America's Greatest Espionage Writer
The Crime Scene
By OTTO PENZLER
May 17, 2006
Upon the publication of Charles McCarry's most recent spy novel, "Old Boys," I wrote a column about him for The New York Sun (June 2, 2004), and, as the former New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel would say, you could look it up. In it, I described him as "the greatest espionage writer that America has ever produced."
I also wrote: "One of the great bafflements of contemporary literature is the fact that Mr. McCarry is not one of the household names whose books soar to the top of the bestseller lists."
A few weeks ago, a gentleman named Jacob Heilbrunn reviewed for the New York Times Book Review (April 2) the reissue of Mr. McCarry's splendid novel, "The Last Supper" (Overlook Press, 389 pages, $24.95). He wrote: "McCarry has written numerous novels, including the popular 'The Tears of Autumn,' but he has never been a household name."
In my column, I also wrote: "Mr. McCarry is the American [John] le Carre, equaling him stylistically but surpassing his English counterpart in terms of intellectual depth and moral clarity. While Mr. le Carre indulges in moral relativism, essentially suggesting that the spies of Western democratic governments are not noticeably more decent or ethical than those who work for totalitarian regimes, Mr. McCarry takes the opposite view. He recognizes that relentless duplicity, especially to those one loves, has a damaging effect on the psyche. Nonetheless, he endows his protagonists with a basic decency that even the onerous weight of a clandestine life cannot eradicate."
In his review, Mr. Heilbrunn writes: "Le Carre depicts the remorseless grind of life as a spy not as an end in it self, but to draw broader lessons about loyalty and betrayal. Still, McCarry never succumbs to a bogus moral equivalence in which Western operatives are as nefarious as their Communist counterparts."
These paragraphs seem to bear striking resemblance to one another, but please do not misunderstand. I am not suggesting for one instant (and I am emphatically not being sarcastic here) that Mr. Heilbrunn read my column and cribbed from it. His review was intelligent, moral, and praiseworthy in every respect. The point is that these observations are so obviously and importantly accurate that, when I necessarily reiterate them here while praising "The Last Supper,"I don't want anyone saying,"Uh, hello, I just read that."
The Overlook Press is reissuing Mr. McCarry's spy novels in hardcover, which is what they deserve, because they are as much a part of our national literature as the works of Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, and Ernest Hemingway and deserve the permanence of well-made, durable volumes that belong on the shelves of anyone who thinks good books matter.
It is a trifle peculiar, however, for the publisher to reissue "The Last Supper" before reissuing "The Secret Lovers," which not only preceded it chronologically but features the same hero, Paul Christopher, some of whose experiences in the earlier book are alluded to in the latter. There is no way that I want to say anything to suggest you shouldn't drop everything and get a copy of "The Last Supper," which is a masterpiece, but I'd like to make a strong plea for you also to get "The Miernik Dossier," Mr. McCarry's first spy book and "The Tears of Autumn," possibly the greatest espionage novel ever written and certainly the most compelling effort to unravel the many secrets surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy. Then read them in the proper sequence, because it matters - not a lot, but still ...
Paul Christopher is the son of Hubbard Christopher who, in "The Last Supper," joins "the Outfit" (aka the CIA) in an attempt to find his wife, Lori, a member of a wealthy Prussian family who ran afoul of the Gestapo near the outbreak of World War II and disappeared. When Hubbard is killed, Paul, a poet (as is Mr. McCarry), also joins the Outfit in order to help find his father's murderer. The young man quickly learns that he is good as an intelligence agent and his career eventually takes him to Vietnam in the 1960s, as well as communist China - in a prison camp.
In its way, "The Last Supper" is a history of the Outfit. Not quite as obviously or as ambitiously as Robert Littell's excellent "The Company" (Overlook, 896 pages, $15), but at least as knowingly (Mr. McCarry was a deep undercover CIA agent during the years of Communist threat). From its individualistic beginnings during World War II to its bureaucratic bloating in the Cold War era and beyond, readers have the opportunity to see the organization in operation, mainly through the eyes of the heroic central figure.
As with all of Mr. McCarry's novels, there is a large cast of characters who rarely do what you think they'll do and who may fool you in the most astonishing ways. There are, too, quotable dialogue and pithy aphorisms galore.
One character expresses a certain frustration in his relationship with the Soviets. "What's it like, working for the Russians?" he is asked. "Maddening," he replies. "They are not a nation of watchmakers, the Russians. They do everything with a sledgehammer."
There is an illuminating moment when the difference is explained between an individual murder and one committed as a necessary action in the labyrinthine world of espionage. Mr. McCarry writes of a murderer: "He feels remorse, guilt, shame, self-disgust: He is an outcast; imprisonment is a relief." But, he continues,
The man who kills at the order of an intelligence service has none of these ... psychological problems: in committing a murder that in other circumstances would be regarded as the work of a psychopath, he has done his country a service and his country pays him, gets rid of the murder weapon, and folds him in its maternal embrace."
Does this seem cold? Maybe that explains why a spy might want to come in from it.
Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual "Best American Mystery Stories." He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.
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