The “Poet Laureate” of U.S. Spy Writers

I spent almost all of yesterday helping to clean out my late parents-in-law’s home. So while I was able to mention, on The Rap Sheet’s Facebook page, that American spy novelist Charles McCarry had passed away on February 26, I had no opportunity to write at greater length about his demise. Fortunately, others weren’t so time-crunched. This, for instance, comes from the Associated Press:

Charles McCarry, an admired and prescient spy novelist who foresaw passenger jets as terrorist weapons in “The Better Angels” and devised a compelling theory for JFK’s assassination in “The Tears of Autumn,” has died. He was 88.

The author died Tuesday in Fairfax, Virginia, from complications from cerebral hemorrhage after a fall, according to his son, Caleb McCarry.

Charles McCarry didn’t write many best-sellers, but among aficionados he was regarded as “the dean” or “poet laureate” of American spy writers and the country’s answer to such British masters as John le Carré. McCarry set several of his books during the Cold War and often contrasted political idealists with those out in the field, observing in “The Better Angels” that “Evil was permanent” and that the job of intelligence was to trick it “into working for your own side.” A former speechwriter, journalist and CIA operative, he drew upon his inside knowledge of power and espionage for narratives praised as eloquent and informed accounts of foreign policy and Washington intrigue.

“I was never in the bureaucracy, always in the theater,” McCarry, who served in the CIA in the 1950s and ’60s, told The Washington Post in 1991. “I’ve consciously tried not to romanticize anything, especially not intelligence work. I’ve always said that I’ve been writing a series of episodic, naturalistic novels. The people just happen to be spies, politicians, civil servants. If pediatricians lived lives in which the manipulation of emotions were the tools of the trade, I probably would have written about them.”

The New York Times’ obituary includes this:

The soft-spoken Mr. McCarry followed other former spies into writing fiction, a group that includes Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and David Cornwell, who writes under the pseudonym John le Carré. And over nearly 40 years, Mr. McCarry’s dense plotting, realistic detail and brisk writing style brought him a reputation as one of espionage fiction’s leading practitioners.

“McCarry is the best modern writer on the subject of intrigue—by the breadth of Alan Furst, by the fathom of Eric Ambler, by any measure,” the political satirist P.J. O’Rourke wrote in a review of Mr. McCarry’s “Old Boys” (2004) in The Weekly Standard.

“Old Boys” is the sixth of seven novels that center on Paul Christopher, an urbane agent for the Outfit (read: the C.I.A.), who first appeared in “The Miernik Dossier” (1973), an inventive tale told through letters, surveillance reports, diaries and transcripts of phone conversations. The Christopher character—Mr. McCarry’s equivalent of George Smiley—returned the next year in “The Tears of Autumn.”

“The Tears of Autumn,” Mr. McCarry’s biggest seller, reimagines the Kennedy assassination as payback by the South Vietnamese—using Cubans and the Mafia as go-betweens—for the White House’s role in the coup that led to the death of President Ngo Dinh Diem weeks before Kennedy was gunned down. Christopher travels the world to prove that his theory is correct.

“McCarry’s years as an undercover operative served him well,” the critic Patrick Anderson wrote in The Washington Post in 2005, when “Tears” was reissued. “Some of the novel’s best moments show Christopher meeting with a variety of revolutionaries, rogues and killers.”

He added, “The Christopher novels are brilliant, but their flaw is that their hero has no flaw—he is too good to be true.”

Meanwhile, this comes from The Washington Post:

Charles McCarry spent almost 10 years in the CIA as an undercover officer, operating alone as he roamed throughout Africa, Europe and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. He never carried a gun. He didn’t kill anyone.

He was in the agency when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961. He was in and out of Vietnam. He was at an airport in Congo in 1963, when a Belgian priest told him about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He always went by an assumed name and never lived in the same countries in which he worked.

After he resigned from the CIA to become a writer, Mr. McCarry used many of those elements in the novel that many consider his masterpiece, “The Tears of Autumn.” But when he turned in his manuscript, it was initially rejected by his publisher.

“Where’s the car chase? Where’s the torture scene? Where’s the sex? Where’s the good Russian?” the publisher demanded, as Mr. McCarry recalled in a 1988 essay for The Washington Post. “Do you call this a thriller?”

The publisher gave Mr. McCarry a best-selling novel to study. A month later, Mr. McCarry submitted his manuscript again—without so much as changing a comma. This time, it was accepted.

“I can only write what I know,” he noted.

Hearing that prominent crime, mystery, or thriller novelists have died often propels me to investigate the books they’ve written but that I have not yet read. In McCarry’s case, that presents a daunting challenge, as I believe I’ve only read three of his yarns: one featuring Christopher—The Secret Lovers (1977)—and two non-series works, Lucky Bastard (1999) and The Shanghai Factor (2013). Yes, it’s true: I have never read The Tears of Autumn. But I just now ordered a copy.

READ MORE: “Charles McCarry Obituary,” by Michael Carlson (The Guardian); “The Tears of Autumn: Charles McCarry,” by TracyK (Bitter Tea and Mystery); “A Writer to Admire: Charles McCarry,” by Kathleen George (The Rap Sheet).