35. Goldfinger: The Ultimate James Bond Novel

Why did James Bond appeal to 1950s Britain? Is Goldfinger hopelessly out of date? And, who really inspired the titular villain? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of Goldfinger, and the world it was born of. Download the Klarna app to stay on top of your money, so you can think about, well, anything else. Klarna balance account required to receive cashback points. Limitations, terms, and conditions apply. Exclusions apply. Learn more at https://www.klarna.com/uk/buyer-protection-description/. For analysis, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes, introduced weekly by Tabby or Dominic. Sign up at: https://www.thebookclubhq.com/ Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: James Clayden Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:58Speaker 04

  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?

• 2:11Speaker 03

  You know, I used to spend a lot of time rewriting my favorite books so that I would get the endings that I'd always hoped for.

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• 3:11Speaker 04

  She whispered almost to herself.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  He killed my sister. You knew her. Jill Masterton.

• 3:18Speaker 04

  Bond said fiercely, what happened?

• 3:20Speaker 03

  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.

• 3:29Speaker 04

  Christ, why?

• 3:30Speaker 03

  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, then they'd die. Afterwards, they're washed down by the Korean with resin or something. Goldfinger gives them $1,000 and sends them away.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  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?

• 4:15Speaker 03

  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.

• 5:00Speaker 04

  And Tabby, you are?

• 5:02Speaker 03

  I'm Tilly Masterton.

• 5:03Speaker 04

  Ill-fated lesbian, yeah.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  And if you've seen the film, you will remember, which I did last night, actually, I rewatched 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 had become so famous in the Bond films, are these kind of images of women with golden faces.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, the title sequence, yeah.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  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?

• 5:48Speaker 04

  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 golf with Goldfinger or whatever it is. I can live without that.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  But the point is, this is very, very much home turf for you.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  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. And he really is the ultimate post-war male fantasy figure. He's the idol. He is the, 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 was becoming the affluent society, sort of rich consumer society. And Bond becomes the symbol of, of that, I think.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  He's a sort of compensation for the loss of empire, but he's also a fantasy figure.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  It's comforting, I suppose, you know, isn't it? You know, allows you to believe that you're sort of still a great nation with...

• 6:50Speaker 04

  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 York kind of affluent world of the 1950s and 60s.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  He's Britain's very own lovable Patrick Bateman.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  Well, Patrick Bateman is the kind of person who would want to be James Bond.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  With similar attitudes to women, to be honest.

• 7:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're not wrong there, actually. Casino Royale 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. And by the time Fleming died, the Eon film series, so that's the sort of canonical film series was up and running. And that, 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 the sort of embodiment of masculinity, of cool, of courage, of, of social ease, of sex appeal, all things that are there in Goldfinger, which we'll be talking about.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  It's why the, 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.

• 8:01Speaker 04

  Exactly right. 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, 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 spinoffs, there's the Young Bond books, there are video games. And as you were saying, Tabby, there's a huge debate right now. I mean, there's been those 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 have bought the rights to the Bond franchise.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  So Amazon spent $1 billion on the film rights in 2025. And 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, 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.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  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 favorites. 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, is that right?

• 9:41Speaker 03

  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 8:00 AM in the morning. And I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it. As in, 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.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  And it's certainly a book of its time.

• 10:27Speaker 04

  It is, it is.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  There's no overlooking that, but I did enjoy it.

• 10:32Speaker 04

  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.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  Did you? See, I didn't. I didn't. I thought maybe that had been overplayed. It hasn't, by the way.

• 10:45Speaker 04

  Do you not think it, you think it hasn't? I think it has.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  You know, there aren't genuine sex scenes. There are the allusions to the fact that Bond is having sex with people are frequent.

• 10:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. So why don't you, I mean, obviously a lot of people will be familiar with the story, but it's, do you want to give people a quick summary?

• 11:02Speaker 03

  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 is 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 double O is unique. There aren't many of them. It means that they have a license to kill. And he is changing planes in Miami after having completed a mission.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  When he meets the billionaire, Oric 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, and, 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 investigate Goldfinger because they suspect him of smuggling gold out of Britain. And being an agent for the Soviet counterintelligence group, Smersh.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  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, Oddjob, called Oddjob by Goldfinger because he does, you know.

• 12:46Speaker 04

  Oddjobs.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, strange and sinister oddjobs for him. Bond then trails into 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. And what he's going to do is he's going to use nerve gas and an atomic warhead to break into Fort Knox.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  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.

• 13:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Surely one of the most famous Bond girls.

• 13:51Speaker 04

  A memorable name, shall we say.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  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 need to talk about Ian Fleming, because they're basically the same, aren't they? But the same insofar as Bond is kind of the man that Ian Fleming wishes he was. I think Fleming said that Bond was his own pillow fantasy.

• 14:13Speaker 04

  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.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  See, that's, that's quite, that's quite self-knowing.

• 14:26Speaker 04

  Self-knowing, exactly.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  I didn't really credit Ian Fleming with that.

• 14:30Speaker 04

  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.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  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. 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.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Do you think then in Bond, there's an element of the man that Fleming kind of imagined or hoped his father?

• 15:28Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Was, because he never got the reality. So you project greatness.

• 15:33Speaker 04

  Definitely. I think his father and his brother, who we'll come to actually.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:37Speaker 04

  So Ian grows up in Hampstead, he goes to Eton, like his father and his older brother, Peter. He was good at sport, but academically he was completely useless. And his mother basically said, get into the, well, they had a thing called the army class, which trains you to go to Sandhurst, office of training.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  He's Prince Harry.

• 15:55Speaker 04

  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.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  It's the rite of passage for every old Etonian.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  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 stockbroking, 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.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  He literally is Bond.

• 16:46Speaker 04

  Completely he is. He went and explored the Amazon in the 1930s. He wrote a bestselling book about it in 1933 and then he became this intrepid foreign correspondent. And basically all Ian 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.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  That's terrible. That's, that's every younger brother's, every younger sibling's worst nightmare, isn't it?

• 17:08Speaker 04

  Of course. You're a younger sibling, are you not?

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Well, I'm a twin, so 10 minutes.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  By about 10 minutes.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  I have 10 minutes worth of bitterness and envy, literally in every, in every fibre of my day.

• 17:18Speaker 04

  I, by the way, am 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 and necessarily drinking, fantasizing about beating girls.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  There was a big leap that you made there, but we'll go with it and, 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.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  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, he'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, you know, secret shenanigans. Were it not for the Bond books, none of us would have remembered him. I mean, his, his brother, who did remarkable things, is not remembered because he's not the author of James Bond.

• 18:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're right. I think, you know, Ian Fleming had a very good war, but no one would write books about him. And actually after the war, you know, 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 boy's own 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. His estate, because he's bought an estate in the Second World War in Jamaica called GoldenEye.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  I wouldn't have put him and Noel Coward together, but I enjoy envisaging that combination.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  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.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:42Speaker 04

  There's almost certainly a silk dressing gown at some stage. 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 Window, 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 pretty 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.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  Simon describes him as a parody of a less talented, younger brother.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  He's Bertie Worcester.

• 20:23Speaker 04

  There was a slight element of, yeah, hanging around and, and somebody bringing him. Yeah, exactly.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  But there is one way in which he most certainly is not Bertie Worcester. And that is the fact that he's an enormous womanizer.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  Like James Bond. So he's been having this sadomasochistic affair with this queen of society. A very posh woman called Anne Charteras, and 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.

• 21:09Speaker 04

  That's a twist.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  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 GoldenEye, Fleming decides to start work on something that he's always wanted to do. And do 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.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  This is an inspiration for you.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  Marital bliss all round. I know. Why do you think I do this show?

• 21:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  And then, so he writes 2,000 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, 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, you, your estimation of it rises. This is what Fleming said in an interview from 1963. I have no message for suffering humanity.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  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?

• 22:40Speaker 04

  I think money changed hands is probably what he said.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  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 comitérn, left wingers. They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airports, aeroplanes or beds. It's an interesting statement that, but you've got to, you've got to respect his honesty, you know? I, we said, we've said about books before, you know? I wish he didn't try to be something that it wasn't. At least he knows.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  He knows exactly what he's doing.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  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. He's pretty prolific. I'm, I was impressed by that detail. So these are written at golden eye over the first few months of every year. So Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Diamonds Are Forever, From Russia With Love and Doctor No. And they pretty much all follow the same formula. This must be familiar to anyone that has watched a Bond movie.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  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.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  But this is sort of the point, right? This formula.

• 24:18Speaker 04

  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.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  In our, our sort of sister show, The Rest Is Entertainment discussed this and, 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 gadgets or whatever. And it's, it's the same reason that, you know, Jack Reacher books do well. People like a formula.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  Completely, they do, completely. I mean, the best person on this is, believe it or not, Umberto Eco.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  So hard to believe.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  The author of The Name of the Rose, who was an Italian semiologist and literary critic, very distinguished. Umberto Eco wrote a study of the Bond books in, I think the very early eighties. And he said, when you read the Bond 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 realises his objective. I think that's absolutely right. You're watching the pieces fall into place in the approved way you, you are.

• 25:36Speaker 04

  You know, Fleming did something mad and it went off piece, 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 Eco loved the books or at least respected them. Some critics right from the start hated the Bond books. So 1958, the literary scholar Bernard Bergonzzi 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 Doctor No. And he said, it was the nastiest book I've ever read.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 26:18Speaker 04

  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.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Imagine what he'd say about American Psycho. 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 Amis.

• 26:59Speaker 04

  He loved them. He loved them.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  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, it's, it's often the case with books that we do on the show, but it's absolutely true. Look at the afterlife of these books. And then when John Le Carre 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, oh, my, my spy novels are of a whole league above.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  Well, Le Carre hated Bond. Yeah, hated Bond.

• 27:38Speaker 03

  So he wrote this article slagging Bond off in 1981. And then Amis 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.

• 27:57Speaker 04

  I noticed how you, you basically shouted that because you were so excited.

• 28:01Speaker 03

  It's so rare that I get to swear on the show.

• 28:04Speaker 04

  Well, calm down, Sophie.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  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. So 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.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  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 and Albert R. Broccoli's daughter is still the producer.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, Barbara Broccoli.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, Barbara Broccoli, the producer behind the shows. And they buy the rights and then they bring out the first Bond film, Doctor No in 1962. It's not like a global sensation at this point, but it does really well and it later explodes.

• 29:15Speaker 04

  Well, Goldfinger is the film that makes it.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Goldfinger is the film that makes it and actually turns Sean Connery into a superstar as well.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  But at this juncture, Dominic, I'm going to give you three fascinating James Bond facts.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, please do. Yeah, I'd love to hear them.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  In 1965 alone, Bond books sold more than 27 million copies worldwide. A 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. 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.

• 30:07Speaker 04

  Why did the Bond books strike such a chord? First of all, we've already talked about the model. Spy stories have a long history, the 39 steps.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  Uh, there's a lot of Richard Hannah and James Bond. They're what are critics called clubland heroes. So people are used to the, um, the idea of a hero who basically swans around in Mayfair and St 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.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  Pencil moustache, that's what I imagine.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  In the hero or the villains?

• 30:40Speaker 03

  Both.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  Okay, right. Wow, that's a twist. So Bond is a lot to Richard Hannah and also to a character from the 1920s called Bulldog Drummond, who is nastier and harder than Hannah. And Bulldog Drummond, um, 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.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  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 Fettis in Scotland and then he joined the Royal Navy. Everything we know about Bond, it's sometimes said that Bond is classless and I just think that's totally wrong. Bond wears Savile Row tailored suits, he wears handmade shirts, he likes casinos, he likes going skiing. He opens a wine list and he recognizes every name.

• 31:44Speaker 03

  I mean, how could he possibly be classless?

• 31:46Speaker 04

  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 had 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, you, I think there's lots of people who like James Bond will recognise this. You study James Bond, you think, well, if I am 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

• 32:28Speaker 04

  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. 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, the 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 already mentioned Goldfinger is a Smersh agent. That's Soviet counterintelligence group from the forties called Schmiet Spionen, set up by Stalin. Death to Spies is what Schmiet Spionen means, apparently.

• 33:10Speaker 03

  Oh, that's great.

• 33:11Speaker 04

  A nice bit Russian for you, Tabby. But the Cold War element, I think, is actually relatively small in the Bond books.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  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.

• 33:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, agree completely, completely. I actually think they're much more end of empire books.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:34Speaker 04

  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. Bond is flying the flag, smiting foreigners. Kingsley Amis pointed this out. He said, if you look at Bond and a 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.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  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?

• 34:15Speaker 04

  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 that's there in the books. So to give you just a taste, coffee from Debray in New Oxford Street, Tip Tree, Little Scarlet's Strawberry Jam, Fortnum's Norwegian Honey, Turkish cigarettes from Morelands of Grosvenor Street, a Mark II Continental Bentley, shirts by Turnbull and Asser, even Bond's shampoo, we are told, is Pino 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.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  He's GQ.

• 34:58Speaker 04

  The GQ is very, very Bond-coded. So in 1959, you are richer than your parents were or your grandparents were, even if you're working class or lower middle class or something. And you don't know what's the right thing to do. How could you look fashionable? 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.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  Well, the Labour 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.

• 35:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  There's a little bit of like, obviously, it's a very different vibe, but you know, part of the reason that people love The Devil Wears Prada is the endless, like, it's like a fashion show of nice clothes.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  I did not see that comparison.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  But 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.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  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 4am. 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 of a red wine that he plans to drink with it whilst on the road.

• 36:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  Every meal is minutely described, categorised.

• 36:33Speaker 04

  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. 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's he have as a starter?

• 36:58Speaker 03

  Every single rest of history dinner we've ever had. This is what's going on in the back of your mind, isn't it?

• 37:02Speaker 04

  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 grandad saw that I was reading them and he kind of chuckled and like raised his eyebrows.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  Looked at you knowingly.

• 37:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, looked exactly like this is why he's reading them. 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.

• 37:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:59Speaker 04

  The sex elements.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  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 grey eyes. And there's so much, I mean, so much pseudo-masochistic 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, you know?

• 38:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course.

• 38:44Speaker 03

  They're always, always beneath him in the social hierarchy that he creates as he goes.

• 38:51Speaker 04

  But you say slightly chastising, Tabby.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  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.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  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.

• 39:18Speaker 03

  murky waters, Jesus.

• 39:20Speaker 04

  But this is part of a pattern in The Spy Who Loved Me, which I already said was narrated by a woman, Vivien Michelle. It's the only Fleming book that is narrated by a woman. Fleming gives us some absolutely terrible sort of thoughts and lines. Vivien tells us, the readers, all women love semi-rap.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  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.

• 39:45Speaker 03

  So, so well done in the movie with Daniel Craig.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  Daniel Craig and Mads Mikkelsen. So Mads Mikkelsen is paying the sheaf for his captured Bond.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  So sexy.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  And who basically strips him and beats his genitals with a cane carpet beater. And in Casino Royale, Ian Fleming tells us, just while all the people who, blokes who are wincing, will be astounded to hear that Fleming writes, 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 any ever a moment where that pain would turn to pleasure, however.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  Can I also, at the, at the time, with, with all the allusions to rape, particularly with the women, were people not very unsettled by that at the time? Because that seems a very stark sentence in any, like even from the, for the 50s, you know?

• 40:43Speaker 04

  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, 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, with 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, they're quite free with their fists. And the women actually, sometimes they're raped,

• 41:24Speaker 04

  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.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:43Speaker 04

  So they're staying in school, they're going to university, they're going into the professions, all of this kind of thing.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  Birth control is suddenly a thing as well.

• 41:49Speaker 04

  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, 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.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  I mean, absolutely. I was about to say, yeah.

• 42:09Speaker 04

  And I think Fleming, you know, you read the Bond books, like so many books at the time, and they're basically putting women back in their box.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  So it's almost like a reactionary thing, a bit like the manosphere now, whatever. It's in reaction to.

• 42:21Speaker 04

  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 Smersh, 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 mind their pots and pans, and stick to their frocks and their gossip and leave men's work for the men?

• 42:53Speaker 03

  Oh, Bond.

• 42:54Speaker 04

  In the Bond books, you don't get any woman who's really a character.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  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 intelligent woman, we assume, who works in a bank. And we are essentially told that she is plain because Bond says, sort of thinks to himself, she obviously ordered first at Cambridge. And is appalled by that.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  Right, 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.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:36Speaker 04

  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.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  Pussy Galore.

• 43:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  Um, but after the break, we're going to be asking a couple of big questions. Is Odd Job the most racist character in all British fiction? Is Pussy Galore really a lesbian? And who was the real Oric Goldfinger?

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• 45:46Speaker 03

  Welcome 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 Balkan 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 behind it?

• 46:30Speaker 04

  Ian Fleming begins work at GoldenEye 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 it, as Goldfinger is.

• 46:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:47Speaker 04

  He collects Spanish doubloons. I mean, you can see why somebody living in the Caribbean.

• 46:51Speaker 03

  You can.

• 46:52Speaker 04

  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, it's just for show, really, he doesn't really use it.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  I still think that insists upon itself.

• 47:07Speaker 04

  It does. But there's loads of other elements, aren't there, Tabi, from the rest of his, from his life generally?

• 47:12Speaker 03

  The 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.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  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 Odd Job 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. And 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 and novelists. He loves these big info dumps, it's kind of a weakness of his prose, for me.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  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 Oric Goldfinger. So Oric Au Gold, obviously. There was a real Goldfinger. And he was a modernist architect called Ernur 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, you know, his stuff was seen as very avant-garde. And he was best known in Britain for Trelic Tower, which you can see, I think, when you come in the train to Paddington from the west. So Trelic Tower, this brutalist building, very well-known, a kind of London, West London

• 49:16Speaker 04

  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 was 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. 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.

• 50:00Speaker 04

  He used the name, and then when the book was in proof stages, publishers got cold feet, you can't really name the book after this bloke. And 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." And basically.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  That's riz.

• 50:27Speaker 04

  Not, not surprisingly, Goldfinger did not pursue it.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:32Speaker 04

  And actually, he doesn't seem to be in that cross about it. They sent him loads of complimentary copies of the book.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  It's always fun to be immortalized 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. I think if I was an author, I'd like to work like that.

• 51:03Speaker 04

  Do you know what? This is a classic journalist-turned-novalist thing.

• 51:06Speaker 03

  Because you've got quick deadlines, I guess.

• 51:08Speaker 04

  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.

• 51:16Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 51:17Speaker 04

  Bang, get it done, move on.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:18Speaker 04

  And that's how Fleming writes the Bond books.

• 51:20Speaker 03

  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, "He'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 stop 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."

• 52:02Speaker 03

  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. He'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 you know, that's quite a Bond way to go.

• 52:34Speaker 04

  Bond way to go.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  Heavy, heavy drinking, heavy smoking.

• 52:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  You know, lived a good life, but a short one.

• 52:39Speaker 04

  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, is your definition of a good life, Tabi.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  When I write my, um, my Bond-Akata crossover, this is how I shall live.

• 52:54Speaker 04

  It's how you live now. So, um, so, 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.

• 53:10Speaker 03

  Really, Skyfall?

• 53:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, Skyfall was a huge hit.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  I'm pleased to hear that, good.

• 53:15Speaker 04

  Well, Skyfall is a brilliant film. No one can surely dispute that Skyfall is a great film.

• 53:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  And Goldfinger establishes the template for the series. So it has the Shirley Bassey 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.

• 53:34Speaker 03

  He's such a psychopath, honestly. It's like, you just killed a man, why are you punning?

• 53:39Speaker 04

  Tabi, I think this is mad from you. I think it's completely self-explanatory why you.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  You're a psycho.

• 53:45Speaker 04

  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 as 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.

• 54:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 54:57Speaker 04

  It is, yeah. And then Bond feels bad, doesn't he?

• 55:00Speaker 03

  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 it. 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.

• 55:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. And he feels really bad about it, doesn't he? And 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.

• 56:12Speaker 03

  It's Daniel Craig's Bond.

• 56:13Speaker 04

  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.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're completely right. Or like that bit when he's convalescing in, I think it's Casino Royale, and he's like, oh, I'm just exhausted. I've had enough of this all. But the fact that the Bond, the, 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.

• 56:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a lot.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  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.

• 57:04Speaker 04

  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.

• 57:10Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 57:11Speaker 04

  And then he gets out a bottle of Mutant Rothschild 1947. And the key thing here.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:16Speaker 04

  They're just for Bond. Goldfinger doesn't drink. And the mad thing, what does Bond do afterwards, Tabby?

• 57:22Speaker 03

  He drives himself home. Yes.

• 57:25Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 57:27Speaker 03

  Road safety not high on his agenda.

• 57:28Speaker 04

  How does he get home?

• 57:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, 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.

• 57:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course.

• 57:47Speaker 03

  And lo and behold, everything works out fine. Anyway, the medical research is verdict. Bond is at considerable risk of developing alcoholic liver disease, cirrhosis, impotence, that would work for Bond at all.

• 57:59Speaker 04

  No wonder there's no talk of birth control. Bond is actually impotent.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 58:13Speaker 04

  That's the thing where Bond levels his pistol at you. His hand is shaking so much. But of course, Goldfinger doesn't drink or smoke.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  No, that means he's a baddie.

• 58:22Speaker 04

  Of course. This is an absolute giveaway for Ian Fleming.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:25Speaker 04

  That Goldfinger is a bad sort.

• 58:26Speaker 03

  That's how you feel about people, to be fair.

• 58:27Speaker 04

  Totally. If they don't drink, I don't want to know them.

• 58:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:30Speaker 04

  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 emigre. And this is poor from Goldfinger. He can't help it, but it is poor nonetheless.

• 58:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And also he does the Jay Gatsby thing of dressing too perfectly.

• 58:46Speaker 04

  Well, he does this brilliantly in the film. In the film, when he's in his golf clothes.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's hilarious.

• 58:51Speaker 04

  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. He's hideously ugly, isn't he, Tabby?

• 59:01Speaker 03

  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.

• 59:23Speaker 04

  I've got a very round head myself, so I find this a little bit too close to home, to be honest.

• 59:27Speaker 03

  Oh no, is this triggering?

• 59:28Speaker 04

  Although there's a massive difference, Tabby. Goldfinger, unlike me, is a prize bore.

• 59:32Speaker 03

  You're a big drinker.

• 59:35Speaker 04

  Thanks. I mean, the number of times you've said this, people are going to, absolutely going to believe it.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  And you don't like golf, to be fair.

• 59:40Speaker 04

  I don't like golf. Goldfinger has no sense of humour. He's a massive bore. He's always lecturing Bond in normal, even when he's about to kill Bond.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:47Speaker 04

  He's wittering on about the Latin definition of pain or whatever it is.

• 59:51Speaker 03

  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'd go, no, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.

• 1:00:01Speaker 04

  No, but that's not in the book.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:00:09Speaker 04

  What about Odd Job? Are you a fan of Odd Job?

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  Am I a fan of Odd Job?

• 1:00:13Speaker 04

  Of his work?

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  I mean, you can't be a fan of Odd Job in this book, can you? He's nothing but strange contorted thumbs and bowler hats. 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 a Rolls Royce on a sunny afternoon in Kent. Murky waters these.

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  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 to Bond how hard he is. Then Goldfinger gives Odd Job his cat, because the cat's transgressed.

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then at one point, he threatens to give Tilly to him for dinner.

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  He does. So that all sounds quite dodgy.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  But it does get actually worse because Goldfinger then gives Bond a huge lecture about why he employs Odd 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.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  I mean, also, by the way, he confused the two. Bond confused the two when trying to work out who Odd Job was.

• 1:01:30Speaker 04

  They are the cruelest, most ruthless people in the world. My staff are handpicked 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.

• 1:01:57Speaker 03

  Bond is totally unmoved by this.

• 1:01:59Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  If I was a Korean, I'd be pretty offended by all that.

• 1:02:14Speaker 04

  You would get it. Exactly. Now, you are, you're not Korean, but you are a woman.

• 1:02:18Speaker 03

  I am a woman.

• 1:02:19Speaker 04

  And the ladies in Goldfinger, do you feel that this is a nuanced, sensitive portrait of the fairer sex, Tabby? The fairer sex, that's such a James Bond thing to say, by the way.

• 1:02:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, for God's sake. 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 Bond 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.

• 1:02:57Speaker 04

  And that will lead to, yeah.

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:03:15Speaker 04

  No, they were called the Abracadats.

• 1:03:19Speaker 04

  You thought that was a typo. It was actually a brilliant pun.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  Oh, that's 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 organisation which now calls itself the Cement Mixers. Can I just say, when you first meet Pussy Galore, she's really cool. She'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, 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, as a challenge.

• 1:03:57Speaker 04

  The passage here is hilarious. Bond liked the look of her. He felt the sexual challenge that all beautiful lesbians have for men.

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 1:04:05Speaker 04

  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?

• 1:04:28Speaker 03

  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, is because she's a lesbian.

• 1:04:36Speaker 04

  And now Bond gives us, I was about to say is excellent, but actually I'm going to rephrase that.

• 1:04:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41Speaker 04

  His insane views about post-war feminism.

• 1:04:44Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  I'm laughing because I can't cry. A consequence of giving votes to women and sex equality. As 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.

• 1:05:34Speaker 04

  The good news is Tilly's going to get her comeuppance for her mixed up hormones.

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  Surely, surely she'll get to give Bond a slap or kill Goldfinger, surely.

• 1:05:42Speaker 04

  No, Tilly disgraces herself because in the final shootout at Fort 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.

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  Rather than to penis.

• 1:06:04Speaker 04

  Tabby, unbelievable from you. Tilly is dead and we've spent a lot of the book with Tilly.

• 1:06:08Speaker 03

  But also 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 at Pussy Galore. And with one frisbee throw of his bowler hat, Oddjob just gets her.

• 1:06:21Speaker 04

  And Bond's epitaph for her, "Poor little bitch, she didn't think much of men. This is what happens." So anyway.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  People that aren't watching and are listening, I've just got my head in my hands.

• 1:06:33Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  It's, no, yeah, it is a brilliantly written thriller.

• 1:06:50Speaker 04

  I think there are some really nice moments, though, moments when Bond is, is being contemplative. I think a very, Fleming 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 Oddjob 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.

• 1:07:20Speaker 03

  He's quite a cinematic writer. He builds tension exquisitely.

• 1:07:24Speaker 04

  And I think there is, he's a really good uncharacter. So my favourite bit of the entire, my favourite 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 off 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 wants is happenstance, twice his coincidence. And then just says, "Oddjob, the pressure room." And you're like, "Oh my God." And you can't wait to find out what's going to happen next.

• 1:08:06Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:08:12Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, the Fort Knox. So when they're arriving at Fort Knox and they think that basically they've 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, the, everybody, the cars have crashed, everybody's lying in the streets. "Now the train was moving at walking pace into the town and everywhere, down every street and 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

• 1:08:55Speaker 04

  ticked off their coloured 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, "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.

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  It's really, and there, 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.

• 1:09:23Speaker 04

  That's right, yes, exactly. I think it's really well observed with a kind of journalist's eye for detail.

• 1:09:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:29Speaker 04

  And some really lovely prose. This is not like just generic formulaic thriller writing. It's a little bit, it's more ambitious.

• 1:09:37Speaker 03

  How does it end?

• 1:09:38Speaker 04

  How does it end? Now, Tabby, what do you make of the, this is my favourite scene of the book because it is absolute Ian Fleming bingo.

• 1:09:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:47Speaker 04

  Would you like to describe to the listeners?

• 1:09:49Speaker 03

  Surprise, surprise, Bond wins the day, to use his own metaphors, 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. This is the one thing he has yet to conquer. So obviously at this point, some, some readers will shudder. But I know Dominic, you find this scene absolutely hilarious. So would you like to do the honours?

• 1:10:16Speaker 04

  Bond 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."

• 1:10:25Speaker 03

  And by the way, Pussy Galore up to this point is really, she is cool, you know, she's, 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.

• 1:10:59Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:00Speaker 04

  There's a William Faulkner book in that.

• 1:11:02Speaker 03

  Devastating and moving story. Fleming's response.

• 1:11:06Speaker 04

  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, "Turn to love and care." Then there's a little bit of action, which I probably won't read out because.

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  I think it's for the best.

• 1:11:19Speaker 04

  Best not. But the very last line of the book is such Ian Fleming bingo, "His mouth came down ruthlessly on hers."

• 1:11:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:27Speaker 04

  And that is, I find that, I mean, it's like Ian Fleming is absolutely leaning into the sort of, the caricature of a Bond book. Bond is converting this.

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  Chuckling to himself at GoldenEye, isn't he?

• 1:11:39Speaker 04

  But also the funny thing is, Ian Fleming, of course, is not chuckling to himself. We're laughing at it and finding it amusing because it's so dated. Ian Fleming, I think.

• 1:11:49Speaker 03

  Is aroused.

• 1:11:50Speaker 04

  He's, 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 her uncle when she was 12. Ian Fleming's just treated that as this throwaway, entertaining plot point.

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  It's so not the point.

• 1:12:08Speaker 04

  That basically sets her up for seduction by Bond.

• 1:12:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:11Speaker 04

  Anyway, shall we give this a mark? What, we could mark this in a terminal but games of golf or in reinforced killer hats.

• 1:12:19Speaker 03

  We could.

• 1:12:20Speaker 04

  My personal view, I don't care whether you agree or not.

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  You don't care either way.

• 1:12:23Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:12:24Speaker 03

  That's very Bond behaviour.

• 1:12:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, is that, I think we should mark it in vodka martini, shake and not stir. But is that too predictable, Tabby?

• 1:12:32Speaker 03

  I don't know. I think we could lean into it and actually in a way, in a way it's subversive because in this book, Bond never once has a vodka martini.

• 1:12:40Speaker 04

  So true. He just has double bourbons, doesn't he?

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  He just has double bourbons. So you go for it.

• 1:12:45Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:12:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, you had to kind of thing.

• 1:12:57Speaker 04

  Sort of efficient, joyless way. And I didn't really luxuriate in them. And I read this on holiday and I just found it a tremendous laugh, actually.

• 1:13:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:07Speaker 04

  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 golf 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 Buckland's descendant and biographer, Ursula Buckland, 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, Buckland doesn't have a tremendous sense of humour in his books, whereas Fleming, I think they are funny. I mean, you're laughing at them half the time.

• 1:13:45Speaker 03

  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, it's.

• 1:14:06Speaker 04

  If it did, something would be seriously wrong with you.

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  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 thoroughly, I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it really goes no deeper than that. I'm definitely going to have to dock a point for the, for the hormones stuff. And I don't know, sort of James Bond curing Pussy Galore's lesbianism. But because it's great fun, I'm going to give this seven out of 10.

• 1:14:36Speaker 04

  Seven, higher than I was expecting, Tabby.

• 1:14:39Speaker 03

  You've convinced me. But what am I going to be reading? Well, Dominic, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Shining by Stephen King, The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger, Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brien and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

• 1:14:54Speaker 04

  So much to come, exciting. Can't wait. All right, I'm off to, I'm trying to think of some James Bond, some James Bond related.

• 1:15:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you're, you're frightened that if you say one more thing, you'll never come back from the cancellation this time.

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  I genuinely can't.

• 1:15:09Speaker 03

  You'll have to make, you'll have to make like one of those soppy apologies online.

• 1:15:13Speaker 04

  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 hanger podcast with the majority female audience.

• 1:15:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, don't tell them that now. We've got none left.

• 1:15:26Speaker 04

  All right. On that bombshell, thank you very much, everybody, and goodbye.

• 1:15:30Speaker 03

  Bye.

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

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  From the studio that brought you WandaVision. I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore.

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  The Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't real.

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  You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible?

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  Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest.

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  Now streaming on Disney+.

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