Who is Mary Goodnight from The Man with the Golden Gun and what is their importance?

Mary Goodnight is an administrative operative in the Jamaican branch of the British Ministry of Defense. There are hints that she has worked, and perhaps has been been emotionally or sexually involved with Bond in the past, but specifics are never provided. In terms of her narrative purpose, she functions on a few important levels—she provides Bond with information, she provides a degree of comic relief, and she supplies that shiver of sexual tension without which a James Bond narrative, either literary or cinematic, would not be complete.