Charles McCarry rides again

Overlook Press is finally righting a wrong: reissuing the early books by Charles McCarry, thought to be arguably the best American spy novelist still writing. Now the LA Weekly catches up with the 75-year-old writer to talk about THE TEARS OF AUTUMN, now out (again) in hardcover and featuring Paul Christopher as he attempts to solve the riddle of the Kennedy assassination:

Originally published in 1974, The Tears of Autumn has been out of print for more than a decade. Thanks to the Overlook Press, which is going to be slowly reissuing several other McCarry novels, it is available once more. (Penguin has purchased the paperback rights.) Economical in length, tersely poetic in style, it purports to solve the biggest political mystery of the 20th century: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. In a just world, or at any rate a braver one, the liveliest film directors of the last few decades would have fought to bring it to the screen. That this hasn’t happened can perhaps be explained by the fact that its interpretation of the Kennedy assassination quietly stings American pride in a way even Oliver Stone wouldn’t countenance.

McCarry "only" spent ten years working for the CIA so he gets a bit annoyed that he’s always asked about it, but there’s good reason, of course — all his books are about the organization. So why hasn’t he achieved the kind of popularity afforded to John LeCarre?

Timing may have something to do with it. The post-Watergate era was not the ideal moment to bring a virtuous CIA agent before the serious reading public. Paul Christopher is the kind of American one doesn’t read about much anymore — intelligent, sensitive, multilingual, nonviolent, at home anywhere in the world, and a talented poet to boot. And though Autumn and the other books in the Christopher series are frequently skeptical about the value of intelligence work, sometimes devastatingly so, they don’t express any doubt about the value of the Cold War struggle itself, and the CIA is depicted in sympathetic terms. Unlike Le Carré, McCarry never fell for the idea that there might not be much difference, on a moral level, between the CIA and the KGB, let alone the societies they represented. Despite his self-deprecating remarks about the tedium of the work, McCarry is quietly proud of what he did for his country. He won’t talk about it except in generalities, but one senses that his contribution was significant.

After reading this (and other interviews) I know I have a ton of catching up to do…