"There is no better spy novelist," Lev Grossman wrote recently in Time magazine of Charles McCarry, whose biggest hit, the JFK-assassination-themed "Tears of Autumn," was published in 1975. "It's like the best parts of 10 John LeCarre novels all put together." McCarry's early fans included Eric Ambler, the British spy-fiction pioneer.
Yet McCarry, who matches the philosophical searching and fully drawn characters of LeCarre as well as the Old World romanticism of Alan Furst, is today criminally unknown -- perhaps an appropriate position for a man who worked for the CIA under deep cover in Europe, Asia and Africa from 1957 to '67.
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.
"The debris, fragments of the machine and parts of human bodies, had fallen into the city streets and onto rooftops. . . . All this happened at a time when security measures were so strict that authorities believed it had finally become impossible for a terrorist to smuggle any sort of bomb or weapon aboard a passenger flight."
McCarry, 77, who lives in the Berkshires and on the Florida coast, spoke recently about espionage, Maugham, "The Better Angels," and a career both celebrated and neglected.
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I think you've said that your time in the CIA was not glamorous or exciting.
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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.
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I want to read a few lines from "The Better Angels" and ask you to describe their meaning:
"Horace . . . perceived that nothing ran unmixed in men or causes or nations. Evil was permanent and it was everywhere. What mattered was that it should be channeled, tricked into working for your own side. That was what an intelligence service was for."
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I certainly believe that. I've always been baffled by critics of the CIA, who are horrified that it does illegal things. That is the purpose of an intelligence service: to perform illegal acts. I think one of the first things that was said to me, when I presented myself for training and briefing, was that, "You must understand that espionage is a criminal activity in any country except your own. Whenever you recruit an agent you suborn him to treason, a capital crime in every country in the world."
And I suppose when I was writing that I was presenting Horace as a supreme realist.
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I wonder, if intelligence is about performing illegal acts, what this says about the issue of torture.
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Well, I never met a torturer in the CIA or anyone who believed in it, and I certainly do not. And one of the reasons is that, like Horace, I think it's counterproductive. People are dying to tell you their secrets; it's just a matter of getting the conversation going in the right direction. If you just let people fill the silence they will let you the most extraordinary things. I sometimes wonder if afterward they remember what they've said.
It's a very complicated question. I don't think it's something that Americans ought to do, or anybody else as far as that goes. But I've been on this planet for more than three quarters of a century, and all my life I've associated decency with my country.
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Your style is hard to describe. Maybe it's a combination of elegance and a hardness . . . How do you achieve that, and which other writers do you feel you're drawing from?
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