New in Paperback: Charles McCarry's THE BETTER ANGELS

New in paperback this month is Charles McCarry's The Better Angels, the prophetic thriller that is not only one of McCarry's best, but a novel of Washington politics that many say is unsurpassed. Written over thirty years ago at the height of the Cold War, McCarry's foresight and crisp language produced a masterpiece perhaps more applicable to the world today as it was when first written.

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.

"Charles McCarry is the greatest espionage writer that America has ever produced His plots are complex and compelling, wheels within wheels joy rides that race from one corner of the globe to another, populated by three-dimensional characters who have brains and hearts. The clarity and beauty of his prose separates McCarry from everyone else, and his insider's view of the CIA adds unparalleled authenticity to every one of his novels." -Otto Penzler, owner of The Mysterious Bookshop

Spymaster Charles McCarry Profiled in The Weekly Standard

David Skinner reflects on the career of Charles McCarry in the new issue of The Weekly Standard. Here's a brief excerpt: "Charles McCarry, the spy novelist, has a number of bestsellers to brag about, if not the numbers or recognition of John le Carré. Still, many discriminating readers think he is better than le Carré. He is also the author of three grisly though impressive political novels, all of which trade liberally in satire and suspense. Praised for their prescience (two of them seem almost prophetic of shocking real-world events) they, too, can seem to be second-place finishers, with little of the cachet reserved for a Christopher Buckley or the audience enjoyed by, say, David Baldacci. McCarry seems to have what's required for literary stardom: winning characters, beguiling plots, fine prose, illuminating research. And the problem cannot be a matter of credentials. A former CIA operative who has worked in many locales, McCarry also has experience in Washington, where he's circulated in high-level politics and the upper reaches of magazine journalism. Sony pictures has an option on Shelley's Heart, and a forgotten Sean Connery movie was made of Better Angels, but Hollywood hasn't made enough of his work. Old Boys, a 2004 novel which revived McCarry's career, seems like an obvious candidate for a Clint Eastwood or Jack Nicholson production. In it, a likable bunch of old men, all retired CIA, take off for one last border-crossing, gun-toting, law-breaking adventure to find their missing friend, Paul Christopher, the sad-hearted hero of McCarry's spy thrillers. It is McCarry's most fun book, and its commercial and critical success led to a frantic market for copies of his other novels, all of which had been out of print. But Overlook Press began reissuing them, and the Washington-set Shelley's Heart was re-released this year.

After buying a copy of Old Boys off the remainder table at Book Revue, a nice store in Huntington, Long Island, I started reading my way through McCarry's novels. Not regularly a reader of thrillers or spy novels, I was surprised at how they lit a fire in me. Sensing an essay in my future, I arranged to interview the author. "The Harbor," the McCarry home in the Berkshires, is like the Berlin apartment of his characters Lori and Hubbard Christopher: "They lived ashore as they lived on their boat, everything ship-shape, with nothing more than they needed." And his cooking was reminiscent of food preparation in his books: simple, light, Mediterranean. For our lunch he made the best crab cakes I've had outside of Oceanaire. McCarry is tall and bald, with a hairless face and owl-like eyes that betray little but a constant flicker of mental processing.

For those who crave vérité, McCarry's years in government, on the campaign trail, and his share of face-time with impressive politicos should lend his Washington fiction every bit as much authenticity as his CIA days lend his Paul Christopher novels. The Washington novels have also delivered important news. Better Angels introduced, long before 9/11, the suicide bomber who uses his own body as a delivery device and boards commercial planes, seeking to blow them up mid-air. Shelley's Heart, published three years before the impeachment of Bill Clinton, showed America's two major parties dueling in Congress for control of the White House, as a recently appointed Supreme Court justice (who bears a strong resemblance to Ralph Nader) looks to manipulate the chaotic hearings to effect a transition from the traditional separation of powers to a rule of one--himself.

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.

In the late 1970s McCarry heard about another great fan. While writing a travelogue on the southwestern United States for National Geographic Books, he paid a visit to Lady Bird Johnson in Texas who, as she showed off the wildflowers on the grounds of the LBJ Ranch, turned and asked, "Are you the Mr. McCarry who wrote Tears of Autumn?" McCarry allowed that he was.
The former first lady smiled and said, "Lyndon loved that book."

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."

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.

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."

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

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.

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:

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.

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."