It all started when editor Sam Vaughan asked William K. Buckley, "Why don't you try a novel?" To which America's most renowned conservative replied, "Sam, why don't you play a trumpet concerto?" Vaughan didn't take up this musical challenge, but he did send Buckley a book contract the next morning, and therein lies the origin of the Blackford Oakes novels, ten stories of international intrigue with Oakes, a distinctly American CIA agent, serving as protagonist.

The Blackford Oakes Reader is a collection of the character studies that lie at the heart of these novels.

Oakes himself is the focus of the first book, Saving the Queen. Subsequently, Buckley would examine an aristocrat trying to exert his will on post-Hitler Germany, a pair of scientists dealing with life in the Soviet Union after confinement in Gulag, a Spaniard serving as a pawn for the Party in Communist Cuba, and eight other diverse characters, all of whom find their lives entangled in the web of international espionage.