Hopscotch

Hopscotch is a 1975 novel by Brian Garfield, in which a CIA field officer walks away from the Agency in order to keep from being retired in place 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 for Best Novel. In 1980, the novel was made into a film with the same name, for whi... more

Hopscotch is a 1975 novel by Brian Garfield, in which a CIA field officer walks away from the Agency in order to keep from being retired in place 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 for Best Novel. In 1980, the novel was made into a film with the same name, for which Garfield also wrote the screenplay. The film starred Walter Matthau. Although the novel has a dark, cynical tone, the film is a comedy, but the plot follows that of the novel fairly closely. The book came out during the period of the Church Committee 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... less