I was never in the bureaucracy, always in the theater, ive consciously tried not to romanticize anything, especially not intelligence work. Ive always said that Ive been writing a series of episodic, naturalistic novels. The people just happen to be spies, politicians, civil servants. If pediatricians lived lives in which the manipulation of emotions were the tools of the trade, I probably would have written about them.

Charles McCarry

Charles McCarry (born June 14, 1930, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, died February 26, 2019, in Fairfax County, Virginia) was an American writer, primarily of spy fiction, and a former undercover operative for the Central Intelligence Agency who The Wall Street Journal described in 2013 as the dean of American spy writers; The New Republic magazine calls him "poet laureate of the CIA."; and Otto Penzler says he has produced some "poetic masterpieces." William Zinsser calls him a "political novelist:"Jonathan Yardley, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the Washington Post, calls him a "'serious' novelist" whose work may include "the best novel ever written about life in high-stakes Washington, DC." P.J.

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