The Better Angels is now part of the Overlook's collection of Charles McCarry in new trade paperback editions. Charles McCarry established an international reputation as a novelist with the publication of his worldwide bestseller, The Tears of Autumn, in 1975, and is the author of nine other critically acclaimed novels including The Miernik Dossier, The Secret Lovers, The Last Supper, and Christopher's Ghosts.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
New in Paperback: Charles McCarry's THE BETTER ANGELS
The Better Angels is now part of the Overlook's collection of Charles McCarry in new trade paperback editions. Charles McCarry established an international reputation as a novelist with the publication of his worldwide bestseller, The Tears of Autumn, in 1975, and is the author of nine other critically acclaimed novels including The Miernik Dossier, The Secret Lovers, The Last Supper, and Christopher's Ghosts.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Spymaster Charles McCarry Profiled in The Weekly Standard
At their best, McCarry's Washington novels are about as entertaining as any by Christopher Buckley, though more intellectual. He is superb at showing how social and institutional life in Washington work, and the account is not flattering. His touch for comedy, though at times excellent, is not light. The ideas that distinguish McCarry--some of which are truly probing, a few of which are crankish--also keep him from being to everyone's taste. He tells the story of a liberal reader who complained to him that when his books describe liberals, "they actually describe our enemies." In response, McCarry said, "Precisely." Readers who take to McCarry do so with a vengeance. Christopher Buckley himself and P. J. O'Rourke both insist this fellow scholar of Washington absurdity is more than a good scribbler, in fact an important one. And connoisseurs like Otto Penzler and fellow spy novelists like Richard Condon have called McCarry's spy novels the best by an American writer.
The former first lady smiled and said, "Lyndon loved that book."
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Alan Furst Calls THE MIERNIK DOSSIER as a "Spy Tale Unsurpassed"
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."
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Charles McCarry's SHELLEY'S HEART in Commentary
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."
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Charles McCarry: The Best Political Novelist America Has Ever Produced?
Literary critic D.G. Myers takes a long look at the work of Charles McCarry on his A Commonplace Blog: "Shelley’s Heart, is the seventh of Charles McCarry’s novels to be reissued by the Overlook Press. (It is due out next month.) Originally published in 1995, it is one of the best novels ever written about the American left. His next novel was Lucky Bastard (1998), the account of a charismatic and winning young American, a sociopath, liar, and rapist, who is groomed for the presidency by Soviet agents. And together these two novels place McCarry in the small group of Americans who have written with distinction about what Irving Howe called “politics as a milieu or mode of life" . . . Charles McCarry may be the best political novelist that the United States has ever produced."
Monday, March 02, 2009
Charles McCarry's SHELLEY'S HEART in Kirkus Reviews
Monday, February 23, 2009
Charles McCarry's SHELLEY'S HEART Headed for the Big Screen
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.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Charles McCarry on the CIA in The Wall Street Journal
Legendary espionage novelist Charles McCarry offers his view on today's CIA in the Saturday op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal. McCarry, author of eleven novels and eight nonfiction books, served for a decade overseas as a CIA agent. This April, Overlook will release a hardcover edition of Shelley's Heart, a masterful political thriller set in Washington DC.
Monday, December 01, 2008
An Agent of Disclosure: CHARLES McCARRY Profiled in Australia's The Age
Legendary spy novelist Charles McCarry is profiled in The Age, a newspaper in Melbourne, Australia. In a wide-ranging interview McCarry talks to reporter Kevin Rabaleis about his tenure in the CIA and his second career as one of this generation's most-admired novelists."I don't think of the books as spy novels," McCarry says. "When I began to write, in my naivety, I thought that I could write about espionage, which is an interesting world because everything is right out on the surface. In theory, at least, all secrets are known, at least in the Organisation. I just thought, probably because it is so much like fiction, that it was a natural subject for fiction and for the novel."
Since 1973, McCarry has produced 1½ million words of page-turning thrillers — so-called spy novels from a literary writer of often-prophetic perception. In The Better Angels (1979), for instance, he writes of America in the last decade of the 20th century when terrorists use passenger-filled planes as their weapons. These and McCarry's other novels of Paul Christopher and his family are essential volumes in the pantheon of contemporary American fiction, where for equivalents — as far as books with recurring characters go — one must look to John Updike's "Rabbit" Angstrom series or Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman books.
"I taught myself to read at the age of four," McCarry says. "I've been a voracious reader all of my life. In that sense, my books have many authors — that is, authors whom I have read in the course of my lifetime. And there are a lot of them. I'm 78 years old. I think I owe something to them. Literature, to me, is a living creature. I think that you owe it something."
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Charles McCarry's THE BETTER ANGELS in the Toronto Star
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
Friday, September 19, 2008
New in Paperback: CHRISTOPHER'S GHOSTS by Charles McCarry
Charles McCarry's electrifying Christopher's Ghosts is now available in a handsome trade paperback edition from Overlook. In McCarry's first work since the astonishing revival of his legendary espionage novels, Paul Christopher is back–but so is the only adversary that ever eluded him. The grand tale begins in Europe in the late thirties, where a young Christopher and his family are struggling against the rise of Nazi totalitarianism in Berlin, even as he wrestles with a doomed love affair and bears witness to an unspeakable atrocity committed by a remorseless S.S. officer. The action spans oceans and time to the height of the Cold War in Europe, when the S.S. man emerges out of the ruins of postwar Germany to destroy the last living witness to his crime. It’s a case of tiger chasing tiger as Christopher is pursued by the only man alive who can match his tradecraft or his instincts. As he edges toward the final confrontation with this mortal enemy, Christopher is forced to operate in the one theater he had thought he had mastered—his own past.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Charles McCarry Q&A in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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:Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Charles McCarry Talks Espionage, THE BETTER ANGELS, and a Career Celebrated and Neglected in L.A. Times Interview
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."Wednesday, March 05, 2008
James Fallows on CHARLES McCARRY in the Atlantic Online
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."
Monday, December 03, 2007
Washington Post Selects CHRISTOPHER'S GHOSTS as one of the Top Books of 2007
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."
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
More Praise for CHARLES McCARRY
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."
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Classic McCarry: SECOND SIGHT Now Available in New Hardcover Edition
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."
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Overlook Thriller: Charles McCarry's THE MIERNIK DOSSIER

Monday, June 11, 2007
Charles McCarry at Politics & Prose this Friday night
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.
Monday, June 04, 2007
Listen for Charles McCarry
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"