RIP …

… Charles McCarry, prescient spy novelist, dead at 88 | The Sacramento Bee. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

"I was never in the bureaucracy, always in the theater," McCarry, who served in the CIA in the 1950s and '60s, told The Washington Post in 1991. "I've consciously tried not to romanticize anything, especially not intelligence work. I've always said that I've been writing a series of episodic, naturalistic novels. The people just happen to be spies, politicians, civil servants. If pediatricians lived lives in which the manipulation of emotions were the tools of the trade, I probably would have written about them."