(p.205)ĭeath is the great mystery, the real puzzle, at the heart of these books.

He saw the bright, proud girl with the spotted handkerchief round her hair in the flying TR3. (This brooding over the mystery of death, the extinguishing of life, also reminds of the shock Bond feels at the death of Darko Kerim, the one-man life force, in From Russia with Love, p.277.) At the end of the novel Bond will feel the same way about the broken rag-doll body of Tilly Masterton.īond stood and looked down at the little empty tangle of limbs and clothes. This passage, especially its portentous final phrase, reminded me of Fleming’s contemporary, Graham Greene (b.1904). And the difference, the thing that had gone out of the stinking Mexican bandit, was greater than all Mexico. Then something had gone out of him, out of the envelope of flesh and cheap clothes, and had left him an empty paper bag waiting for a dustcart. This had been a Mexican with a name and an address, an employment card and perhaps a driving license. What an extraordinary difference there was between a body full of person and a body that was empty! Now there is someone, now there is no one. Bond tracks the pipeline to its source and blows up the heroin warehouse, but then is approached in the street that night by an assassin hired by the gang, and after a brief intense fight, kills him.

Fleming gives a brief description of how an informal heroin smuggling circle was set up by a posh, amateur Brit which led from poppy fields in Mexico via a courier to Victoria Coach Station and then distribution via Soho. Thus Goldfinger opens with Bond in the departure lounge of Miami airport, obsessively going over his most recent job in Mexico. He tries to persuade himself it’s just part of the job, he does it then moves on, but in reality he broods and worries. Bond dislikes killing and it gives him a bad conscience.

Goldfinger novel