The Secret Lovers

Charles McCarry

A nervous courier delivers the handwritten manuscript of a dissident Russian novel to Paul Christopher early one morning in West Berlin. Minutes after the hand-off, the courier’s spine is neatly snapped by an impact with a passing black sedan. Meanwhile, in Rome, Christopher’s wife Cathy takes a famous film director as a lover to stir her husband out of the stoicism that defines his personality.

These two seemingly discrete events set in motion a spiral of operational and personal intrigue that leads Christopher from the cafes of old Europe to the front lines of the Cold War in the Congo as he secretly arranges the publication of a novel that could bring the Soviet system to its knees, and races to identify the leak that compromised his messenger — and possibly the entire mission.

Since his re-emergence with the publication of Christopher’s Ghosts, Charles McCarry has been heralded as one of the select few espionage novelists who manages to break out of his genre to shine as a brilliant and unique novelist. The Secret Lovers, first published in 1977 and featuring the legendary Paul Christopher, is McCarry at his best. It is an exploration of the great scope of ‘the great game’, and also a riveting psychological portrait of a man ensnared by a profession that, like the facade of diplomacy which outwardly held the Cold War in check, could never contain its violent core.