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The worst you can say about "Goldfinger" is it is a checklist for the things Fleming haters like to jump on. Weak plot? Check. Overly confident villain? Check. Bond as too sexy for his own good? Yes. Ignorant racist asides? Yes, more so than any other Fleming story.
In this novel, published in 1959 and smack in the middle of Fleming's run of novels, Bond faces off against the title character, a sun-burnt zillionaire with a penchant for cheating over what amount to mere trifles for him. Bond suspects this trait touches upon more sinister aspects of Goldfinger's personality, and arranges to "accidentally" bump into him a couple of times in order to learn what they are. Goldfinger gets wise quickly, though, and Bond must work fast to prevent Goldfinger's most audacious plot from being carried out.
Of Goldfinger's master plot, so outlandish it had to be changed in the film adaptation, Fleming assures us it sprang from theories that were "logical exercises...bizarre only in their magnitude." When reading the final third of "Goldfinger", you, like me, may willingly suspend your disbelief despite the howling winds from the gaping plot holes.
"Goldfinger" starts off in an impressive low-key manner, with Bond at the end of a dangerous mission in Mexico, remembering with surprising pathos his killing of a low-rent killer: "...life had gone of the body so quickly, so utterly, that Bond had almost seen it come out his mouth as it does, in the shape of a bird, in Haitian primitives." Bond's gloomy musings are broken up by a fellow named Du Pont, a nice call back from the epic card game in "Casino Royale". It's Du Pont that introduces Bond to Goldfinger, saying Bond maybe can help him figure out how Goldfinger cheats at canasta.
Goldfinger's exposed, but so's Bond, as someone Goldfinger will have to keep an eye on. Fleming builds the tension between the two characters in a palpable, gripping manner, but he suffers from his need to link Goldfinger up with his favorite fiendish operation, the Russian spy organization SMERSH. How Bond can operate without alias before Goldfinger under such circumstances is one of those many plot holes mentioned earlier.
Like other reviewers have said, the movie is one of those rare examples where the novel's story is improved upon. Pussy Galore barely registers here as more than a plot convenience, while Oddjob, Goldfinger's guy Friday, is more menacing in the flesh than on the page. Fleming's comments about Koreans and lesbians are painfully ignorant, and certainly make the rest of this novel harder to enjoy, especially if you ARE Korean, lesbian, or a Korean lesbian.
But just when you start giving up on it, the story does pull you back. Can Bond save the U.S.'s gold supply and prevent Goldfinger from poisoning the population of Fort Knox? Those bodies lying on the road don't look good. Fleming sets up the big score, and even if Bond's presence, and that of a half-dozen underworld figures, seems out of place, the author's way of generating a thrusting narrative drive, called "The Fleming Sweep", shows up just in time to save the day.
"Goldfinger" is an improvement on the previous Bond novel, but finds Fleming at a crossroads as to what to do with 007 after failing to kill him off two books prior. Luckily for Bond and us, inspiration and the 1960s were just around the corner.
Rated by buyers 
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Of the fourteen James Bond books written by Ian Fleming, Goldfinger is the seventh, and when I finished it, I'd reached the halfway point in the series. With the previous book, Dr. No, we got the very first true Bond villain, the man with truly megalomaniacal plans that is typical of most of the movies. In Goldfinger, we get another such villain, plus a new first: the very first villain's sidekick. These sidekicks are usually the supertough hired muscle, and few are more intimidating than Goldfinger's servant, Oddjob.
Goldfinger actually begins similarly to Moonraker. In the earlier novel, Bond is initially introduced to the villain Hugo Drax when trying to catch him cheating at bridge. In this book, the game is canasta, but Bond still catches Goldfinger in the act. Auric Goldfinger is an extremely wealthy man with an obsession for gold and a mysterious past. With little in the way of scruples and possible ties to SMERSH, Bond's chance encounter develops into an assignment to derail Goldfinger's smuggling operations.
A second "chance" encounter will lead to a golf game between the two, with Goldfinger trying again to cheat to victory. Later, Bond will begin to get the goods on his foe, but will eventually wind up in Goldfinger's clutches. Like all Bond villains, Goldfinger is interested in explanatory monologues and elaborate schemes, in this case, one involving the theft of all the gold in Fort Knox.
Although it has some of the stuff that would later become cliches, this novel is still Fleming at his peak, maybe just slightly less good than From Russia With Love and Dr. No. If you're a Bond fan, this will definitely not disappoint.
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More dodgy card players. This book was fun reading, being a canasta player at the time. Bond busts Goldfinger using a spotter to cheat, and makes him pay back what he owes to people.
Not knowing who he is, when Bond is back with MI6 resources available, he checks him out, and finds out he is a gold smuggler, and even worse, is working for those SMERSH super villain types.
Goldfinger has an audacious plan to bust into Fort Knox with some serious weaponry, and using nerve gas. Leiter and Bond work to oppose him, but Goldfinger has some seriously talented help. Pussy Galore and her Catwoman crew of acrobatic purloiners, and Oddjob, the asian anti-John Steed.
Luckily, during this book, Bond has more Q-Branch toys.
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You won't find perhaps the most quoted lines from "Goldfinger" in the novel that were heard in the film:
Bond: "Do you expect me to talk?"
Goldfinger: "No, Mister Bond, I expect you to die."
That's because the filmmakers, in this case anyway, wisely decided to rewrite the entire story for their script.
I've been rereading all of the 007 novels and have just finished reading Andrew Lycett's insightful biography of Ian Fleming, so I've been pretty immersed in the whole James Bond experience (why not? It is, after all, 2007). I bought the new special edition DVD collections and can't wait for "Casino Royale" to hit DVD this spring as seeing it several times in the theatres.
Of the very first seven novels, I'm standing by "Casino Royale" and "From Russia, With Love" as the best. I liked them 20 years ago and I like them now.
But I would probably put "Goldfinger" with "Moonraker": worth reading but not as good as the others.
The ambitious plot to rob Fort Knox just doesn't come off. Bond himself even sums up the absurdity of it in the film version ("...now you've only got a few hours before the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines show up to make you put it all back"). In the novel, Goldfinger proposes to use a small atomic device to blast the safes of Fort Knox--a explosion that would probably require some serious excavating to get the irradiated gold loaded up and out of there. In the film, he wants to blast the US gold supply with a dirty bomb to increase the value of his own stockpile.
Goldfinger's plan and Lex Luthor's San Andreas land scheme from the very first Superman movie are the two great evil plots of hero movies, as far as I'm concerned.
As Bond concedes in the film, "My apologies, Goldfinger, it's an inspired plan."
Although she has the most infamous name of all the Bond girls, Pussy Galore shows up as an afterthought, an undeveloped character whose sexuality is gossiped about and then chucked aside for the obligatory final coupling with 007. Fleming devotes far more time to Bond's golf game with Goldfinger than he does Pussy's character. The movie spends more time fleshing her character out!
Some scenes were actually funny, such as when Oddjob demonstrates his karate by splintering Goldfinger's staircase and fireplace before dinner as Goldfinger admits that he doesn't really care for his house. It was also funny and somewhat racist for Goldfinger to hand over his pet cat to feed Oddjob when kitty got blamed for something. There were actually two foul swipes in this novel: the insistence that Koreans love eating cats and that American Southerners rape their sisters (Pussy Galore asks Bond at one point, "What do you call a little girl in the South who can outrun her brother? A virgin.")
The novel was more interesting this time when I pictured new 007 Daniel Craig in the scenes. The "blunt instrument" Bond makes more sense in this one.
But here's something I've almost never said about any adaption: the movie was better.
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First of all, let me disclose that I really like all of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, and I particularly like and admire Fleming's lean, understated style of prose. Fleming is underrated as a writer, and James Bond is more than a comic book cutout character.
Goldfinger as a novel has some appealing attributes. The scene in which Bond plays a game of golf with Auric Goldfinger (with the stakes higher than they seem) is a masterpiece. Goldfinger the villain is an ingenious character. The reason I deprived this novel of two stars is very first of all that the ending is tacked on almost as an afterthought. Sorry, it just didn't work, and it almost seemed like Fleming reached his page limit, and realized that he needed to wrap up the novel in the subsequent twenty or so pages. Secondly, "Operation Grand Slam" involving a hodgpodge of criminals, seemed highly underdeveloped, and SMERSH would not have dared have a Soviet vessel upload the goal and hightail it to Russia. Nor would it have involved the sweepings of the US underworld in such a plan. It just did not work. Now mind, the idea of robbing Fort Knox is brilliant, and Fleming could have made it work. But here, in my opinion, it did not.
All these criticisms aside, I enjoyed "Goldfinger" the novel, and I recommend it, along with all of the other Bond novels, to anyone who enjoys good writing, a suspension of one's critical facilities for an afternoon, and, of course, James Bond.