The Gold Standard: A Look Back At Ian Fleming's Classic Thriller 'Goldfinger'

Tom Cull at ianfleming.com looks back at Ian Fleming's classic thriller Goldfinger.

It is with little surprise that Anthony Horowitz chose to begin Trigger Mortis just at the point where Bond wraps up the case in Goldfinger. By his own admission, Horowitz has loved this particular Bond novel since childhood.

“Goldfinger has Bond himself, tired and cynical after a dirty assignment at the start of the book. The sequence at Miami airport as he watches the sun set and considers the vicissitudes of fate is writing of the highest order.”

Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger is perhaps overshadowed in popular culture by the overwhelming success and iconography of the film adaptation. However, it is the novel that provided two of the greatest villains of all time in Auric Goldfinger and his henchman Oddjob, and of course one of the best Bond girls; the salaciously named Pussy Galore, who features in Horowitz’s Trigger Mortis. 

Perhaps occluded due to Gert Frobe’s excellent performance is the fact that Auric Goldfinger’s Fort Knox plan speech was taken almost verbatim from the novel.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.ianfleming.com/the-gold-standard-ian-flemings-goldfinger/

You can also read an earlier post on Godlfinger via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/03/interplay-between-truth-and-fiction-ian.html

My Washington Times Review Of 'The Third Bullet," Stephen Hunter's Kennedy Assassination Thriller

 

My review of  The Third Bullet, Stephen Hunter's thriller about the Kennedy assassination, appeared this morning in the Washington Times.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, was the crime of the 20th century.

Like many of the military and intelligence people I met while serving in the U.S. Navy and later as a Defense Department civilian employee, I believed Fidel Castro killed Kennedy. Kennedy attempted to kill the communist Cuban leader and the dictator announced publicly that he intended to return the favor.

My view changed after reading Gerald Posner's book “Case Closed.” Mr. Posner debunked all of the Kennedy conspiracies and laid the deed squarely on Lee Harvey Oswald. Vincent Bugliosi, the famed prosecutor of the Charles Manson “family,” further assured readers that Oswald was the lone assassin in his huge book “Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy."

Stephen Hunter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for The Washington Post, said that he started writing his first novel, “Point of Impact,” with the Kennedy assassination in mind. When he started the book, he said, everyone thought a conspiracy was behind the killing. Halfway through the novel Mr. Hunter read “Case Closed” and he ceased believing in conspiracy. The premise of his early novel had been destroyed, and in the end, he separated the novel from the JFK assassination.

However, in “The Third Bullet,” Mr. Hunter returns to the scene of the famous crime. He sets a serious “gun guy” — the legendary former Marine sniper and Vietnam veteran Bob Lee Swagger, known as “ Bob the Nailer” — on a course to discover the truth behind the Kennedy assassination.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/8/book-review-the-third-bullet/?page=all#pagebreak