Old Boys

From Publishers Weekly
McCarry is another ace spy novelist from the past to whom Overlook's Peter Mayer is giving a new lease on life (as with Robert Littell's The Company two years ago). Both of them are real pros, with McCarry having a more lapidary style and a rather more aristocratic turn of mind. His "old boys," former CIA men who come out of retirement to help one of their former colleagues, Horace Hubbard, find his lost cousin, Paul Christopher, are a classy group, each with a well-defined area of expertise. Christopher, an elderly agent himself (he starred in some of McCarry's earlier books, most notably in The Tears of Autumn), has disappeared, and apparently died, in a remote area of China. His ashes are sent back to the U.S. by the Chinese, and a memorial service is held. But Horace cannot believe he is dead, and nor can Paul's daughter, Zarah. As they set out on Christopher's trail, they find it leads to his remarkable mother, Lori, who was probably involved in the assassination of Nazi kingpin Heydrich in WWII and kept as a legacy of that monster a priceless scroll in his possession depicting the death of Christ from a Roman agent's viewpoint. The plot is almost indescribable, involving a Muslim terrorist who wants the scroll and who plans to blow up much of the West with a cache of miniature Soviet nuclear bombs; a Chinese forced-labor camp; and sundry ex-Nazis, ex-KGB men and double-crossers galore. It's a great tribute to McCarry's skill that he manages to keep all his colored balls in the air and carry the reader willingly with him. But the kitchen-sink approach to the plot increasingly strains credibility as the story zips along, and the tension between his all-too-believable "old boys" and the comic-book action is never satisfactorily resolved. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
As soon as he began publishing fiction more than three decades ago, Charles McCarry was recognized as a spy novelist of uncommon gifts. He enjoys, like the masters of the genre (Buchan, Greene, Fleming, le Carré), the presumption of authenticity grounded in a prior career in intelligence work. McCarry in his younger days was a CIA agent operating "under cover," the Old Boys jacket flap discloses, before he turned to fiction and a long tenure at National Geographic. But knowing what you're talking about is not enough. From the outset McCarry has been willing to take risks in both form (the documentary structure of The Miernik Dossier, his first novel, 1973) and content (linking the assassinations, three weeks apart, of Presidents Ngo Dinh Diem and John F. Kennedy in November 1963, in The Tears of Autumn, 1974). Shelley's Heart, more than 20 years later, confirmed McCarry's versatility as a Washington novelist, too, with an eerily anticipatory tale of a stolen presidential election. In Old Boys, his 10th novel, McCarry has cut loose yet again, this time in a cheerfully convoluted yarn whose tone is by turns mischievous and elegiac.To set the stage, think of Yul Brynner in the opening scenes of "The Magnificent Seven," recruiting a posse of specialists in each of the lethal arts to take on one last challenge -- because they believe in the cause. The Brynner character in Old Boys is Horace Hubbard, a retired spy of the old school, and the magnificent are six. Their mission is to discover the fate of Hubbard's older cousin, Paul Christopher. Christopher, introduced in McCarry's first two novels, is the recurring spy of his oeuvre, a romantic loner who has recently survived 10 years in a Chinese prison. And now he seems to be dead. Seems to be. For reasons McCarry can better explain, the fate of nations and the meaning of life are wrapped up in this mystery. As Horace muses in one of the author's many considerate reminders, "The problem now was to establish whether Paul Christopher was or was not a dry quart of ashes inside a gaudy Chinese urn and, far more difficult than that, to accept that this Prince Valiant of my childhood had at last encountered an ordeal he could not survive. . . . Whatever drove him to Ulugqat must have been a matter of great significance, at least in his own mind -- something he felt he absolutely had to do, had to know, had to find in order to make sense of existence." Who better to unravel this than Horace and his fellow-retirees. "Taken together, [we] used to know most of the people in the world worth knowing," he reminds his cronies as he makes his pitch over lunch at a steakhouse on K Street in Washington. They're game. With Christopher's necessarily beautiful daughter Zarah providing support and, well, youth, the old boys fan out around the world with their timeworn instincts and new-fangled SAT phones. They get in and out of heaps of trouble. They may be senior citizens, but they still know how to deal with bad guys. In Moscow, for example, our man Horace does an impressive turn forcing a thug to break his own neck.Impending mortality has made them a sentimental bunch: They are interrupting their retirements not to crush terrorists or subvert evil empires -- although these are nice if you can get them -- but because of ties of friendship, of blood-brotherhood and of just plain blood. The holder of the secret, we learn early on, may not be Paul Christopher at all but his 94-year-old mom, Lori. She may possess -- here McCarry experiences a Dan Brown moment -- a first-century scroll purporting to be "the report of a Roman official sent on a secret mission to Judea around the time of the Crucifixion to investigate a Roman covert action operation that went wrong." The scroll, because it may expose Jesus of Nazareth as "an unwitting asset of Roman intelligence," is coveted by a radical Islamist and recurring McCarry foe, Ibn Awad, as evidence that "Christianity is a false religion." High stakes indeed. McCarry is a careful plotter and an unfussy stylist; he nourishes his narrative with cosmopolitan reflections on the craft (of espionage, and perhaps of fiction, too) such as this one: "Operations develop like the seduction of a woman who knows that she's worth any amount of trouble -- false moves, faux pas, misunderstandings, rebuffs, zones of silence, long gazes into seemingly candid eyes that will not answer the simplest question. And then, when you have despaired of ever seizing the moment, it arrives." Old Boys is, at heart, a lament for a dying generation of American spies, an elegy for the human twilight, "Cocoon" with a cloak and dagger. Here's how one young Agency whippersnapper -- a woman, no less -- puts it to the old boys: "You're well and gratefully remembered. But you and your old-timer friends are causing a lot of unnecessary trouble. You're getting between our people and an important target. What is desired -- and this comes from the very highest level -- is for you and your shuffleboard team to get out of the way. And stay out of the way." Them, of course, be fightin' words. Reviewed by Charles TrueheartCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
McCarry's latest is an old-fashioned, rollicking adventure that beats Ludlum and Cussler at their own game. When Paul Christopher, the enigmatic hero of several earlier McCarry novels, disappears while on a quest for his nonagenarian mother, Lori, his black-sheep cousin, Horace Hubbard, convenes a discreet cadre of over-the-hill spies to find their confrere--and to save the world from Ib'n Awad, an aging Islamic terrorist in possession of 12 nuclear suitcase bombs. In a beguiling twist sure to appeal to fans of The Da Vinci Code, all parties also seek a fabled ancient scroll that unmasks Jesus as an agent provocateur, handled by Judas for Roman spymaster Paul. The nonstop peregrinations of this league of extraordinary spooks take them to a score of exotic locales, pitting them against Chechen thugs, Chinese secret police, Nazi doctors, and a case of acute myocardial fibrillation. McCarry's commitment to this fanciful premise is absolute, and the resulting yarn combines the intrepid exploits of John Buchan, the cagey intrigue of Eric Ambler, and the clipped cadences of Dashiell Hammett. Tremendous fun. David Wright
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


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A collection of retired intelligence agents comes to the aid of the very dashing Christopher family of spies last seen in McCarry's 1991 Second Sight. Paul Christopher is dead. Possibly. A packet of ashes has arrived from western China, where the retired spook had spent ten years as a prisoner. Why on earth would he go back to such an awful scene? And why isn't the provenance of the cremains any better than it is? These and other questions plague Paul's cousin Horace Hubbard, who was also in the family spying business until caught stealing a national election. Horace rather thinks that Paul has taken the opportunity to drop out of the scenery, and, indeed, following Paul's state funeral, clues lead Horace to a hollowed-out table leg in his cousin's house wherein are cached clues suggesting that Paul has headed for central Asia on a hunt for his nonagenarian mum and a glass vial containing a Roman intelligence officer's eyewitness report of events in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Christopher's mother, a German national who lived enough lives for five ordinary mortals, salvaged the document from Nazi Germany and has been carrying it about ever since. Horace rounds up a group of elderly colleagues and begins a search for Paul that takes him to China, Bulgaria, Turkey, South America, and numerous "-stans." He must be rather careful, since there is a fatwa out on him. Ibn Awad, an Islamic maniac Horace had supposedly killed in the line of business, is not only alive, but very much in the hunt for that interesting bit of biblical history and very unhappy about that murder attempt. After he eliminates Horace, Ibn Awad plans to blow up numerous satanic cities with the old Soviet A-bombs he'sbeen hoarding, so the Old Boys have to keep an eye out for radiation. There are numerous narrow escapes from goons, police, armies, and Arabs, and a lot of interesting side trips well off the beaten tourist-track. Excellent spy thriller in the Anglo-American style. First printing of 75,000; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour


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