This web page is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
I read Buckley's "Saving the Queen" the other year, and it was (as I rather vaguely recall) pretty much disposable spy fiction made memorable by the fact that the hero, who has some old psychological wounds from his time as a Yank in a posh English boarding school, gets closure on those wounds by having sex with the (lovely, young) Queen of England. Which is a brash enough thing to do in an otherwise disposable novel that I at least remember it.
"High Jinx" is another pretty much disposable spy novel, made a bit memorable by an attempt to get into the head of some Communist sympathizers who spy for Russia in Britain in the early '50's. It's a rather blatantly anti-communist attempt; the heads involved are clearly not screwed on quite right, but at least he made the effort. There's also some historical recreations of what might have been going on within the post-Stalin Kremlin that led to the death of Beria, which was kinda neat, and a rather implausible bit of SF about an advanced telescope that can be used to read secret documents through walls from across the street while they're still inside the code-transcription machine, which is kinda fun and whiz-bang but deeply unlikely.
All told just as disposable as "Saving the Queen", and not redeemed as much by the psychology as that one was by the sex. (Which isn't to say that it's not better written than most of the pure-genre spy stuff out there, but that's not a really high bar now is it?)
(Oh, and amusingly the blurb on the back that explains the title by saying that the spy that Blackford Oakes (what a manly name that is!) is looking for is referred to as "High Jinx", is utterly inaccurate as far as I can tell; I don't think the phrase occurs anywhere in the actual text of the book. I wonder if the working title was something else, and the publishers slapped this one on just before printing say?)
This web page is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.