Charles McCarry

Charles McCarry (born in 1930, in Massachusetts, USA) is an American writer, primarily of spy fiction, and a former undercover operative for the Central Intelligence Agency who The Wall Street Journal, in 2013, described as the dean of American spy writers.[1] William Zinsser calls him a "political novelist:" [2]Jonathan Yardley, Pulitzer Prize winning critic for the Washington Post, calls him a "'serious' novelist" whose work may include "the best novel ever written about life in high-stakes Washington, DC." [3]

Early life

His family is from The Berkshires area of western Massachusetts, and he currently lives in Virgina..[4]

Approach to Writing

McCarry believes that "the best novels are about ordinary things: love, betrayal, death, trust, loneliness, marriage, fatherhood." [5] He also says "if you write a political novel, you're writing what you believe instead of what you know."[6]

McCarry writes that: "After I resigned [from the CIA], intending to spend the rest of my life writing fiction and knowing what tricks the mind can play when the gates are thrown wide open, as they are by the act of writing, between the imagination and that part of the brain in which information is stored, I took the precaution of writing a closely remembered narrative of my clandestine experiences. After correcting the manuscript, I burned it. What I kept for my own use was the atmosphere of secret life: How it worked on the five senses and what it did to the heart and mind. All the rest went up in flames, setting me free henceforth to make it all up. In all important matters, such as the creation of characters and the invention of plots, with rare and minor exceptions, that is what I have done. And, as might be expected, when I have been weak enough to use something that really happened as an episode in a novel, it is that piece of scrap, buried in a landfill of the imaginary, readers invariably refuse to believe."[7]

Throughout McCarry's fiction are statements and descriptions such as "the average intelligence officer is a sort of latter-day Marcel Proust. He lies abed in a cork-lined room, hoping to profit by secrets that other people slip under the door."[8]


A critic for Tin House magazine approaches McCarry through what the critic calls "the art of the sentence," citing as an example a description in the opening pages of McCarry's The Secret Lovers: “The sun shone feebly through the overcast, like a lamp covered by a woman’s scarf in a shabby hotel room.”[9]

Career

Military, U.S. presidential speechwriter, CIA

McCarry began his writing career in the United States Army as a correspondent for Stars and Stripes, afterwards, in the 1950s, serving as a speechwriter for President Dwight D. Eisenhower before taking a post with the CIA for whom he traveled the globe as a deep cover operative (that his son, Nathan McCarry (CEO of Pluribus International Corporation described, in 2014, as being trying for the family), but left the CIA, in 1967, becoming a writer of spy novels.[1][10][11] McCarry rarely speaks or writes directly about those years, saying simply, "For a decade at the height of the Cold War, I worked abroad under cover as an intelligence agent."[12]

As an editor and writer

McCarry was editor-at-large for National Geographic and has contributed pieces to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the "Saturday Evening Post," and other national publications.

In as essay published by the Washington Post, he says that "for a writer in America, going out to dinner is like living as an American in Europe: Total strangers think they can say anything they like to you."[13]

As commentator and book reviewer

"The Paul Christopher Series"

Ten of McCarry's novels involve the life story of a fictional character named Paul Christopher, who--in McCarry's telling--grew up in pre-Nazi Germany, and later became a lone operative for a U.S. government entity that is clearly the Central Intelligence Agency.[14]

These books, in order of publication, are:

Select Reviews, Positive and Negative, of the Above

"It’s tempting to say that Charles McCarry’sThe Tears of Autumn is the greatest espionage novel ever written by an American, if only because it’s hard to conceive of one that could possibly be better. But since no one can claim to have read every America espionage novel ever written, let’s just say that The Tears of Autumn is a perfect spy novel, and that its hero, Paul Christopher, should by all rights be known the world over as the thinking man’s James Bond — and woman’s too."--Brendan Bernard, "The Great American Spy Novel," March 31, 2005', LA Weekly[15]


"Old Boys is a large yarn that will make yummy reading between long looks at Nantucket Sound this summer. (And a boffo movie in the right hands.) But it is a tale that travels from the outlandish to the absurd. As long as readers don't expect the taut realism we have come to expect from the man, they'll be fine. If they're looking for vintage McCarry, though, this will produce unhappy campers. The book does not approach his better grownup fiction. It is not in the same league, for example, with The Miernik Dossier, the small gem that made McCarry's career. Rather, it is something of a "Treasure Island" for lovers of spook fiction, a near-juvenile adventure that entrances adults who know better with fabulous writing. What they do get is a fleeting reprise of McCarry's great creation, Paul Christopher. Christopher, the spy whom many first met in McCarry's bestseller The Tears of Autumn, is now an opaque older man and an ascetic survivor of a Chinese prison camp."--Sam Allis, "McCarry's thriller 'Old Boys' is a trip past believable," Boston Globe, July 26, 2004[16]


McCarry's Fiction: Insights into the CIA

In The Secret Lovers (1979) and its sequel, Shelley's Heart (1995), McCarry imagines a Washington, D.C. in which the CIA has been disbanded "after it collapsed under the weight of the failures and scandals resulting from its misuse by twentieth century Presidents," and has been replaced by a FIS (Foreign Intelligence Service).[17]

Technological Predictions in McCarry's Fiction

--Computer algorithms that analysis media content and specify--with accuracy--when a physical war between two countries will break out. The Better Angels, 1979.[18] --


Morality (Political and Personal) in McCarry's Fiction

--Jacob Heilbrunn writes in the N.Y. Times (2006): "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 travails are evoking nostalgia for a golden age when it supposedly operated effectively, McCarry offers a useful reminder that such an era never existed."[19]

McCarry on Being Alone

Adaptations in Other Media

The film Wrong is Right (1982), starring Sean Connery, was loosely based on McCarry's novel, The Better Angels (1979).[21]

Influences

McCarry is an admirer of the work of W. Somerset Maugham, especially the Ashenden stories. He was also an admirer of Richard Condon, author of The Manchurian Candidate (1959), Prizzi's Honor (1982), and numerous other novels.[4]

Other Books

Non-Paul Christopher novels

Non-fiction

--Stories include: In March 1981, shortly after taking office, Ronald Reagan was shot; Secretary of State Haig appeared in the White House press room and announced, "I am in charge here!"[23]

References

  1. 1 2 Trachtenberg, Jeffrey (May 9, 2013). "An Ex-CIA Agent’s Novel Take on Spying in China". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved June 7, 2017.
  2. ↑ William Zinssr, "Paths of Resistance: the Art and Craft of the Political Novel," 1989.
  3. ↑ "The Powers that Be," Washington Post, June 4, 1995.
  4. 1 2 Birnbaum, Robert (2004). "Interview: Birnbaum v. Charles McCarry". The Morning News. Retrieved June 9, 2010.
  5. ↑ Charles McCarry, "A Strip of Exposed Film, " in Paths of Resistance, p. 69.
  6. ↑ Charles McCarry, "Strip of Exposed Film."
  7. ↑ Charles McCarry, "Between the Real and the Believable," Washington Post, December 11, 1994.
  8. ↑ Charles McCarry, "The End of the String," a short story published in Agents of Change, 2010, p.7.
  9. ↑ "The Art of the Sentence," Tin House', January 8, 2013.
  10. ↑ "Nathan McCarry, Founder, President & CEO at Pluribus International". Executive Leaders Radio. executiveleadersradio.com. March 13, 2014. Retrieved June 7, 2017.
  11. ↑ "Authors: Charles McCarry". Mysterious Press. mysteriouspress.com. Retrieved June 7, 2017.
  12. ↑ Charles McCarry, "Between the Real and the Believable," Washington Post, December 11, 1994.
  13. ↑ December 11, 1994
  14. ↑ https://www.goodreads.com/series/93807-paul-christopher
  15. ↑ http://www.laweekly.com/news/the-great-american-spy-novel-2139722
  16. ↑ http://archive.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2004/07/26/mccarrys_thriller_old_boys_is_a_trip_past_believable/
  17. ↑ Shelley's Heart, p. 16.
  18. ↑ p. 284
  19. ↑ "Old-Fashioned Espionage," April 2, 2006
  20. ↑ p.
  21. ↑ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084920/
  22. ↑ "The Shanghai Factor". Grove Atlantic.
  23. ↑ pp. 141-166

Further reading

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