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Charles McCarry's The Miernik Dossier is chosen by novelist Alan Furst as one of the Five Best spy tales ever written in The Wall Street Journal: "With The Miernik Dossier, Charles McCarry introduced us to Paul Christopher, the brilliant and sensitive CIA officer who would appear in a series of perhaps more widely known novels, such as The Secret Lovers and Second Sight. The book itself is the “dossier” in question: the reports and memoranda filed by a quintet of mutually mistrustful espionage agents, including a seductive Hungarian princess and a seemingly hapless Polish scientist, who undertake to drive from Switzerland to the Sudan in a Cadillac. It is a travelogue that bristles with suspicion and deception—but don’t listen to me, listen to a certain highly acclaimed spy novelist who reviewed McCarry’s literary debut: “The level of reality it achieves is high indeed; it is superbly constructed, wholly convincing, and displays insights that are distinctly refreshing. A new and very welcome talent.” Good call, Eric Ambler."
D.G. Myers reviews Shelley's Heart, the masterful political thriller by Charles McCarry, in the May issue of Commentary: "Though McCarry distrusts abstract ideas, he is masterful at dramatizing their influence. Written in a fluent and sharp-toothed prose modeled upon W. Somerset Maugham and Evelyn Waugh, Shelley's Heart succeeds in creating an utterly believable world in which ideology has run amok. McCarry's portrait of the inner experience of an American radical is entirely convincing: "Correctness was virtue; belief was personal validity; doctrine was truth. All else was evil." So is his dystopian portrait of Washington's near future, in which deer run freely in the streets because of laws governing endangered species, thermostats must be set low and lights dimmed by government mandate, and terrorists have more advanced weaponry than the Secret Service because of budget cuts. McCarry is more interested in persons, the moral drama of men and women operating at crosspurposes, than in flogging a thesis. Although the "whole point" of America's elite institutions is to "turn out a type," as the President's lawyer says, Shelley's Heart contains no types—no "flat" characters in E.M. Forster's sense of having been "constructed round a single idea or quality." The life of every person in the novel is complicated by temperament, memory, and love or its lack. McCarry is particularly good at snagging personality on exact details: Julian Hubbard is a "compulsive diarist" and bird watcher, using "well-worn Zeiss binoculars" that his father had taken from "the corpse of an SS officer"; Franklin Mallory reads Macaulay's essay on Boswell's Life of Johnson with a pen in hand; President Lockwood greets his lawyers in an old University of Kentucky sweatsuit and thick socks; up close, Archimedes Hammett looks "like a Richard Avedon photograph of Muammar Qadaffi." Even better is that McCarry fully unfolds his characters dramatically—through their twisted histories and mixed-motive actions. McCarry is one of the few American novelists to have written with distinction about what Irving Howe called "politics as a milieu or mode of life." Shelley's Heart is a classic that examines how the American Left came to be and how potent the American Left still is. It might best be understood not as a conspiracy thriller but rather as a dark satire. Given how many of McCarry's wild surmises have become reality since its initial release, however, no one should make the mistake of attempting to compartmentalize his remarkable novel."
Kirkus Reviews takes a look at Charles McCarry's Shelley's Heart, coming next month in a new hardcover edition: "There's skullduggery afoot, and plenty of political intrigue, in this latest by accomplished mysterian McCarry (Christopher's Ghosts, 2007, etc.), whose overarching message might be that one has no friends in Washington, those who call you friend are likely to do you harm, and when Republicans call you friend—well, schedule an appointment with the undertaker. McCarry's setup is out of the headlines: A conservative presidential candidate wins office via electoral fraud. This time, however, his opponent has evidence. Enter the FIS—the heir to the CIA, replacing it "after it collapsed under the weight of the failures and scandals resulting from its misuse by twentieth-century Presidents." Enter spooks, defense contractors, lobbyists and assorted other denizens of the District of Columbia—and, to boot, a few deranged assassins and Yale graduates up to no good. The plot thickens and thickens—it has to, after all, since, among other things, part of it turns on a presumptive president's debating "the advantages and disadvantages of appointing a man he believed to be an enemy of democracy as Chief Justice of the United States." There's more than one clef in this roman, which has all the requisites of a Frederick Forsyth–style thriller but adds a few modern twists, some the product of a supersecret Moroccan-born agent whose stiletto heels are the real deal. She's not the only hotty, and there's the requisite steamy sex, too, told in requisite steamy language: "His great ursine weight fell upon her with a brutality that made her gasp with pleasure." Other gasps await good guys and bad guys alike, especially when drilled by tiny bullets to the thorax and other unpleasant means of dispatch.Will democracy survive? Readers will be left guessing until the last minute. A pleasing 21st-century rejoinder to the 1962 novel Seven Days in May, and a capable whodunit."
Variety reports that writer/director/producer David Koepp will adapt the Charles McCarry novel Shelley's Heart into a political drama called "Article II" that he'll direct for Columbia pictures! A new hardcover edition of Shelley's Heart will be published by Overlook in April.
Shelley's Heart was originally published in 1995 to great acclaim. The novel is centered on the first presidential election of the twenty-first century, bitterly contested by two men who are implacable political rivals but lifelong personal friends, is stolen through computer fraud. On the eve of the Inauguration, the losing candidate presents proof of the crime to his opponent, the incumbent President, and demands that he stand aside. The winner refuses and takes the oath of office, thereby setting in motion what may destroy him and his party, and bring down the Constitution. From this crisis, McCarry, author of the classic thrillers The Tears of Autumn and The Last Supper weaves a masterpiece of political intrigue. Shelley’s Heart is so gripping in its realism and so striking in its foresight that McCarry’s devoted readers may view this tale of love, murder, betrayal, and life-or-death struggle for the political soul of America as an astonishing act of prophecy.
Charles McCarry's 1979 thriller, The Better Angels, is reviewed in the Toronto Star: "In the course of Charles McCarry's recently released thriller, The Better Angels, Arab terrorists lay plans to crash domestic passenger planes into Western targets. Ah, the unwary reader concludes, McCarry is borrowing from the most terrible episode in early 21st century American history. No, no, the more informed reader realizes, McCarry isn't repeating history. In a remarkable feat of prescience, his book actually anticipates future events. McCarry wrote and published The Better Angels in 1979. Now, in a worthy venture, the American publisher Overlook has launched a program of reissuing McCarry's past novels in new hardcover copies. The series begins with The Better Angels, which happens to be a timely choice for more reasons than McCarry's foreshadowing of 9/11. This kind of extravagant stuff sounds like leftovers from a lame Tom Clancy novel, but in McCarry's sophisticated hands, the material becomes engrossing and convincing. McCarry's own background is in diplomacy and espionage. A man now in his 80s, he began his political life in the Eisenhower administration and later worked as a CIA undercover operative for nine years. He says his two writing influences are Somerset Maugham and Richard Condon. His books reflect the civilized treachery of Maugham's spy novels and the subversive imagination of Condon's thrillers. The talent for predicting is exclusively McCarry's own. Apart from getting 9/11 right, he seems to have been one of the earliest thriller writers to work computers into his plot. As an instrument in Horace Hubbard's machinations, his number one assistant gets "computers talking to one another." It's true that only a minute group of people in the entire world are aware of computers in The Better Angels, but it seems remarkable that, as early as 1979, McCarry even considered a computer as an essential plot device. It seems certain that McCarry's imagination, freewheeling and abundant as it was in 1979, would never have conceived of a Sarah Palin appearing as any party's vice-presidential candidate." - Jack Batten
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran Scott Timberg's recent Q&A with the legendary Charles McCarry, author of two recent hardback reissues: Second Sight and The Better Angels. Here's a short excerpt:
Q: How do you achieve your style? A: I don't feel when I'm writing that I'm drawing from any other writer, but of course I must be. The writers I've admired have been not so very different from myself: Evelyn Waugh, for example, that kind of crystalline prose. And I've always admired W. Somerset Maugham more than any other writer. He also writes in an absolutely clear and conversational style. But I have to tell you, I write in a very peculiar way. I think about a book for 25 or 30 years in a kind of inchoate way, and at one point or another I realize the book is ready to be written. I usually have a character, a first line and general idea of what the book is going to be about. And I sit down and start writing, 1,000 words a day; it used be 1,500 when I was younger. And it just happens. I hardly ever read a thriller. I was very fond of Eric Ambler --- another one of my masters. I think he must be a strong subconscious influence.
Q: It's amazing that
The Better Angels, along with
Tears of Autumn and your other novels, spent several decades out of print. Do you have a theory about why, despite your reputation among people who've read you, you're so far from being a household name?
A: Frankly it's a mystery to me. I think it's maybe because I've always written against fashion. Also, from the beginnings the books were marketed as thrillers and they aren't really. I don't think Random House would have had the success with Cormac McCarthy that they've had if they marketed his books as Westerns.
Q: I think you've said that your time in the CIA was not glamorous or exciting.
A: That's correct. It was tedious and boring. It's like being in love: long periods of deprivation and loneliness and suspicion and anxiety, punctuated by moments of intense gratification. And then the cycle begins over again. It consists largely of waiting, in fact, I've sat around in hotel rooms waiting for agents to turn up for weeks at a time. And finally they do --- you're supposed to meet them on the Champs-Elysees at 11 o'clock on Tuesday and they think they're supposed to be in Copenhagen on that day. Because there's so much of the charade involved in tradecraft, there's continual misunderstanding.
In a rare interview published in The Los Angeles Times today, Charles McCarry talks about his prophetic thriller The Better Angels, first published in 1979 and now being reissued in hardcover by The Overlook Press. Scott Timberg writes: "Despite unceasing critical support and strong sales in the 1970s, McCarry's novels were available in later decades only in used bookstores. But since 2005, the Overlook Press has been gradually reissuing all his work, and this month they're publishing The Better Angels. The novel, originally published in 1979 and set in the '90s, reads like a prehistory of the Sept. 11 attacks: While most of it takes place in Washington, D.C., the book's plot is set in motion by a rabble-rousing Arab Muslim leader and a Middle Eastern terrorist who once exploded planes over Israel."
James Fallows comments on superior genre fiction in the Atlantic online: "Some reviewers and blurbers have loved Joseph Weisberg's An Ordinary Spy. A few others have not -- you can go find those reviews yourself. One of my rules of life is: there are a whole lot of terrible books out there, but many, many books deserve a better shake and wider audience than they receive. An Ordinary Spy deserves attention and a chance. Its immediately noticeable gimmick is that pages in the finished book have passages blacked out, "redacted," as if this really were what the fictional premise holds, the memoir of a CIA agent. But the book's real point is conveying what the craft of spying is like -- now, with all we know about failures of intelligence and America's blundering in the world. Weisberg himself is a former CIA agent. Is his account realistic? Well, the CIA's former chief of counterintelligence says so: An Ordinary Spy captures perfectly the spy world I lived in my whole career, how we talk, how we think, and how we operate. Joe gets it better than Clancy and is on a par with McCarry.The McCarry here is of course the sainted Charles McCarry, former CIA agent and author of The Tears of Autumn and many subsequent Paul Christopher novels. (McCarry is a good friend of mine; I have met Weisberg only briefly but do know his wife and brother.) . . .But overall I thought this was a very good book. To be put in Charles McCarry's company, for knowledge of spycraft and for narrative skill, is high praise -- and deserved, I think. Check it out."
The Washington Post includes Charles McCarry's Christopher's Ghosts as one of the Best Books of 2007 in their special Holiday Book issue. In the Post review from last May, Patrick Anderson wrote: "It is certainly one of the better Christopher novels . . . McCarry is back in form here, and by pitting the Christopher family against the Nazis, he is deadly serious. The story is rich in suspense, colorful characters, sudden surprises and detail. His prose, as always, in elegance itself."
With the paperback releases of The Tears of Autumn and The Miernik Dossier, and the hardcover reissue of Second Sight, the great Charles McCarry is back in the spotlight.
The December issue of
Men's Journal magazine features a list of the Top Literary Thrillers ever written and coming in at #5 is
The Tears of Autumn, McCarry's international bestseller now available in a new trade paperback edition. This classic Paul Christopher novel, originally published in 1974, explores the JFK assasination. In the current issue of
The Kenyon Review, Andre Bernard writes of his own recent discovery of
The Tears of Autumn: "McCarry's style is just terrific. He's wonderfully fluid, writing elegantly yet succintly about the underbelly of government. His characters are fully formed, his landscapes and cities are real breathing things. He fills his tale with casual yet vital tidbits about the trade of spies, and whether they are true to life or imagined the resulting picture is stunningly vivid. He has a flair for summing up history and conjuring a vision of an out-of-control American military establishment. . . If you haven't discovered McCarry, now is the time to head to your local bookstore."
McCarry's latest novel, Christopher's Ghosts, was published in May, and continues to earn rave reviews from all over the world. In the November Commentary, Brian M. Carney offers a thoughtful review of McCarry's compelling tale of a young Paul Christopher in pre-war Berlin, and concludes: "You need not have read a Paul Christopher novel to appreciate Christopher's Ghosts. (In my opinion, the masterpiece among McCarry's works is The Last Supper). But if this is your first, it is unlikely to be your last." And from down under, The Sydney Morning Herald declares "McCarry has written an elegant historical novel elaborating the formative moments in the life of his recurring character, CIA operative Paul Christopher. Christopher's Ghosts is a kind or prequel for those lucky enough to have discovered McCarry earlier. And if you haven't, it may be a good place to start before backtracking through the catalogue of an author whom P.J. O'Rourke describes as the best modern writer on the subject of intrigue."
Charles McCarry's acclaimed novel Second Sight is finally available in a new hardcover edition from Overlook. This is the seventh in the series of Paul Christopher novels, a thrilling story that combines masterful flashbacks and memorable characters. Writing in USA Today, novelist Ross Thomas noted that "it may well be the best of the fictional spy dynasty, that remarkable Christopher clan . . . It is without a doubt, a special treat for those of us who dote on novels of espionage as it is practiced by our betters. To paraphrase another gifted novelist, McCarry has successfully taken spying out of the dark alleys of the world and dumped it back into Georgetown where it belongs."
Now in paperback for the first time in many, many years is
Charles McCarry's legendary debut novel
The Miernik Dossier. This is Mac's introduction to that eminent spy of all spies, Paul Christopher, who is an American agent in deep cover in the twilight world of international intrigue. Originally published in 1973,
The Miernik Dossier is one of the great spy novels of our generation and the perfect companion to
The Tears of Autumn, also new in the trade paperback format.
Today's DCist mentions beloved Overlook Press author Charles McCarry's exclusive engagement Friday night at the great Politics & Prose, bringing together a singularly magnificent bookstore and a legendary writer of the highest order. Yes, Fridays are for getting away early, but this Friday it's worth sticking around in the DC metro area a little bit later.
Christopher's Ghosts, Mr. McCarry's latest, has not merely confirmed his place among our literature's most superior writers of any ilk, but also boldly reinvented the spy thriller. See above the intrepid and knowledgeable staff of the aforementioned indy book giant. Only a store of their caliber could host an author such as Mr. McCarry. Please attend for a reading and booksigning you will always remember:
Politics & Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse
Directions and Accessibility
5015 Connecticut Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20008
1-800-722-0790
202-364-1919
202-966-7532 (Fax)
STORE HOURS:
Mon -Thur 9:00 a.m. - 10:00 p.m.
Fri & Sat 9:00 a.m. - 11:00 p.m.
Sunday 10:00 a.m. - 8 p.m.
If you're unable to attend the signing, call or e-mail and try to get a signed copy for yourself and your loved ones. Father's Day is Sunday. And helpful booksellers are standing by.
Charles McCarry is coming to a radio near you talking about his new novel Christopher's Ghosts and his classic thriller of the Kennedy assassination The Tears of Autumn, which releases in paperback Tuesday 6/5.
Listen up!
6/5 8 AM WOCM-FM Ocean City, MD--"Rude Awakening with Mad Dog"
6/5 8:40 AM KUKA-FM Corpus Christie, TX--"The Morning Show with Pete Vasquez"
6/6 7:35 AM USA NETWORK "Daybreak USA" with Al Lerner
6/6 5:15 PM WDWS-AM Champaign, IL "Gary O'Brien and Friends"
6/8 9:30 AM KCMN-AM Colorado Springs, CO "Tron in the Morning"
The great Otto Penzler takes notice of the latest Paul Christopher novel in today's NEW YORK SUN:
There is something disconcerting, even embarrassing, about having so much affection for an author that writing about him becomes too great a challenge. Words of praise become inadequate, almost juvenile, in their failed attempts to adequately describe the brilliance of a given work, somewhat like trying to explain the love one feels in a perfect marriage, or at the birth of a first child. This fear of losing all critical faculties strikes like an arrow in the heart whenever I'm confronted with a new work by America's greatest espionage writer, Charles McCarry. It is no good thing to be seen as obsequious or awed when writing about a book, but there is no credit in finding flaws in an object of rare beauty, either. While it is indeed possible that there is no such thing as a perfect creation by the mind and hands of man, a scarce few works of art come closer than others, and Mr. McCarry has approached that ideal on a number of occasions, bringing joy and understanding to those fortunate enough to have encountered his novels.
Further good notice of the new Paul Christopher novel by Charles McCarry comes from the WASHINGTON POST today and THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER yesterday:
"Fans of the superior espionage author Charles McCarry know of his long series featuring agent and gentleman Paul Christopher. Now, in Christopher's Ghosts (Overlook Press, $25, 304 pp.), we flash back to a teenage Christopher falling in love, with dangerous consequences, both immediately and later."--Michele Ross
"McCarry is back in form here, and by pitting the Christopher family against the Nazis, he is deadly serious. The story is rich in suspense, colorful characters, sudden surprises and detail. His prose, as always, is elegance itself."--Patrick Anderson
Terrific reviews continue to pour in on Charles McCarry's new literary thriller Christopher's Ghosts. Check it out:
"Many critics believe that Charles McCarry is the finest espionage writer working today. Count me in. He writes with precise attention to detail yet manages to encompass the big picture of the bloodiest century in history, avoiding unnecessary drama and excessive heroics. This is the way it really was, the reader thinks upon digesting a McCarry book, which is the finest compliment that can be paid any novelist."--Steve Bennett, San Antonio Express-News
"Our greatest spy novels aren't concerned just with gadgets, lingo and tradecraft, they're also alive with compelling characters and moral dilemmas that resonate long afterward in a reader's mind. McCarry has been developing his main character for decades, and readers are richer for it. He isn't writing spy novels as much as elegant installments in the life of his most fascinating creation — that "Old Boy" and second-generation spy Paul Christopher, whose adventures have ranged from pre-World War II Berlin through the Cold War to the current war on terror."--Denise Hamilton, Los Angeles Times
"Christopher's Ghosts is the latest in a series of often elegant novels that former CIA officer Charles McCarry has written about his fictional spy Paul Christopher, American intelligence and the Christopher clan. This novel should find itself in many a briefcase and flight bag this summer."--Steve Hirsch, The Washington Times
Good word from the DENVER POST on Charles McCarry's latest!
This week marks the triumphant return of the famed Paul Christopher in his first (and possibly last) adventure. Christopher's Ghosts serves as both a prequel and a coda to Christopher's legendary and troubled career and extends the reach of the Christopher family through all the major events of the late Twentieth Century. Order your copy today. Charles McCarry will be reading and signing at Politics and Prose in Washington DC June 15th.
"Effectively a prequel to McCarry's series of outstanding novels featuring master spy Paul Christopher this exciting tale presents the prolog and denouement-two periods separated by 20 haunted years-of one of CIA agent Christopher's most dramatic career problems....The book has much to recommend it: the prose is elegantly literate, the plot unfolds clearly, the characters are drawn in satisfying detail, the transitions are graceful, the sense of place and time is strong, and the "tradecraft" is as authentic as circumstances permit."--Library Journal
"Veteran McCarry remains a compelling storyteller, as shown in his latest spy thriller, which chronicles the early career of his series hero, Paul Christopher....The book speeds toward a satisfying, inevitable conclusion."--Publishers Weekly
"McCarry takes the story of his recurring master spy Paul Christopher back to its wildly romantic beginning....[He] remains at the top of his game."--Kirkus Reviews
The great Witold Rybczynski chose THE LAST SUPPER by Charles McCarry for one of SLATE's BEST BOOKS OF 2006:
My favorite bedtime read this year was Charles McCarry's The Last Supper. This political thriller was actually written in 1986, but Overlook Press has been republishing his tales of Cold War espionage at the rate of one or two a year, so I guess it qualifies as "new." Like all the best spy novelists since Graham Greene, McCarry creates a world of his own. It helps some that he spent years in the CIA doing undercover work; it helps more that he's a very good storyteller.
Charles McCarry's The Miernik Dossier is chosen by novelist Alan Furst as one of the Five Best spy tales ever written in The Wall Street Journal: "With The Miernik Dossier, Charles McCarry introduced us to Paul Christopher, the brilliant and sensitive CIA officer who would appear in a series of perhaps more widely known novels, such as The Secret Lovers and Second Sight. The book itself is the “dossier” in question: the reports and memoranda filed by a quintet of mutually mistrustful espionage agents, including a seductive Hungarian princess and a seemingly hapless Polish scientist, who undertake to drive from Switzerland to the Sudan in a Cadillac. It is a travelogue that bristles with suspicion and deception—but don’t listen to me, listen to a certain highly acclaimed spy novelist who reviewed McCarry’s literary debut: “The level of reality it achieves is high indeed; it is superbly constructed, wholly convincing, and displays insights that are distinctly refreshing. A new and very welcome talent.” Good call, Eric Ambler."
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