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 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."

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."

Charles McCarry's SHELLEY'S HEART in Kirkus Reviews

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."

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.

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.