Mon 10 Jan 2022
Reviewed by David Vineyard: WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. – Saving the Queen.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[6] Comments
WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. – Saving the Queen. Blackford Oakes #1. Doubleday, hardcover, 1976. Warner, paperback, 1977. Avon, paperback, 1981. Cumberland House, softcover, 2005.
It is almost impossible to write about William F. Buckley and not mention politics, one of the leading Conservative voices of the Twentieth Century, political commentator, gadfly, and droll defender of his point of view. He was closely identified with Conservatism, founding two of it’s most important voices, the magazine National Review and the series Firing Line, but I would argue he found his true gift as a writer of fiction, droll, witty, fanciful, and playful fiction that took advantage of his sophistication and famous vocabulary.
It can be argued today that his novels, both those about Blackford Oakes and the more mainstream ones, are more relevant than any of his political stances or achievements to the modern world, his brand of Conservatism largely dead and forgotten by all but a few, certainly no longer the mainstream voice of the movement it once was.
For my tastes the highlight of his gift lay in his series of delightful spy novels featuring handsome Patrician Ivy League spy master Blackford “Blackie†Oakes, whose adventures filled eleven volumes, following the adventures of the CIA agent from 1950 until 1987 and Blackie’s final confrontation with British traitor Kim Philby (Last Call for Blackford Oakes).
Granted it can be pointed out that the Oakes novels play fast and loose with history rewriting many of the most embarassing failures of the CIA as secret triumphs, thanks to Blackie’s untold version, but taken as the fun they are intended as rather than history it’s cheeky entertainment watching Buckley try to re cast the reality of Sputnik (Who’s On First?), the Hungarian Revolution (The Story of Henri Tod), Cuba (High Jinx), or Kim Philby (Last Call for Blackford Oakes), which he does with unflagging tongue in cheek humor while an endless parade of Presidents, spy masters, and diplomatic figures out of history glide through Buckley’s re=imagining of the Cold War, Allen Dulles, Dean Acheson, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, the Kennedy’s, and Ronald Reagan among them.
That he personally knew most of those figures and had himself served in the CIA informs the books with something like the spirit of the far less political Ian Fleming, the British spy novelist he resembles in terms of storytelling gifts and audacity far more than a more sober Le Carre or cynical Deighton. For their obvious differences the Oakes books are very much the true American answer to Fleming and Bond.
Saving the Queen opens in the wake of Watergate with the very real Rockefeller Commission looking more closely into the past activities of the CIA and Blackie Oakes due to testify. Over dinner with his friend Anthony Trust, a recurring character in the series, Blackie muses on just how much truth he dare tell the Committee about his first major assignment. To take the Fifth Amendment would mean the end of his career in the CIA.
There was no comment. Harman, for one, knew nothing about the first assignment. Anthony knew more than he let on, but he didn’t know it all, by any means. And it would greatly have surprised Singer Callaway to discover that not even he, who had been intimately involved in the operation, knew exactly how far the young man had got in, in the course of saving the Queen.
It is the Post War era and a young Blackford Oakes has been sent to London ostensibly to study the Post War British economy, and for Oakes a painful it’s a reminder of youthful encounter with the British Public School system that left him cynical and bitter. Much of the first third of the book is taken up with his being readied for the mission, briefed, and with flashbacks to his childhood experience.
If there is a flaw in the book, it is these flashbacks to Oakes’ humiliation in the British Public School system. I can’t help thinking Harry Flashman would of given him the Tom Brown treatment and James Bond, who got kicked out of Eton, would have laughed in his face. I’m not sure Charles Dickens is really the best model for spy fiction.
Of course there is more to his mission than that. CIA suspects the Russians have high level agents in the United Kingdom maybe even at Buckingham Palace in the court of the beautiful new Queen Caroline I.
Saving the Queen is the most playful of the Oakes series with Buckley more relaxed here where he isn’t trying to rewrite actual history. In later books Blackie will find his conscience tested by his profession (Stained Glass) and his neck in much tighter nooses (The Story of Henri Tod), but here the adventure is spiced with just a hint of spy spoofery dressed up with Buckley’s considerable wit.
His friendly enemy Economist John Kenneth Gailbraith was only partially ribbing him when he noted that in fiction Buckley had found his true place.
Oakes and the beautiful English Queen, more Grace Kelly than Elizabeth, are physically attracted as Blackie begins to sort out the question of the possible Soviet agent at the heart of British royalty, and get his own back a bit over his unpleasant childhood experiences, all coming to a head in a duel at 10,000 feet between a Hunter-Hawker piloted by the Soviet agent and Blackie in an F86 Sabre.
For all the spirit of Ian Fleming, Buckley is far less hedonistic than his British forerunner. Blackie can be a bit of a prude and it is hard at times to believe in him. Unlike Bond he has a steady girl friend he is usually faithful too and something of a life as an engineer. You can’t imagine him letting down his hair in Romany encampment or a Japanese bath like Bond or enjoying the sexy sound of his car’s exhaust, much less Bond’s exploits with women. Even when Blackie gets his hands dirty there is a sense hand sanitizer is nearby. Blackie is very much a paragon of Yale and Patrician birth, not an “elegant thug†like Bond kicked out of Eton for an unspecified scandal with a serving girl.
Buckley has removed the Sex and Sadism from the Bond formula, retained the Snobbery, and added Wit and the sting of the political gadfly to create his own formula, Snobbery, Re Written History, and Satire.
But he is charming company to spend an evening with delving in the backrooms and shadowy corners of the Cold War, imagining oneself an armchair insider in the back corridors of power, and when a relieved Blackie escapes testifying before Congress only to walk away whistling “God Save the Queen,†I think many of you will agree the trip was worth taking, and with varying results he managed to keep it up for eleven more books, with his best after this one probably Who’s On First?.
January 11th, 2022 at 5:56 pm
Fairly or unfairly, I’ve tended to stay away from mystery writers who are celebrities in their own right. Unfairly perhaps in Buckley’s case, as I’m sure he wrote his own stuff, as opposed to Margaret Truman and a number of others. His books may actually have been quite good, and it’s good to hear that that’s really the case.
January 11th, 2022 at 6:51 pm
I wonder if anyone else has wondered why Buckley chose Blackford Oakes as his character’s name when John Gardner had just finished writing several novels about a spy character named Boysie Oakes.
January 11th, 2022 at 8:55 pm
I doubt Buckley made the connection. Though the Gardner series didn’t end until right before Buckley picked up with Blackie, the last Boysie story published in the US had been four books earlier, the last in paperback six back.
I don’t know what Buckley read for pleasure but chances are he never heard of Gardner or Boysie.
While Blackford Oakes wasn’t Buckley’s code name it may have been one of another agent. CIA recruits are given a Company name when they join the agency and BLACKFORD OAKES may be related to that, perhaps even the name Buckley would have preferred if given the choice. As I remember his, which he used when stationed in Mexico City, was far from romantic.
But it is an interesting suggestion, and I wondered it myself briefly.
Steve,
I’m torn on celebrity novels. For every Margaret Truman or Elliot Roosevelt there’s a David Niven, Errol Flynn, or Sterling Hayden.
Dick Francis was himself a minor celebrity author, a well known jockey who had ridden for the Queen.
Buckley though was a well known writer of non fiction with numerous books under his belt.
January 11th, 2022 at 11:37 pm
I’ve read a couple Buckleys and I readily admit –I enjoyed them for distraction purposes. As far as that goes.
Blackie Oakes is a competent concoction, but just not very dazzling. At the time I met him in print, I felt he just wouldn’t last very long in a novel by someone like Charles McCarry, he’s too staid, somehow. Too ‘establishment’.
Re: Buckley in general. What a multi-dimensional man. I respect Buckley even though he was so prickly and edgy with his Burke-style perspective.
As to his writing career: to this day it remains unfathomable to me why such a self-styled “hard-bitten realist” like Buckley ever dabbled in fiction at all. Despite how good he was at it. I’m puzzled.
I just don’t understand his motivation. I don’t grasp what he ever got out of it, what need it satisfied. Writing is hard work. Why bother with it if you don’t need to? Why play with card tricks when you’ve already been the circus sword-swallower or knife-thrower?
Similar reaction when I first heard that either Hunt, Liddy or John Mitchell –who was it? –also penned detective mysteries. Why? I just don’t cotton to why they had such urges. The entire persona of these men was based on stiff, upright, ‘no-nonsense’ posturing, anti-art, anti-leisure, anti-fiction, anti-fantasy.
So too, with Buckley. I just can’t even imagine him replete in this role of ‘celebrated mystery author’ even though he was obviously very successful with it. I just don’t see what hay he made with this hobby.
Seems to me that if you’re a razor-tongued, self-appointed spokesperson for a traditional-minded, classicist political viewpoint, the last thing you would want to also be known as around the DC Beltway, is a ‘mass-market fiction novelist’.
I did enjoy the few books from him I sampled; but they fall somewhere in a lower tier of my esteem. Found them impressively competent and professionally turned and finished; but just …eh, something lacking somewhere. No ‘magic’ no magic like the kind you discover in a Deighton romp, or a Follett yarn.
January 12th, 2022 at 9:54 pm
Oakes fills very much the same fantasy for Buckley that Bond did for Fleming, an extension of himself, but endlessly handsome, capable, attractive to women, and unlike Fleming, redressing the historical wrongs Buckley saw. As I said, Buckley turns every set back the CIA saw in the Cold War on its ear. If you can’t win them in the real world at least there is fiction.
Getting to rewrite history from your own point of view had to be attractive to a political gadfly like Buckley who enjoyed the give and take of political debate. There is a lot of satisfaction to using the god like power of the author to say whatever you want and know you cannot lose the argument at least within your own book.
I suspect too there were things he wanted to say in fiction he couldn’t express as well in non-fiction. In one of his books a Randian Objectivist and a John Bircher fall in love, and both find contentment romantically as Buckley style Conservatives. Aside from the satire he was also making a pointed feint toward his rivals in Conservatism.
Remember too his younger brother, to whom SAVING THE QUEEN is dedicated, was novelist F. Reid Buckley who had more than a little critical acclaim for his Spanish trilogy. I would not be surprised at a little sibling rivalry/encouragement. It’s a very literary family, his son Christopher is a best-selling novelist as well.
Why does anyone decide to write fiction, certainly popular fiction? Basil Thompson was head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch and wrote detective novels. Frank Froest was head of the Yard’s Murder Squad and wrote thrillers. Dick Francis was a celebrated jockey retired on a handsome stipend. There are hundreds of examples, Poet Laureate C. Day Lewis writing as Nicholas Blake, Oxford don J. I. M. Stewart as Michael Innes, film composer and conductor Robert Montgomery (not the actor) as Edmund Crispin.
Some even had to write in secret not to harm their reputation in more serious letters or politics. In Irving Wallace THE PRIZE his American protagonist has won the Nobel prize and is hiding he has survived writing cheap paperback originals in what is suggested to be the Spillane style.
Rex Stout was a millionaire before he was twenty and still wrote for the pulps and created Nero Wolfe. Garry Wills, Ted Koppel, Charles Collingwood,and others all wrote novels (I’m not going into ego trips like many celebrity writers who have their work ghost written). Frederic Dard, the internationally recognized author of serious suspense novel still wrote the absurdist pulp San Antonio books up until the end. Daniel Odier, Delacorta, was a guest lecturer at the Uni. of Oklahoma when I knew him
He was a professional writer, but Evan Hunter continued as Ed McBain long after his mainstream success with best sellers and screenplays (THE BIRDS) meant he didn’t have to continue with 87th Precinct.
More writers write because they enjoy it than write because they are driven to. However difficult the process the result is often highly satisfying. If it was just pain and work no one would do it.
I would argue though that Oakes was exactly what Buckley wanted him to be, a fictional fantasy figure of himself, Yale, Skull and Bones, Patrician birth, upper middle class CIA officer from the early Post War era, Cold War warrior. For Buckley the kind of excitement we take for granted in popular fiction would be too vulgar. He wasn’t interested in portraying, however romantically, the kind of tough commando types Fleming wove into Bond’s persona. His intention was that Oakes represent what he thought were the best American values, the upper middle-class Republican WASP hero personified. Buckley in the books is equally hard on his liberal colleagues and some vulgar hard right types he dislikes almost as much.
Ironically the fictional agent that most resembles Oakes is Howard Hunt’s Peter Ward (written as by David St. John) another solidly WASP Conservative Cold Warrier albeit a bit more vulgar than Buckley would allow. This was how the first generation of CIA saw themselves, aristocrats, Ivy League, born to privilege and duty. Even when that wasn’t true, that was their ideal, the way they saw themselves and their world.
In that Buckley nailed the world view of that generation of Cold Warriors as well as any writer ever has.
Granted McCarry and Robert Littell write about them better than Buckley, largely because they are more honest about the limits of that world view, but then again Buckley never takes himself seriously and is more interested in the sly smile than the vulgar thrill.
I always found it ironic that it wouldn’t take a great deal of effort to imagine Blackford Oakes as Pyle in Graham Greene’s THE QUIET AMERICAN a man blinded by his own view of a world that was not exactly as he imagined it should be, damned by his own good intentions.
As for “celebrated Mystery author” I think it a stretch to think Buckely imagined himself at all as a genre writer, not even the spy genre. He saw himself as a playful literary figure surely, but I doubt he saw himself as a genre writer even as much as Gore Vidal when he was writing paperback originals as Edgar Box.
I can’t imagine Buckley saw himself that way any more than Ian Fleming had, who imagined himself writing shockers the way John Buchan had or thrillers designed for more literary types in the mode of Raymond Chandler. Buckley’s books weren’t seen that way either. They got full page reviews by themselves in major papers and magazines, not short genre reviews in the Crime and Mystery section, and they were included in among mainstream novels the way Graham Greene’s “entertainments” were or the novels of Charles McCarry, Littel, or a Helen MacInnes.
We are coloring his view with our own prejudice to see him as a genre writer no matter how close he was. The idea he was competing with Donald Hamilton or Philip Atlee would have amused him no end. For all that he wrote I really have no idea whether he ever read a detective novel in his life, at least his adult life. If he did, I never saw his name blurbing one when I can’t imagine writers and publishers didn’t seek them from him.
Just as there are writers like Margaret Atwood, Kashuro Isiguro, and Ian McEwen who write books that are science fictional and not Science Fiction per se there are mainstream writers who pen novels that fit within the genre but aren’t really part of it. The lines blur a bit dealing with writers like Morris L. West, James Jones, Irving Wallace, Leon Uris, and others who are very sometimes close, but not exactly writing genre fiction and would not define themselves as writing genre fiction.
January 12th, 2022 at 10:49 pm
Thank you, David. Well said.