Happy Warrior

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 Carré, and Ambler and Maugham, and become a writer of thrillers lui-même. 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:

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:

About the Author

Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn is an international bestselling author, a Top 41 recording artist, and a leading Canadian human-rights activist.

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 Carré, and Ambler and Maugham, and become a writer of thrillers lui-même. 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:

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: