Charles McCarry

• Born: June 14, 1930
• Birthplace: Pittsfield, Massachusetts
• Died: February 26, 2019
• Place of death: Fairfax, Virginia

Types of Plot: Espionage; psychological; thriller

Principal Series: Paul Christopher, 1973-

Contribution

Charles McCarry’s novels have often been compared to the espionage thrillers of John le Carré. McCarry’s characters are also caught in the morally ambiguous Cold War world of agents and double agents. Like le Carré’s George Smiley, McCarry’s Paul Christopher carries out his duties as a government agent (in the novels the CIA is called the Outfit) while he realizes that his own side engages in dubious, unethical, and even evil actions to protect national interests.

Christopher’s personal life, like that of Smiley, suffers because of his need to be secretive and contain his emotions. A decent man who refuses to carry a gun, Christopher is often at odds with the Outfit’s programs, although he usually finds a way to operate within the system even as he risks termination.

Christopher differs from Smiley, however, in that his moral purpose is never compromised. However opposed he may be to the Outfit’s policies, his ability to gather intelligence and to determine the identities of the real enemies makes Christopher not only a survivor but also the holder of a point of view about the covert world of espionage that is quite different from that of Smiley. That Christopher has moral convictions that he never relinquishes actually makes him a better agent than anyone else in the Outfit. In other words, his morality is not a luxury but a necessity.

Whereas le Carré exposes the corruption on both sides of the Cold War, McCarry, through the indomitable Christopher, suggests a “third way,” a personal code of conduct that makes his series hero an exemplar of values that neither side can warp.

Biography

Charles McCarry was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on June 14, 1930. His father, Albert, was a farmer and his mother, Madeleine Rees McCarry, was an avid reader who inspired her son’s love of literature. On September 12, 1953, McCarry married Nancy Neill. They have four sons. McCarry’s home is in the Berkshires, where generations of his family have lived.

McCarry’s novels draw extensively on his experience as a journalist, government official, and CIA agent. From 1952 to 1955, he was a reporter and editor on the Lisbon Evening Journal in Ohio. He spent another year (1955-1956) on the Youngstown Vindicator in Ohio as a reporter and columnist. His government service began as an assistant to the secretary of labor in Washington, D.C. (1956-1957). From 1958 to 1967, McCarry worked for the CIA. He worked as a freelance writer from 1967 to 1983. His last job in journalism was at the National Geographic, where he served as editor at large from 1983 to 1990.

Although McCarry is best known for his espionage thrillers, he has simultaneously fashioned an impressive career in nonfiction. His well-received biography, Citizen Nader, appeared in 1972. The subject of this biography, a maverick public activist beholden to no institution, is not so different, in some respects, from McCarry’s series hero, Paul Christopher, who is constantly confronting and sometimes flouting the Outfit’s strict protocols. Indeed, in The Tears of Autumn (1975), when Christopher’s desire to investigate the John F. Kennedy assassination goes way beyond what he is permitted to do as a government agent, he resigns from the Outfit.

McCarry’s novels reflect his collaborations with government officials such as Alexander M. Haig, Jr., former secretary of state, and Don T. Regan, chief of staff under President Reagan. McCarry cowrote with Haig Caveat: Realism, Reagan, and Foreign Policy (1983), Inner Circles: How America Changed the World (1992), and with the Regan For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington (1988).

McCarry has published more than a hundred articles and stories in magazines, including Saturday Evening Post, Life, National Geographic, Esquire, Saturday Review, and True. He has also worked extensively as a “script doctor,” contributing to several screenplays without receiving authorial credit.

Although Paul Christopher uses work as a journalist as a cover for his covert espionage activities, McCarry has said that he kept his journalism and his spy work in two separate worlds. In the novels, however, Christopher uses journalism as a cover to travel extensively and to mingle with government officials, foreign nationals, and just about anyone a journalist might wish to interview or befriend.

The Paul Christopher novels: The Miernik Dossier (1973), The Tears of Autumn (1975), The Secret Lovers (1977), The Last Supper (1983), Second Sight (1991), and Old Boys (2004), have received many accolades from critics who praise their authenticity and elegance. The novels are “compulsively readable,” as one critic put it.

Part of McCarry’s authority derives from his travels. McCarry spent time in Berlin in 1948, observing firsthand the U.S.-Soviet Cold War confrontation. During his CIA period, he had deep cover assignments in Europe, Africa, and Asia—locations that are Paul Christopher’s turf. Rome, for example, is Christopher’s home base, a place that comes alive as he walks the streets, dines, and mingles with the everyday sights and smells that have no doubt been experienced by his creator as well.

McCarry apparently wanted to end his twenty-five-year career as a novelist with Lucky Bastard (1998), which featured a politician (a mixture of John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton) whose seriocomic adventures marked a departure from McCarry’s series of espionage novels. Then Peter Mayer, publisher of Overlook Press, sought out the retired novelist at his home in Massachusetts, promising to reprint his work, and encouraging McCarry to write more novels. The result was Old Boys (2004), which centers on the disappearance of a retired Paul Christopher. Critics deemed this novel a great success, confirming McCarry’s place not merely in the espionage thriller category but in the history of the literary novel.

Analysis

Otto Penzler in The Armchair Detective, like many other reviewers, highly praised Charles McCarry, saying he stood out among the American creators of believable spy novels, a very difficult category, because of the brilliance of his plots and characterization and his poetic style of composition.

McCarry’s spy hero, Paul Christopher, is handsome, a Yale graduate, and a poet. His father was also a spy, killed in Berlin in a Soviet setup. Christopher’s mother, a courageous anti-Nazi German who helped many Jews escape the Third Reich, was sent to a concentration camp during the war and then vanished. As a loner, it is difficult for Christopher to maintain relationships with the women who fall in love with him, and it is not surprising that an early marriage ends in divorce.

This composite biography of Christopher can be gleaned from several of McCarry’s novels. Each work of fiction, in fact, is a revelation, delving not only into Christopher’s background but also into the widening network of contacts that implicate him in the major events of the Cold War. To read the sequence of the Paul Christopher novels is not only to journey through the complexity of contemporary history but also to constantly revise perceptions of Christopher himself. Thus biography, history, and psychology are melded into the plots of the spy novels, making McCarry’s handling of the genre so sophisticated and elegant that he has few equals.

The Miernik Dossier

McCarry’s stunning debut novel, The Miernik Dossier, is also an innovative work that is reminiscent of such great novels as William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Miernik is a Polish diplomat who wishes to defect to the West, but is he a double agent? The novel takes the form of a dossier, which includes reports from Paul Christopher and his superiors, excerpts from Miernik’s own writings, and other materials that typically are included in intelligence reports. Christopher is doubtful all along that Miernik is duplicitous; that is, Christopher tends to think that Miernik is what he says he is. However, mired in the Cold War world of deceit (Federal Bureau of Investigations director J. Edgar Hoover titled one of his anticommunist books Masters of Deceit, 1958), Christopher’s superiors overrule his assessments, and the result is tragic for Miernik.

The novel never explicitly ratifies Christopher’s judgment. There is no smoking gun, no way to absolutely confirm what is surely true: that Miernik’s suspicious behavior would not have seemed all that problematic if the Cold War had not fomented the conditions in which the truth itself becomes a victim of the competition between superpowers.

Mystery novels in general are supposed to solve a mystery. What is striking about The Miernik Dossier is that like Absalom, Absalom! the mystery is solved only insofar as readers are able to decipher the novel’s escalating ironies and negotiate its intricate ambiguities.

The Tears of Autumn

Considered by many critics to be McCarry’s masterpiece, The Tears of Autumn tracks Paul Christopher’s quest to discover who set up Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate John F. Kennedy. Christopher does not doubt that Oswald was the assassin, but his years as a covert agent for the Outfit lead him to suspect that Oswald did not act alone.

Early on, Christopher intuits who is behind the plot. He does this not because of any particular clue but rather because of his travels in Southeast Asia. He realizes that the United States’ involvement in the assassination of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem, a figure intricately situated within the clan structure of his society, has set off forces that will bring down an American president.

The problem for Christopher, however, is that his superiors do not really want to know who is behind the Kennedy assassination. Christopher finds himself opposing highly placed officials inside the White House, and ultimately he resigns from the Outfit to pursue his personal quest for the truth.

What is it that Christopher hopes to accomplish? The answer to this question is what distinguishes McCarry from virtually all other writers of political thrillers and espionage novels. Christopher has no political agenda—not even a basic desire to see justice done or to exact revenge. On the contrary, what motivates him is a pure quest after the truth no matter where it might lead. This dedication to truth and knowledge endows Christopher with an extraordinary ethical authority that is highly unusual in the annals of the mystery genre.

The Secret Lovers

In The Secret Lovers, when one of Paul Christopher’s agents is run over in a Berlin street, the Outfit assumes he has been killed by the Soviets. However, Christopher watched the event happen, and though it has all the earmarks of a Soviet-style murder, he is suspicious. Why would the courier (who had just handed off a manuscript that exposes Stalin’s crimes, including the gulags) be eliminated after he accomplished his mission?

Christopher finds himself opposing not only the higher command of the Outfit but also one of his most trusted foreign agents, who wants the manuscript published even though Christopher is sure it will result in the author’s death. He wonders why the agent would not just wait until the author, an old and ailing man, dies.

Ultimately Christopher unravels a complex set of affairs (including secret lovers) that explains the concatenation of events in Berlin. At the same time, his own personal life is disintegrating as his wife finds Christopher’s need for secrecy unbearable because he cannot share much of what he does for the Outfit with her. A clinging, demanding, beautiful woman, she attempts to construct a secret life of her own, challenging Christopher to come out of his shell.

Both Christopher’s marriage and the publication of the manuscript result in disaster—as Christopher, more than ever a tragic protagonist—has anticipated. This is one of the bleakest and certainly the most honest of McCarry’s spy thrillers. The human cost of spying, as in John le Carré’s novels, is brought home with devastating effect.

The Last Supper

The Last Supper constitutes a virtual biography of Paul Christopher. So much of what motivates Christopher is inherent in his family’s history—his father’s quest to find out what happened to his wife after the Nazis captured her and how others related to the Christophers became mired in Cold War politics and the missions of the Outfit.

Not as taut as the other novels but with the heft of a historical novel, The Last Supper merges a family saga with the history of American intelligence. Descriptions of how the Outfit (CIA) developed out of World War II and how Christopher sees himself in the geopolitical jockeying of the Cold War make this novel the most comprehensive of all McCarry’s works.

Principal Series Character:

• Paul Christopher , a government agent, has spent his entire adult life working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which he knows as the Outfit. Indeed, his work represents a family commitment, because his father was one of the first agents to serve in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA’s precursor. Although he is entirely loyal to the Outfit, Christopher remains a loner, developing plans of action that sometimes conflict with the agendas of other agencies and government officials. Although he tries to maintain a satisfying private life, his need for secrecy constantly puts him at odds with the women with whom he becomes involved.

Bibliography

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007. Contains a section on McCarry that looks at his background and discusses The Tears of Autumn at length.

Callendar, Newgate. Review of The Miernik Dossier, by Charles McCarry. The New York Times Book Review, July 8, 1973, p. 26. One of the first reviewers to hail McCarry as one of the most important practitioners of the spy novel.

Fletcher, Katy. “Evolution of the Modern American Spy Novel.” Journal of Contemporary History 22, no. 2 (April, 1987): 319-331. Situates McCarry in the context of other spy novelists, including E. Howard Hunt and William F. Buckley, Jr. McCarry’s work is praised for its authenticity and compared with several nonfictional works criticizing the CIA.

Heilbrun, Jacob. “Old Fangled Espionage.” The New York Times Book Review, April 2, 2006, 11. A review of the reissued The Last Supper that also assesses McCarry’s place in the pantheon of Cold War novelists. Heilbrun ranks McCarry as the best American novelist in this genre while reserving judgment as to whether McCarry equals the best of the work of John le Carré and other British contemporaries.

Kegley, Charles W., Jr. “How Did the Cold War Die? Principles of an Autopsy.” Mershon International Studies Review 38, no. 1 (April, 1994): 11-41. McCarry’s novels can be profitably read in the light of this searching study of the Cold War. The author examines the books McCarry wrote with Alexander M. Haig, Jr.

Penzler, Otto. Armchair Detective (Summer, 1989): 272-73. Review of The Better Angels, The Bride of the Wilderness, The Last Supper, The Miernik Dossier, The Secret Lovers, and The Tears of Autumn. Penzler, one of the most important critics of mystery fiction, ranks McCarry as one of the great writers in this genre