Charles McCarry

Early life

His family is from The Berkshires area of western Massachusetts, and he currently lives in Virginia.

Approach to Writing

McCarry believes that "the best novels are about ordinary things: love, betrayal, death, trust, loneliness, marriage, fatherhood." He also says "if you write a political novel, you're writing what you believe instead of what you know."

McCarry's books are not thrillers; thrillers maintain suspense mostly by letting the reader know more than does the characeter being depicted; e,g, someone with a knife is waiting in the dark room. In contrast, as you read a Paul Christopher novel,you rarely see or know anything that Christopher does not see and know.

In a 1988 essay published in the Washington Post, McCarry writes, "[I]n 1973 when I turned in the manuscript of my novel The Tears of Autumn, [the publisher] summoned me to New York and, in his office high above lower Park Avenue, banged the manuscript on his desk."This book is talky, it's slow, and nobody is going to believe a goddamn word of the plot," he said. "Where's the car chase? Where's the torture scene? Where's the sex? Where's the good Russian? Do you call this a thriller?" "No," I said. He didn't hear me."

McCarry writes that: "After I resigned [from the CIA], intending to spend the rest of my life writing fiction and knowing what tricks the mind can play when the gates are thrown wide open, as they are by the act of writing, between the imagination and that part of the brain in which information is stored, I took the precaution of writing a closely remembered narrative of my clandestine experiences. After correcting the manuscript, I burned it. What I kept for my own use was the atmosphere of secret life: How it worked on the five senses and what it did to the heart and mind. All the rest went up in flames, setting me free henceforth to make it all up. In all important matters, such as the creation of characters and the invention of plots, with rare and minor exceptions, that is what I have done. And, as might be expected, when I have been weak enough to use something that really happened as an episode in a novel, it is that piece of scrap, buried in a landfill of the imaginary, readers invariably refuse to believe."

Throughout McCarry's fiction are statements and descriptions such as "the average intelligence officer is a sort of latter-day Marcel Proust. He lies abed in a cork-lined room, hoping to profit by secrets that other people slip under the door."

McCarry's first published novel came out in 1973, which means he was 43,; in contrast, most successful novelists have their first novel published while they are still in their twenties.

A critic for Tin House magazine approaches McCarry through what the critic calls "the art of the sentence," citing as an example a description in the opening pages of McCarry's The Secret Lovers: “The sun shone feebly through the overcast, like a lamp covered by a woman’s scarf in a shabby hotel room.”

Key Insights in McCarry's Writing

Military, U.S. presidential speechwriter, CIA

McCarry began his writing career in the United States Army as a correspondent for Stars and Stripes, afterwards, in the 1950s, serving as a speechwriter in the early Administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower; a typical McCarry item was the 1953 Labor Day Proclamation, which read, in part, "Free American labor has won for itself the enjoyment of a standard of living unmatched in history. The contemporary world knows no comparison with it. There is only brutal contrast to it. To this, there is no more pitiful and dramatic testimony than the food which this free people has been able to send to feed hundreds of thousands suffering the peculiar torments of the proletarian paradise of Eastern Germany." In the late 1950s, he accepted a post with the CIA for whom he traveled the globe as a deep cover operative--his son, Nathan McCarry, CEO of Pluribus International Corporation, in 2014 described his father's work for the CIA as "trying for the family." He left the CIA, in 1967, becoming a writer of spy novels McCarry rarely speaks or writes directly about those years, saying simply, "For a decade at the height of the Cold War, I worked abroad under cover as an intelligence agent."

As an editor and writer

McCarry was editor-at-large for National Geographic and has contributed pieces to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the "Saturday Evening Post," and other national publications.

In as essay published by the Washington Post, he says that "for a writer in America, going out to dinner is like living as an American in Europe: Total strangers think they can say anything they like to you."

As commentator and book reviewer

"The Paul Christopher Series"

Ten of McCarry's novels involve the life story of a fictional character named Paul Christopher, who--in McCarry's telling--grew up in pre-Nazi Germany, and later became a lone operative for a U.S. government entity that is clearly the Central Intelligence Agency.

These books, in order of publication, are:

The novels, In chronological order of events depicted:

Select Reviews, Positive and Negative, of the Paul Christopher Novels

"It’s tempting to say that Charles McCarry’sThe Tears of Autumn is the greatest espionage novel ever written by an American, if only because it’s hard to conceive of one that could possibly be better. But since no one can claim to have read every America espionage novel ever written, let’s just say that The Tears of Autumn is a perfect spy novel, and that its hero, Paul Christopher, should by all rights be known the world over as the thinking man’s James Bond — and woman’s too."--Brendan Bernard, "The Great American Spy Novel," March 31, 2005', LA Weekly

"Old Boys is a large yarn that will make yummy reading between long looks at Nantucket Sound this summer. (And a boffo movie in the right hands.) But it is a tale that travels from the outlandish to the absurd. As long as readers don't expect the taut realism we have come to expect from the man, they'll be fine. If they're looking for vintage McCarry, though, this will produce unhappy campers. The book does not approach his better grownup fiction. It is not in the same league, for example, with The Miernik Dossier, the small gem that made McCarry's career. Rather, it is something of a "Treasure Island" for lovers of spook fiction, a near-juvenile adventure that entrances adults who know better with fabulous writing. What they do get is a fleeting reprise of McCarry's great creation, Paul Christopher. Christopher, the spy whom many first met in McCarry's bestseller The Tears of Autumn, is now an opaque older man and an ascetic survivor of a Chinese prison camp."--Sam Allis, "McCarry's thriller 'Old Boys' is a trip past believable," Boston Globe, July 26, 2004

McCarry and the JFK Assassination in Real Life and in His Fiction

--"...the most credible account of President Kennedy’s assassination. You will believe it’s what really happened."--New York magazine on Tears of Autumn

--In Lucky Bastards, JFK has an illegitimate son. In real life, no such person is known to exist.

--In Tears, Paul Christopher wakes up ten days after the JFK killing and intuitively and instantly knows "who had arranged the death of the President"--the family and followers of recently assassination South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem and his two brothers. In real life, the wife of one of Diem's murdered brothers attracted media attention for predicting the JFK assassination ("Anything that happens in Vietnam will find its equivalent in the United States"), and later telling reporters that JFK had got what he deserved.

McCarry's Fiction: Insights into the CIA

Torture and Assassination--and the Rule of Law

Can and Should Journalists Serve as CIA Operatives?

Technological and Other Predictions in McCarry's Fiction

--Computer algorithms that analysis media content and specify--with accuracy--when a physical war between two countries will break out. The Better Angels, 1979.

--Terrorist suicide bombers appear in Better Angels (1979); the N.Y. Times first reported this form of terrorism in 1983, when describing the Lebanese civil war. Suicide terrorists use fully loaded passenger planes as weapons in Better Angels--which did not occur in real life until September 11, 2001.

--On June 10. 2004, the Wall Street Journal published a review entitled, "He Has Seen The Future: It's in His Work; Charles McCarry's novels keep coming true. And his new book is about the end of the world."

--ARK (2004) has people equipped with "artificial hornets as their primary defensive weapon;" as of 2017, experts discuss the impending possibility of "drones the size of bumblebees that could be programmed to kill certain people, or certain categories of people, by grabbing their skulls with tiny metal talons and drilling into their head."

Morality (Political and Personal) in McCarry's Fiction

--Jacob Heilbrunn writes in the N.Y. Times (2006): "McCarry never succumbs to a bogus moral equivalence in which Western operatives are as nefarious as their Communist counterparts. He instructs us that the real problem is not so much moral quicksand as incompetent scheming. At a moment when the C.I.A.'s travails are evoking nostalgia for a golden age when it supposedly operated effectively, McCarry offers a useful reminder that such an era never existed."

--"The truth, once discovered, is of no use: people deny what they have done, forget what they had believed, and make the same mistakes over and over again."

--Paul Christopher is eating dinner with a beautiful young woman in wartime Saigon. They discuss the morality of killing. "So you believe in nothing," she says to him. "I believe in consequences," he responds.--Tears of Autumn

--"You think thee truth will make men free.But it only makes them angry."--Tears of Autumn.

Romance, Love,Beauty and Sex in McCarry Novels

Symbolism and Recurrent Themes

Satire

McCarry v. LeCarre:

Autobiographical Elements in McCarry's Fiction

The Former Spy as Novelist

"Greene, le Carre, Maugham, and McCarry," writes Alan Furst, "write with a kind of cloaked anger, a belief that the world is a place where political power is maintained by treachery and betrayal..." In its subtitle, Furst's book calls such writing "literary espionage."

McCarry on Being Alone

Adaptations in Other Media

The film Wrong is Right (1982), starring Sean Connery, was loosely based on McCarry's novel, The Better Angels (1979).

Paul Christopher, J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, and J.P. Donleavy's Sebastion Dangerfield in The Ginger Man (1955) are among the post-World War II literary heroes who have stymied Hollywood efforts to depict them.

Influences

McCarry is an admirer of the work of W. Somerset Maugham, especially the Ashenden stories. He was also an admirer of Richard Condon, author of The Manchurian Candidate (1959), Prizzi's Honor (1982), and numerous other novels.

Non-Paul Christopher novels

Non-fiction

--Stories include: In March 1981, shortly after taking office, Ronald Reagan was shot; Secretary of State Haig appeared in the White House press room and announced, "I am in charge here!"

Collections that Include McCarry's Work

Harlan Coben, ed. 'The Best American Mystery Stories: 2011, incldudes "The End of the String."

Alan Furst, ed. The Book of Spies,includes excerpt from The Tears of Autumn.

Otto Penzler, ed. Agents of Treachery, includes "The End of the Sting."

Short Stories (fiction)

Magazine Articles (non-fiction)