywhere and then a wonderful line I think.

1:10:50Dominic Sandbrook: No movement, no sound, save the click of the murderer's iron feet as his train slid through the graveyard. That last line is really nice writing. It's really, and there is a bit I really liked in that passage, which is where he talks about the woman's washing hanging on the line, but she's just slumped. That's right, yes. Next to it. I think it's really well observed with a kind of journalist's eye for detail and some really lovely prose. This is not like just generic formulaic thriller writing it's a little bit it's more ambitious how does it end how does it end now tabby what do you make of the this is my favorite scene of the book because it is absolute ian fleming bingo yeah would you like to describe to the listeners surprise surprise bond wins the day to use his own metaphor and george kills the dragon this is the very last scene of the book and he is facing his most formidable adversary of all namely pussy galore her lesbianism.

1:11:49This is the one thing he has yet to conquer. So obviously at this point, some readers will shudder. But I know, Dominic, you find this scene absolutely hilarious. So would you like to do the honours?

1:12:01Dominic Sandbrook: Bon looked down into the deep blue violet eyes that were no longer hard, imperious. He bent and kissed them lightly. He said, they told me you only liked women. And by the way, Pussy Galore up to this point is really, she is cool. You know, she's hard. she stands her ground but she says i never met a man before the toughness came back into her voice 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 as fast as my uncle i was 12 that's not so good james you ought to be able to guess that we're so that tragic devastating revelation the kind of revelation around which whole books are written right yeah there's a william faulkner book in that devastating and moving story.

1:12:49Fleming's response.

1:12:50Dominic Sandbrook: Bond smiled down into the pale, beautiful face. He said, all you need is a course of TLC. And then she says to him, what's TLC? And he says, tend to love and care. Then there's a little bit of action, which I probably won't read out because - I think it's for the best. Best not. But the very last line of the book is such Ian Fleming bingo. His mouth came down ruthlessly on hers. Yeah. And that is, I find that, I mean, it's like Ian Fleming is absolutely leaning into the caricature of a Bond book. Bond is converting this. He's chuckling to himself at Golden Eye, isn't he? But also the funny thing is, Ian Fleming, of course, is not chuckling to himself.

1:13:28Dominic Sandbrook: We're laughing at it and finding it amusing because it's so dated. Ian Fleming, I think. Is aroused. Yes, he is. He's absolutely serious about this. He thinks this is an incredibly erotically charged scene. and the fact that Pussy has just confessed to the fact that she was abused by our uncle when she was 12 Ian Fleming has just treated that as this throwaway entertaining plot point it's so not the point that basically sets her up for seduction by Bond yeah anyway shall we give this a mark what we could mark this in interminable games of golf or in reinforced killer hats we could my personal view I don't care whether you agree or not you don't care either way no that's very Bond behaviour yeah is that I think we should market in vodka martinis, shake and not stir.

1:14:15Dominic Sandbrook: But is that too predictable, Tabby? I don't know. I think we could lean into it. And Anichi, in a way, in a way, it's subversive. Because in this book, Bond never once has a vodka martinis, shake and not stir. So true. He just has double bourbons, doesn't he? He just has double bourbons. So go for it. I'll go first. I'm going to give it eight. It's not high art, of course. But I enjoyed it much more than I thought. I last read the Bond books about, I don't know, 15 years ago, effectively for work. so I read them in a sort of very yeah you had to kind of thing sort of efficient joyless way and I didn't really luxuriate in them and I read this on holiday and I just found a tremendous laugh actually yeah I think the funny thing about it is they compared with the modern thriller there are kind of longers there are moments where you're like where is this going with the gulf or something it's very characterful it's very distinctive kind of writing it has all Fleming's obsessions but I actually enjoyed it more than the 39 steps so John Buchan's descendant and biographer Ursula Buchan is a listener to this podcast and she will be appalled to hear me say that I preferred Goldfinger to the 39 steps because you know Buchan doesn't have a tremendous sense of humor in his books whereas Fleming I think they are funny I mean yeah you're laughing at them half the time I mean I think characterful is the perfect choice of word it is so characterful you're never bored apart from the golf game you're never bored it's it is a tremendously fun read like when i finished it i said i'd love to go on and read the next couple it's so much fun it didn't like change my life i didn't think it was a yeah if it did yeah something would be seriously wrong with you seriously wrong but you know i didn't think the writing was amazing i you know i i wasn't i wasn't so invested in james bond as a character but i thought i thoroughly enjoyed it but it really goes no deeper than that i'm definitely gonna have to dock a point for the for the hormones stuff okay and uh i don't know sort of james bond curing pussy galore's lesbianism but because it's great fun i'm gonna give this seven out of ten seven higher than i was expecting tabby you've convinced me but what am i going to be reading well dominic the bell jar by sylvia plath white knights by fyodor dostoevsky the shining by stephen king the catcher in the rye by jd selinger master and commander by patrick o 'brien and to kill a mockingbird by harper lee so much to come exciting can't wait all right i'm off to um i'm trying to think of some james but some james bond related yeah but you're you're frightened that if you say one more thing you'll never come back from the cancellation this time you'll have to make you'll have to make like one of those soppy apologies online like a hostage video i've let myself down i've let the podcast down i've let tabby down i haven't been true to my values and actually this is the one goal hunger podcast with the majority female audience so don't tell them that now we've got none left all right on that bombshell thank you very much everybody and goodbye bye

1:17:25Dominic Sandbrook: Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light, and slowly the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season, you create it layer by layer until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross. Thank you.