In the days when the Cold War provided depth and context to all spy fiction, Charles McCarry was the strongest of the contenders for the title of ‘the American John Le Carré’. Although Robert Littell and Paul Hennisart wrote novels of complex moral ambiguity, McCarry’s CIA was closer in tone to Smiley’s Circus, chosen from society’s elite, products of the best prep (the American equivalent of public) schools and Yale’s secret societies (one of which, Skull and Bones, has produced both candidates in this year’s US presidential election), honourable schoolboys pursuing a business whose currency is dishonour.
His protagonist, Paul Christopher, made his debut in McCarry’s first novel, The Miernik Dossier. Brilliantly constructed as a patchwork of documents, it introduced Christopher, as if inadvertently, late in the book. In The Tears of Autumn, his only bestseller, Christopher discovered the place where espionage and politics intersect, the conspiracy to kill John Kennedy, while his best book, The Secret Lovers, was very much in Le Carré territory, where those who practise deceit find themselves at odds with the very idea of love.The
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