LA Weekly

Photo by Brendan Bernhard

It’s tempting to say that Charles McCarry’s The 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 American 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.

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, who is 75, lives in Massachusetts but spends his winters in Pompano Beach, Florida, where I met him in February. He was dressed for the 80-degree weather in a blue short-sleeved shirt, red shorts and clumpy sneakers. Photographs from the 1970s show him as dapper in a slightly tweedy way, with a full head of swept-back hair and a steady gaze on which nothing is lost. The hair is gone now, but the eyes, set wide apart above a long, narrow nose and a chin that retreats rapidly into his neck, have grown wearier. Many novelists who have written about espionage, including Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John Le Carré, indulged in a bit of cloak-and-dagger themselves, but few did as much as McCarry, who served for 10 years, from 1957 to 1967, in the CIA’s covert-action department as an agent under “deep cover.” Based in Europe, he also worked extensively in Asia and Africa. It sounds impressive, but what does the phrase “deep cover” actually mean?

“Oh it’s laughable,” McCarry said in his throaty, David Gergen–ish voice. “What it means is that you have an ostensible occupation, a cover job, and that you don’t go about introducing yourself as a CIA agent. You don’t work out of an embassy, in fact you don’t go near an embassy, and all of your meetings and reporting take place clandestinely.”

“Did you find it very exciting?”

“No. It’s one of the most boring occupations in the world, punctuated by moments of ecstasy. You sit around for days, sometimes for weeks, waiting for something you think you have made happen, to happen. And sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. Or waiting for an agent to show up. They’re famous for not doing that, or showing up in the wrong place or on the wrong day, wrong hour.”

Because he spent only 10 years in the CIA (referred to as “the Outfit” in his books), McCarry sometimes seems mildly annoyed that it’s the one period of his life journalists are interested in. Of course, he has only himself to blame, since almost all of his 10 novels have been either directly or indirectly about espionage. Starting in 1972 with The Miernik Dossier, an innovative concoction of fictional official reports and documents written by various agents trying to decide whether a Polish dissident is a double agent or merely an eccentric, and ending with 2004’s Old Boys, in which a group of retired septuagenarian agents get together for one last covert operation, McCarry has now written seven novels in which Paul Christopher, Autumn’s hero, plays a major role.

From the start, McCarry has been recognized as a genre writer of exceptional ability. Eric Ambler, whose A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939) is often referred to as the greatest thriller ever written, wrote that McCarry’s first novel was “the most enthralling and intelligent piece of work” he had read in years. Autumn was a best-seller (the only McCarry novel to achieve that status) 30 years ago, and remains his best-known work. Subsequent novels in the Christopher cycle such as The Secret Lovers (1977), The Last Supper (1983) and Second Sight (1992) have been praised by everyone from Elmore Leonard to Norman Mailer, whose own massive CIA novel, Harlot’s Ghost, owes McCarry an obvious debt. And when he has strayed from the espionage field, McCarry has done just as well. The Washington Post’s book critic, Jonathan Yardley, called McCarry’s 1995 novel, Shelley’s Heart, which is about a presidential election stolen through the manipulation of computerized voting machines, the greatest novel ever written “about life in high-stakes Washington.” The real mystery about McCarry’s work is why it hasn’t been more popular.

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