Charles McCarry finds himself back in print
His 1979 spy novel 'The Better Angels,' reissued this month, has some similarities to 9/11.
"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 LeCarré 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 LeCarré 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.
I think you've said that your time in the CIA was not glamorous or exciting.
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.
