Hopscotch
by Brian Garfield
Summary
Miles Kendig has spent his working life as one of the CIA's best field men, and the agency's reward is a desk: too old for operations, too knowledgeable to release, he is to be filed alive. Kendig declines. He sits down in a rented room and begins to write his memoirs, complete, specific, agency secrets and Kremlin secrets alike, and mails the first chapter simultaneously to the CIA, the KGB, and every major intelligence service on earth, with a covering note promising a chapter at a time until the book is done.
The game this detonates is the novel: every agency needs him dead, none can afford another service catching him first, and Kendig, who designed half their manhunt doctrine, leads the combined intelligence apparatus of both blocs across two continents, planting clues to his own location on purpose, because the point, as his pursuers slowly understand, is not escape. The point is the game itself: a master of a life's work refusing retirement by forcing the whole profession to play him at it, one last time, at the highest stakes he can engineer. Garfield keeps the tradecraft exact and the tone cold; the chapters land, the noose tightens by invitation, and the ending resolves the book's real question, which was never whether Kendig would be caught but what winning could possibly look like.
Around two hundred and eighty pages, lean and fast.
Best for readers who want the spy novel as pure game theory, the Cold War chased around the board by a man with nothing left to want but the chase.
Historical Context & Significance
Hopscotch won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1976, its timing impeccable: published as the Church Committee was dragging the CIA's secrets into hearings, a thriller about an officer weaponising disclosure read as the season's news made kinetic, and it stood in the decade's paranoid company beside Condor and its kin.
Brian Garfield was already famous for the book he spent years regretting: Death Wish, whose 1974 film adaptation converted his study of vigilantism's corrosion into an endorsement he publicly disowned, writing a sequel novel to argue with the movies. Hopscotch was the other career: the craftsman's thriller, and he co wrote the 1980 film himself, retuning it as comedy for Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson, one of the rare authors to adapt his own Edgar winner and change its genre in transit.
Garfield's seventy odd books ran from westerns to nonfiction, Hollywood buying steadily; the Edgar marks the shelf's peak, the game novel the game rewarded.