''Hopscotch'' is a 1975 novel by

Brian Garfield Brian Francis Wynne Garfield (January 26, 1939 – December 29, 2018) was an Edgar Award-winning American novelist, historian and screenwriter. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, he wrote his first published book at the age of eighteen. Garfield went on ...

, in which a

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian intelligence agency, foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gat ...

field officer walks away from the Agency in order to keep from being retired and placed behind a desk, and invites the Agency to pursue him by writing an exposé and mailing chapters of it piecemeal to all the major intelligence agencies around the world, including the CIA. ''Hopscotch'' won the 1976

Edgar Award The Edgar Allan Poe Awards, popularly called the Edgars, are presented every year by the Mystery Writers of America, based in New York City. Named after American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), a pioneer in the genre, the awards honor the bes ...

for Best Novel. In 1980, the novel was made into a film with the same name, for which Garfield also cowrote the screenplay. The film starred

Walter Matthau Walter Matthau (; born Walter John Matthow; October 1, 1920 – July 1, 2000) was an American actor, comedian and film director. He is best known for his film roles in '' A Face in the Crowd'' (1957), ''King Creole'' (1958) and as a coach of a ...

. Although the novel has a dark, cynical tone, the film is a comedy, but the plot follows that of the novel fairly closely.

Historical context

The book came out during the period of the

Church Committee The Church Committee (formally the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) was a US Senate select committee in 1975 that investigated abuses by the Central Intelligence ...

Congressional investigations of the Intelligence community in the mid-1970s. The popular image of the CIA had been under attack before the committee was convened, and the Agency's image was not helped by the spate of spy novels like ''Hopscotch'', in which the CIA was depicted as a paranoid bureaucracy out to kill any Agency insiders who dared to expose its blunders. In addition to ''Hopscotch'', the same story was told by novels like ''

Six Days of the Condor ''Six Days of the Condor'' is a thriller novel by American author James Grady, first published in 1974 by W.W. Norton. The story is a suspense drama set in then-contemporary Washington, D.C., and is considerably different from the 1975 film vers ...

'' (1974) by

James Grady James Grady may refer to: * James Grady (footballer) (born 1971), Scottish footballer * James Grady (author) James Grady (born April 30, 1949) is an American writer and investigative journalist known for his Thriller (genre), thriller novels on ...

(adapted for the 1975 film ''

Three Days of the Condor ''Three Days of the Condor'' is a 1975 American political thriller film directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson, and Max von Sydow. The screenplay by Lorenzo Semple Jr. and David Rayfiel was based on ...

''), ''Dragons at the Gate'' (1975) by Robert Duncan and ''The Star-Spangled Contract'' (1976) by Jim Garrison.Kathryn S. Olmsted, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI, The University of North Carolina Press, 1996, p. 102. The new batch of insider

spy fiction Spy fiction is a genre of literature involving espionage as an important context or plot device. It emerged in the early twentieth century, inspired by rivalries and intrigues between the major powers, and the establishment of modern intelligen ...

that emerged 30 years after the publication of ''Hopscotch'', has a certain resonance with the spy novels that appeared around the time of the Church Committee investigations. In ''Hopscotch'', the Agency tries to retire Kendig—their most successful field agent—'in place', by relegating him to a desk job. Kendig decides not to take this lying down, destroys his Agency file, and walks away from the 'punishment' that his despotic bureaucrat of an office chief has ordained for him. The same scenario is repeated in ''The Dream Merchant of Lisbon'' by Gene Coyle (2004), and there are variants of this theme in ''Edge of Allegiance'' by Thomas F. Murphy (2005) and in ''Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary'' by T. H. E. Hill (2008).

References

External links

* {{IMDb title, id=0080889, title=Hopscotch 1975 American novels Edgar Award-winning works American spy novels American novels adapted into films