Irwin R. Blacker’s The Kilroy Gambit

There’s nothing more exciting when you’re a vintage pop fiction fan than discovering a totally unknown book by a writer you’ve never heard of and then discovering it’s terrific. That was the case for me with Irwin R. Blacker’s 1960 spy novel The Kilroy Gambit. And the icing on the cake is that it was the first of a series of four books about American spymaster Richard LeGrande.

Irwin R. Blacker (1919-1985) was an American who wrote around a dozen novels altogether (all within the space of a decade) and also had a successful career as a writer for film and television.

The Kilroy Gambit is certainly not a James Bond-style action spy thriller. It is a spy thriller, but of a very particular type. It’s very serious in tone, but it’s quite unlike other serious spy thrillers of that era such as Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm novels such as Death of a Citizen. In some ways it’s an anticipation of John le Carre’s approach in which the focus is much more on the spymaster sitting in his office pulling the strings rather than on the field agents doing the actual spying stuff.

It’s also quite cynical, but it’s not the cynicism of a Len Deighton in which the whole business of espionage has a touch of the absurd to it. The Kilroy Gambit is a kind of political thriller, but focused on the sleazy politics of espionage.

The central character is middle-aged General Richard LeGrande who heads a shadowy U.S. agency knows as General Operations (GENOPS). Unusually LeGrande does not have a background as a field agent. During the war he was involved in covert operations but he was the man making the plans and giving the orders, not the agent in the field.

GENOPS is involved in covert operations that are perilously close to being black ops. What they do is pretty much illegal and certainly unconstitutional and probably in breach of international law. Their operations have to be kept secret not just from the Soviets but from the U.S. Government and Congress and the media and the American people.

He now faces his most dangerous enemy - not the KGB but a U.S. Senate inquiry. There’s not a single aspect of the activities of GENOPS that he can reveal to a Senate committee but if he refuses to reveal the nature of those activities it could be the end of his career and of GENOPS. He soon finds out that in Washington nobody has any friends. Every agency and individual on which he relies to protect him is willing to sell him out to gain a political advantage or to advance their own careers.

His immediate problem is an operation in Afghanistan involving arms caches which seems to have gone disastrously wrong. The idea of clever operations that end up as trainwrecks due to bungling or treachery would later be explored brilliantly by John le Carre in novels such as The Looking Glass War. This operation (whimsically codenamed Operation Kilroy) may have been completely blown. The covers of GENOPS agents may have been blown. GENOPS may have been betrayed by one of his own agents. There is a security leak which may have originated with one of the five subordinates who make up the inner circle of GENOPS.

The book is also interesting for its treatment of defectors. Richard LeGrande has never liked defectors. If a man will betray his own country, Russia, then he is highly likely to betray the U.S. as well. Even assuming he’s a genuine defector and not a KGB plant. Defectors are so untrustworthy that in practice they’re a lot more trouble than they’re worth. And Richard LeGrande now has two defectors to worry about.

There’s also the problem that one member of this inner circle, Janet Garner, happens to be his mistress. This not very well kept secret may be about to be aired publicly. That could cause difficulties with his wife.

These nightmares would be enough to deal with but when they happen just as he is about to face a very hostile Senate committee then Richard LeGrande is a man under extreme pressure.

The narrative switches constantly between the Washington witch-hunt against him, his attempts to figure out how Operation Kilroy went so badly wrong and a dangerous mission by a GENOPS field agent, who happens to be his mistress Janet.

There’s almost no action at all, although there are some fine suspenseful moments involving real danger.

It’s the details of operational planning, the portrait of the murky world of Washington politics and the emphasis on a man slowly being crushed by intolerable personal and professional pressures that makes this a fascinating and extremely fine unconventional spy thriller. Very highly recommended.