William F. Buckley Jr. is almost alone in using genuine political mischief as a source of wit in the spy novel. He raises the sort of questions that only the most naïve and the most sophisticated political observers would dare to ask. He says, "What if—" and then proposes something that is as attractive as it is preposterous, something so nearly commonsensical that it throws the entire Western world into pandemonium.

He did this in "Stained Glass," his last spy novel, and now he is at it again in "Who's on First." It is 1956, and the earthshaking question is who will launch the first satellite, the United States or the Soviet Union? At stake is "the myth of bourgeois scientific invincibility." (pp. 123-24)

Mr. Buckley learned all about writing spy novels with his second attempt. He understood, for example, that readers of the genre love the technical...