Robert Littell; Charles McCarry

I read Patrick Anderson’s The Triumph of the Thriller about a year ago. It’s a survey of popular crime/mystery authors of the past thirty years, breezy and very enjoyable, and I’m most indebted to it for introducing me to the novels of Robert Littell and Charles McCarry.

The past few years I’ve had the pleasure of picking up on some great writers when they had only a book or two under their belts, like Sean Doolittle, Sara Gran, and Kevin Wignall.

It’s a different kind of satisfaction, though, to discover a great writer who has already produced a shelf. And it’d been about eight years since I last had the experience (Ross Thomas.)

Littell and McCarry have each produced a shelf. They both write espionage with a literary bent. Stylistically, McCarry favors Maugham or perhaps Fitzgerald; Littell, Lewis Carroll and Don Delillo. Both are Americans who seem more at home abroad, and most at home in the Great Game (though both have also written novels set pre- and/or post-Cold War.) McCarry, a former CIA field agent, is aristocratic and romantic; Littell, a former journalist, goes for bitter irony and brittle absurdity.

Both are having a career renaissance of sorts, care of The Overlook Press, which is in the process of reprinting both authors’ entire backlist.

Whenever I get hepped to one of these fantastic backlisters, I tend to treat them like money in the bank, and try to read only a book (or two) a year, saving them for the slow months between the next new Doolittle or Gran or Abbott; eight years in, I’ve still got seven Ross Thomas books to track down.

I’ve been on a tear lately, though, reading several books in a row by these two gents.

Their most recent novels are actually great points of departure for the uninitiated.

McCarry’s Christopher’s Ghosts is a story of revenge, and I only begin to suggest its wise and sorrowful tone when I let slip that the crime and the retribution are separated by twenty years’ time.

Littell’s Vicious Circle is a story of a kidnapping, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a near future with a female American president, and reverse-Stockholm syndrome. He manages to work a ridiculous amount of Middle East history and history of religion into the mix without ever letting you forget you’re reading a thriller.

If you prefer, say, The Good Shepherd to The Bourne Ultimate, Charles McCarry and Robert Littell will be right up your alley.