The more recent title on the list:
The Polish Officer by Alan FurstClick here to read about the older classics on McCarry's list.
Like [The Manchurian Candidate author Richard] Condon, Furst writes about espionage from the outside and manages to create a compelling version of a twisted world in which good men do bad things in the name of a foul cause. Where Condon relied on a fabulous imagination, Furst is a prodigious researcher, and in his fiction he has done for interwar European espionage what the blind historian W.H. Prescott, who had never been there either, did for Peru--that is to say, made palpable a vanished time and place and its political mood swings. "The Polish Officer" is the novel in which Furst hit his stride, and like his other books, it is a dazzling commentary on fate--how the unanticipated leads to the inevitable by way of the unavoidable.
Melanie Kirkpatrick called Charles McCarry "America's best writer of espionage novels."
In Slate's 2006 round-up of its writers' book picks, the architecture critic Witold Rybczynski praised McCarry:
My favorite bedtime read this year was Charles McCarry's The Last Supper. This political thriller was actually written in 1986, but Overlook--Marshal ZeringuePress has been republishing his tales of Cold War espionage at the rate of one or two a year, so I guess it qualifies as "new." Like all the best spy novelists since Graham Greene, McCarry creates a world of his own. It helps some that he spent years in the CIA doing undercover work; it helps more that he's a very good storyteller. I like thrillers; the good ones can be reread many times. I regularly reread early Le Carré (before he turned preachy), and I recently reread all of Alan Furst's World War II novels. Last year, I found some old Len Deighton thrillers in a used-book store and reread those. They seemed so fresh 40 years ago—oh well.
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