Paul Christopher's Ghosts

Categories: Mystery & Suspense , Staff Picks , Fiction

Shortly before the outbreak of Word War II, 16-year-old Paul Christopher resides in Berlin with his American father, Hubbard, and his beautiful German mother, Lori, a baroness.  It’s a time of great tension for Jews and non-Germans in Berlin, especially for the Hubbards.  They have helped Jewish families escape the Reich to Denmark on their small sailboat.  The secret police, directed by an SS officer named Stutzer, are watching them.

The danger for the family increases after Paul meets Rima, a Jewish girl, and he falls in love.  Their relationship possesses a fatalistic gravity far beyond their adolescent years. As the threat of arrest increases, Paul’s parents send him home to New York City for safety.  But Paul can think only of Rima's safety, and he returns to Germany.   

On a dark night, Paul and Rima set sail for a Danish island 50 miles away.  A German patrol boat, with Stutzer aboard, intercepts them.  Stutzer places Paul under arrest. The boat is burned.  Rima is allowed to drown in the frigid waters of the Baltic Sea, while Paul looks on.  

Twenty years later, Paul Christopher is a CIA agent in Berlin, when he catches sight of Stutzer.  Here begins Paul’s quest for retribution and comprehension.   How does an ex-Nazi SS officer manage to survive in a Soviet satellite state?  What possible value does he possess that the Statsi allows him to crawl their streets?

Charles McCarry has written seven novels about Paul Christopher, and three more about the Christopher family of spies (one is a historical, The Bride of the Wilderness).  It's hard to imagine a more engrossing or significant series of literary suspense novels written by an American in the last 35 years.   

It began in 1973 with The Miernik Dossier, a cleverly constructed novel with a story advanced by intelligence reports on a Polish functionary with the United Nations in Geneva.  Paul Christopher appeared in a minor role. In later novels, McCarry’s concern is the personal toll that Cold War espionage operations impose on his unusual protagonist.  Paul is an agent who has published a volume of poetry; who has family connections, women who love him, and a life outside of espionage.  It’s this personal and human perspective that set apart the Christopher spy novels.

I recall my stunned reaction to the provocative Tears of Autumn  (1975), in which Paul follows an intuition that a South Vietnamese family was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as revenge for the JFK’s supporting the coup that killed the Ngo brothers. No one in the agency is willing to listen. Paul resigns to pursue the truth.  After this astounding novel, I was hooked.

If you enjoy the genre of espionage, but have never read a McCarry novel, do yourself a favor and pick up Christopher’s Ghosts.  You won’t regret it.