Goldfinger is the seventh novel in
Ian FlemingIan Lancaster Fleming was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer.Fleming is best known for creating the fictional British spy James Bond and for a series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character, one of the biggest-selling series of fictional books of...
's
James BondJames Bond, code name 007, is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. There have been a six other authors who wrote authorised Bond novels or novelizations after Fleming's death in 1964: Kingsley Amis,...
series, first published in the UK by
Jonathan CapeJonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...
on 23 March 1959.
Goldfinger originally bore the title
The Richest Man in the World and was written in January and February 1958. The story centres on the investigation by
MI6The Secret Intelligence Service is responsible for supplying the British Government with foreign intelligence. Alongside the internal Security Service , the Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence Intelligence , it operates under the formal direction of the Joint Intelligence...
operative James Bond into the gold smuggling activities of
Auric GoldfingerAuric Goldfinger is a fictional character and the main antagonist in the James Bond film and novel Goldfinger. His first name, Auric, is an adjective meaning of gold...
, who is also suspected by MI6 of being connected to
SMERSHSMERSH was the counter-intelligence agency in the Red Army formed in late 1942 or even earlier, but officially founded on April 14, 1943. The name SMERSH was coined by Joseph Stalin...
, the Soviet counter-intelligence organisation.