Before my very eyes I became a dossier. I no longer have blood. I become a paper man.

--Tadeusz Miernik

Recently deceased American novelist Charles McCarry is largely unknown within the academic domain of literary studies. Despite the fact that before his death on 26 February 2019 at age eighty-eight McCarry published fourteen well-received novels, he remains on the periphery of critical attention apart from such notable contemporaries as Eric Ambler, Norman Mailer, Richard Condon, and Alan Furst. A reviewer in 2004 identified this author's metier: "McCarry is the best modern writer on the subject of intrigue [...]. Read Dostoyevsky's The Possessed or Conrad's The Secret Agent for worthwhile comparisons" (O'Rourke 31). As Allan Hepburn has shown, intrigue narratives of this caliber involve far more than thrilleresque suspense for its own sake. Deeply linked with espionage during the post-World War II era, such works invite readers to reflect on "the underhanded machinations of the state" as a supposed guarantor of "belonging, citizenship, and agency" (4). Given their facility in dissemblance, spies enact a cultural fantasy of escaping established boundaries of identification, suggesting in their figurative spectrality (they are called "spooks" for a reason) that "authenticity may be irrelevant to commitment or character" (xiv). Hence it is that we are drawn, argues Hepburn, to these narratives of epistemological skepticism and negative transcendence.

Two other scholars have amplified this framework for reading McCarry. Timothy Melley, focusing on the mushrooming of a "covert sphere" ever since the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was founded on 26 July 1947, posits that the resulting "National Security State, with its emphasis on secrecy and deception, helped transform the cultural status of fiction as it relates to discourses of 'fact,' such as journalism and history" (viii). (1) As an imaginary construct the covert sphere has inspired a plethora of novels and films, which besides "generating] cynicism about government," have "contributed significantly to the rise of postmodernism" (6). The double-edged irony is that such artistic treatments are essential to the hypercompartmentalized work of the State because "Fiction 'reveals' covert action in a form dismissible as fantasy, melodrama, mere entertainment" (22; see also 116). At the same time Melley recognizes fabulation's heuristic function: "The open falsehoods of the fiction writer are [...] a corrective to the deceptions of the [S]tate; the novel's lies are 'true lies'" (111). One year later Eva Horn began The Secret War: Treason, Espionage, and Modern Fiction by maintaining that "Fictions illuminate secrecy's structure because they reconstruct its logic, its subtle and mysterious economy of light and dark, truths and lies, presence and absence" (25). Though Horn does not discuss McCarry's The Miernik Dossier (1973), her observation that "Fiction alone [...] is able to make the narrative's unstable basis itself a part of the narrative" (39) applies well to McCarry's debut novel, which is riddled by epistemic aporias. Moreover, since such narratological reconstruction lacks any external review of its findings (or conjectures), "the doubling of reconnaissance and deception in modern intelligence agencies results in an abysmal...