The good guy's good guy.

WE have Samuel Vaughan of Doubleday to thank for William F. Buckley Jr., spy novelist. Like Margaret Thatcher, Bill had greatly enjoyed Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal, and like any good publisher Mr. Vaughan seized on this slender fact and proposed that Buckley follow Forsyth, and le Carre, and Ambler and Maugham, and become a writer of thrillers lui-meme. Why not? Bill was a have-a-go harpsichordist and it surely couldn't be more difficult than that. So William F. Buckley, Yale '50, created Blackford Oakes, Yale '51. And doing the Hollywood-actress thing by shaving a year off the birth certificate only increased the strong suspicion that the author had created Oakes as an alter ego even more implausibly glamorous than the original:

   Caroline looked at him, sitting on the
   sofa next to her, the man-boy American,
   loose, bright, shining with desire and
   desirability, his port and coffee at his
   side, and she felt something she had
   never felt before.

So did a few reviewers: Was it all a massive leg-pull? Published in 1976, Blackie Oakes's first adventure is set in the London of a quarter century earlier. "Caroline" is Her Majesty the Queen, the young monarch newly succeeded to the throne. Surely even Buckley wouldn't make her just another Bond girl, the ultimate bit of (as they say in Britspeak) posh totty? But oh, yes, he did. On Oakes's first CIA assignment, going undercover means the bedspread at Windsor Castle:

   "Light the fire," she said, and he did so,
   and came back to her with the glass of
   champagne. She put it down and said,
   "England has taken the initiative."
      He rose, extended his hand, and
   brought her silently into the bedroom.

And, when his mission is accomplished, he whispers across the pillow: "Courtesy of the United States, ma'am."

This isn't merely a perk of the job. British Intelligence in the early Fifties has been hollowed out by Soviet agents in the highest echelons of the state, and Oakes's job is to find the mole before he damages the monarchy itself. And if saving Washington's closest ally involves making the Anglo-American "special relationship" even more special, so be it. Queen Victoria is said (apocryphally) to have advised her daughter on her wedding night to "lie back and think of England." This time, it was the Queen who lay back, while Blackford Oakes thought of America.

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In a way, Bill Buckley was evoking a great romantic adventure of a century earlier, The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope, in which a dashing young Englishman has to save Ruritania by posing as the rightful king and wooing and winning Princess Flavia. Of course, Flavia never took the "initiative" in the sense that Queen Caroline does. "Is love the only thing?" the Ruritanian princess asks her English adventurer. "If love were the only thing, I would follow you--in rags, if need be--to the world's end; for you hold my heart in the hollow of your hand! ... But honour binds a woman too, Rudolf. My honour lies in being true to my country and my House."

Ah, but times change, even in royal bedchambers. I had heard that Saving the Queen had caused a chill in Bill's relations with the House of Windsor, but, au contraire, a member of the royal family told me a few years back that it was quite a hit at the palace.

Not everyone cared for the dashing Blackie: Time sniffed that Buckley was "writing with his foot in his cheek." But in the course of the series he made a significant contribution to what was, after all, the Cold War's own literary genre. There had been espionage thrillers of the First and the Second World War, but once it was decided that the Cold War would not be a hot one, spying was no longer simply a prelude or adjunct but the main event. Blackford Oakes was created as an antidote to the le Carre ethos of moral equivalence, and Bill used his good guy--once he'd got over Queen Caroline--to explore critical moments in the West's long confrontation with the East.

The best entry in the series, Stained Glass, finds Oakes dispatched to Germany to keep an eye on a rising political figure, Count Axel Wintergrin, who is troublesome to Washington because he refuses to accept as permanent the division of Germany. A couple of years back, Bill and I spent an agreeable lunch discussing the novel. In Buckley's Cold War, there's something to play for. In le Carre's, there's nothing: The formula's murky wilderness-of-mirrors moral ambiguity is ultimately reductive. I thought the young count's line in the book about the "American right" to "hemispheric torpor" especially relevant at the start of a new existential struggle of which we seem already weary, though Bill was less persuaded of the relevance. Nevertheless, the central point of the Buckley spy novels is an important one: In the crucial early years of the conflict, the good guys should have done more, faster.

Incidentally, when I remarked on NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE that that line about "hemispheric torpor" contained more truth than the entire le Carre oeuvre, a couple of readers wrote to point out that, say what you will about the politics, the world of George Smiley & Co. is very good on office life. Well, up to a point. The seedy MI6 loser trudging home from the dingy Whitehall office through bleak rain-streaked streets to the dreary flat with the tea kettle nevertheless manages to enjoy so extraordinary an amount of leg-over action as to make Queen Caroline's seduction a model of authenticity. I think even on the sex I'll take Buckley.