Or, You Always Die Twice

The teams of criminals whom Goldfinger attempts to recruit for his ambitious heist at Fort Knox are headed by Helmut M. Springer, Jed Midnight, Billy (The Grinner) Ring, Jack Strap, Mr. Solo, and Miss Pussy Galore.

One of these potential accomplices is not like the others.

Surprisingly, it is not Miss Galore, who, despite being the sole representative of her gender, otherwise fits in very neatly with most of the other boys.

Only one of the six ringleaders has been given a real name, or one that doesn’t sound like a criminal alias or a dirty joke.  And while most of the candidates speak a tough-guy argot straight out of Guys and Dolls, one asks to be dealt out Goldfinger’s incredible heist, with the calm, measured language of “a bank manager refusing a loan.”   

He is also the only member of the hood’s congress who observes the proceedings through a monocle.

There was at least one person in Fleming’s proximity who wore a monocle in real life - Bernard Rickatson-Hatt, Ian’s boss at Reuters and longtime family friend.  I recently suggested that Fleming repaid his various contributions to From Russia, With Love by giving the villainous Krilencu a name which is an anagram for “Uncle Rik.”

Three years ago I believed that the name “Helmut M. Springer” also might be an anagram pointing to Goldfinger’s roots in Germanic fairy tales.  Unfortunately, after several long, late-night and bleary-eyed sessions of shifting letters around, I reached too far for a cockeyed solution which I later had to retract.

After  brushing up on Fleming’s family connections and feeling fairly secure about the anagram for “Krilencu,” I decided to go another round with Mr. Helmut M. Springer.

Bernard Rickatson-Hatt’s contribution to Goldfinger has been recognized for decades.  He performed the same service for Fleming that Colonel Smithers does for Bond, providing a crash-course on international monetary policy and gold reserves, part of the process that anchors Fleming’s more fantastical elements in the real world.

Yet, it was only while leafing through Goldfinger recently that I realized Rickatson-Hatt is actually in the book, thinly disguised as Helmut M. Springer, the underworld ringleader who sounds like a banker and wears a monocle.  

Having already killed Rickatson-Hatt in From Russia, With Love, Fleming knocks him off a second time in Goldfinger.  Krilencu was flushed out of hiding so he could be shot down in the street by Kerim Bey in From Russia, With Love, while Odd Job tosses Springer and his bodyguard down a concrete stairwell in Goldfinger, most likely with their necks already broken.

Realizing that Rickatson-Hatt had been memorably slaughtered a second time, I was reminded of an interview I had overheard with British writer Lawrence Durrell more than fifty years ago, in which he admitted that he had written his own brother into two of his novels and killed him in both of them.  It amounts to familial affection in literary circles, I suppose.

But if “Krilencu” was intended as an anagram for “Uncle Rik,” shouldn’t there also be some sort of hidden message tucked away within the name “Helmut M. Springer?”

While I can’t imagine that there isn’t one, I couldn't fathom for sure what it might be.  But that will never stop me from guessing.

Originally, I surmised that since Goldfinger is in some ways an elaboration on the fairy tale “Rumpelstiltskin,” the middle initial “M” might have been needed to spell “Grimm,” as in the German brothers who collected folk tales in the 19th century.  The best I could do on that score without dropping a consonant or buying a vowel was “Runes Helpt Grimm,” which also dovetails with my notion that Fleming may have watched Night of the Demon, a film based on the book Casting the Runes, shortly before writing Goldfinger.  

Wilhelm Grimm was a philologist who did study German runes, but so what?  It’s hardly a breathless discovery worth smuggling into an anagram.  Undeterred, I was pleased to notice that the letters could also be rearranged to spell “Grimm Pen Hustler,” which, I suppose, is what an author who admitted to writing “Fairy Tales for adults” might call himself after a few drinks.

Some ways of rearranging the letters in “Helmut M. Springer,” such as “Trump Helms Reign” sound like gibberish outside of the esoteric world of newspaper headlines, and in this case apparently peers at least sixty years into the future, putting it out of the question.  Yet, there are a pair of interesting solutions that gave me a tingle, both of them involving rings.

“Her Plum-Stem Ring,” is one.  “Her Ring Plummets” is the other.  The former is usually called a "plum blossom ring," a design which became very popular in the early decades of the twentieth century.  While I don’t know that Fleming gave his intended bride any sort of engagement ring, the possibility led me back to Fleming’s novel, where I marveled at how many references to rings the book contains.  

The slogan for Goldfinger’s chain of jewelry shops is “Buy Her Engagement Ring With Grannie’s Locket.” Bond checks Goldfinger for a signet ring that would enable him to mark cards.  Jill Masterton wears a Claddagh ring.  Bond later notices that Tilly wears a gold ring on her engagement finger, though he finds its presence suspicious.  This turns out to be Jill’s Claddagh ring which she’s been instructed to pass along to Bond.  When she tries to do so, it is shot out of her hand by Odd Job.  Billy Ring runs the Chicago “machine,” and the gangs being recruited by Goldfinger are often referred to as “rings." 

The girl whose memory haunted Fleming as he approached his fifth and final decade, was the one who got away, the girl who, he was convinced, might have made him happy, Monique Panchaud de Bottens.  She had been Fleming’s fiancee before the war until his mother forced him to break off the engagement.  She had first tried to recruit Ian's boss Rickatson-Hatt to block the marriage, but he replied that Ian had every right to tell him to go to hell.

When Fleming later prepared the obituary for his fictional alter ego, who was presumed dead after an assignment in Japan, he listed the parents who had perished in Bond’s youth as Andrew Bond and Monique Delacroix.  Ian Fleming’s mother was named Evelyn Beatrice St. Croix Fleming.  

Thus Eve Fleming and the potential daughter-in-law she could not abide, were braided together to form one fictional star-crossed mother in James Bond’s obituary, where they are destined to reside intertwined for quite some time to come.