Sneak Preview: The New York Times raves about Charles McCarry's THE LAST SUPPER

Is Charles McCarry the world's great literary espionage master? Jacob Heilbrunn graciously throws Charles' hat in the ring in his gracious and smart appreciation of McCarry's career in the 4/2/06 New York Times Book Review. Highlights follow.

"The cold war novel has fallen on hard times. Once the stuff of high drama and derring-do, the genre has pretty much evaporated along with the conflict that spawned it. Even the high priest of the form, John le Carre, moved on to new terrain, bashing multi-national corporations in THE CONSTANT GARDENER. But once an era ends, it becomes ripe for reassessment. Was le Carre really #1--or is another espionage master lurking in the shadows who might be deserving of the palm?

It is thus with more than a pinch of curiosity that one reaches for Charles McCarry's thriller THE LAST SUPPER, which first appeared in 1983 and has now been reissued by the Overlook Press. McCarry has written numerous novels, including the popular TEARS OF AUTUMN but he has never been a household name. A former American intelligence officer who did tours of duty in Europe, Africa and Asia, he mines his experiences in THE LAST SUPPER.

Written in spare, biting prose, it traverses much of the past century, from Weimar Germany to Burma during World War II, from Vietnam in the 1950s to Mao Zedong's China. Thrown in for good measure is a hefty dose of Yale's Skull and Bones, European aristocrats, gentlemen's clubs, sexual liaisons, third world assassins and other mandatory appurtenances of the cold war novel. All of this might sink to parody in the hands of a middling novelist, but McCarry is the genuine article. This is a blazingly good read that is almost impossible to put down.


So where does McCarry's nearly faultless performance leave him in the cold war novelistic pantheon? He easily best his America rivals, but whether he topples his British contemporaries from their perch is another matter. Le Carre, for example, depicts the remorseless grind of the life of a spy not as an end into itself, 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. 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 trevails are evoking nostalgia for a golden age when it supposedly operated effectively, McCarry offers a useful reminder that such an era never existed. That alone is reason enough to welcome the return of his excellent Paul Christopher novels.”

Be sure to read the entire review in this weekend's book review.--Jim