Charles Mccarry
Undercover CIA agent who became a spy novelist hailed by critics as ‘the American John le Carré’
CHARLES MCCARRY, who has died aged 88, was an undercover operative for the CIA who went on to become a revered spy novelist, regarded by many critics as the closest American equivalent to John le Carré. Mccarry’s novels were at the more cerebral end of the spy-fiction spectrum and although they received effusive reviews they rarely reached the bestseller lists. He claimed that he did not write thrillers, but rather “naturalistic novels about people who happened to be engaged in espionage … because that’s the world that I knew and understood”.
Nevertheless, he had a flair for “kiss kiss bang bang” melodrama when required, and his regular hero, Paul Christopher – whose CIA career echoed his creator’s in many aspects – had more than a trace of James Bond in his make-up, with an ability to call on a prodigious fund of scientific or cultural knowledge to help him out of a tight spot, and a remarkable prowess with women.
Some reviewers found the omnicompetent Christopher the least appealing element of the books. The caustic Julian Symons, doyen of crime and thriller critics, judged that Mccarry was one of the few new spy writers of the 1970s to be worth reading, but thought that his work would be improved if “before the next book Paul Christopher meets with a fatal accident”.
The writer John Gross spoke for many critics when he declared in 1988 that Mccarry had never surpassed his first novel, The Miernik Dossier (1973), “arguably the finest modern American spy story, the only one that matches the leading British masters of the genre in subtlety and ingenuity”.
The book took the unusual form of a collection of documents – reports, letters, diaries, transcripts of bugged telephone conversations – giving a rare sense of how an intelligence operation is actually conducted.
Paul Christopher’s second outing was The Tears of Autumn (1974), in which he goes rogue to prove his theory that President Kennedy was assassinated in revenge for his backing of the coup d’état that had led to the death of President Ngo Dinh Diem of
Vietnam a few weeks earlier. Mccarry had originally wanted to propound this theory in a factual work but was told by his publisher that it would not go down well with the public. In the event, The Tears of Autumn became his bestselling book by far. Lady Bird Johnson told Mccarry that it had been a favourite book of her husband’s.
Five more books featuring Paul Christopher followed over the next three decades; particularly admired was The Old Boys (2004), which saw Christopher and his ex-colleagues raging against the dying of the light in retirement, and was described by The Washington Post as “Cocoon with a cloak and dagger”. Mccarry also wrote novels about political skulduggery in Washington, which gave more scope to his gift for comedy and eventually earned him a reputation for prescience. The Better Angels (1979, filmed with Sean Connery in 1982 as Wrong Is Right) featured terrorists weaponising passenger planes, and its sequel, Shelley’s Heart (1995), seemed to predict both Bill Clinton’s impeachment battle and the dispute over the 2000 election result. Lucky Bastard (1998) was about a president whose election victory is secured by Russian interference.
Albert Charles Mccarry Jr was born on June 14 1930 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and grew up on the family farm in Plainfield, where his mother, who owned more than 10,000 books, fomented his love of literature.
He was offered a place at Harvard but could not afford to take it up, and served in the Army before becoming a journalist and then a speechwriter for President Eisenhower’s Labour Secretary James P Mitchell. In 1958 he was recruited to the CIA and spent a decade in deep cover around the world, operating entirely on his own with no official attachment to an embassy.
After beginning to feel “what the religious call ‘spiritual fatigue’”, he resigned, and spent some years as editor-atlarge of National Geographic.
His first book was a biography of the activist Ralph Nader (1972), which was commissioned by Nader but turned out to be unexpectedly hostile after Mccarry discovered that the more he found out about the man the less he approved of him.
Mccarry had kept his CIA work a secret from everybody except his wife, and intended to keep this up even when he began to write. One of his publishers happened upon the truth, however, during a chance encounter with a drunken excolleague of Mccarry’s, and primed an interviewer to out him on live television.
Altogether Mccarry wrote 15 novels, the last of which, The Mulberry Bush, appeared in 2015. He also ghost-wrote the memoirs of the politicians Donald Regan – the book that revealed the extent of the influence of Nancy Reagan’s astronomer in the White House – and Alexander Haig.
He was described by one interviewer as “tall and bald, with a hairless face and owl-like eyes that betray little but a constant flicker of mental processing”. A modest man, he admitted to a compulsion to drop in to libraries at random and check the stamps in his books to see how often they were taken out.
Charles Mccarry married, in 1953, Nancy Neill, who survives him with their four sons.
Charles Mccarry, born June 14 1930, died