Editing Charles McCarry (section)

==Approach to writing==
McCarry believed that "the best novels are about ordinary things: love, betrayal, death, trust, loneliness, marriage, fatherhood."<ref name=Strip>McCarry, Charles, "A Strip of Exposed Film, " in ''='Paths of Resistance'', page 69.</ref> In 1988 McCarry described the themes of his novels to date as "ordinary things – love, death, betrayal and the American dream."<ref name="How to Write Spy Novels">McCarry, Charles, "How to Write Spy Novels; the Best Books are Collaborations Between the Writer and Reader", June 19, 1988.</ref>

McCarry wrote that: "After I resigned [from the CIA], intending to spend the rest of my life writing fiction and knowing what tricks the mind can play when the gates are thrown wide open, as they are by the act of writing, between the imagination and that part of the brain in which information is stored, I took the precaution of writing a closely remembered narrative of my clandestine experiences. After correcting the manuscript, I burned it. What I kept for my own use was the atmosphere of secret life: How it worked on the five senses and what it did to the heart and mind. All the rest went up in flames, setting me free henceforth to make it all up. In all important matters, such as the creation of characters and the invention of plots, with rare and minor exceptions, that is what I have done. And, as might be expected, when I have been weak enough to use something that really happened as an episode in a novel, it is that piece of scrap, buried in a landfill of the imaginary, readers invariably refuse to believe."<ref name="Charles McCarry 1994">McCarry, Charles, "Between the Real and the Believable", ''Washington Post'', December 11, 1994.</ref>

McCarry was an admirer of the work of [[Eric Ambler]]<ref name=":0"/> and [[W. Somerset Maugham]], especially the latter's [[Ashenden: Or the British Agent|Ashenden]] stories. He was also an admirer of [[Richard Condon]], author of ''[[The Manchurian Candidate]]'' (1959).<ref name="morning news"/>