The Secret Lovers

The front cover of a paperback edition, probably from 1977.

The Secret Lovers, published by E.P. Dutton in 1977, was the third of seven novels by the American novelist Charles McCarry to feature an American intelligence agent named Paul Christopher. It takes place in 1960 and '61, a year after the events in the first Christopher novel, The Miernik Dossier, published in 1973, and three years before the beginning of The Tears of Autumn, published in 1974, which was actually the second book McCarry wrote about Christopher. The word secret in the title is first understood by the reader to be a noun rather than an adjective—at one point the cool, distant Christopher tries to explain his remoteness to his beautiful young wife, "I love secrets, we all do. That's why we do the work.... I put my emotions aside.... I couldn't do the job if I let myself go free." As the book progresses, however, in a subplot nearly as important as the primary one involving espionage, his wife creates her own secret world of lovers in order to order to break Christopher out of his emotional detachment from her.

Recurring characters

In most of McCarry's novels, both those about Christopher and those about his cousins the Hubbards, there are characters who turn up in more than one of the books. In The Secret Lovers we have Paul Christopher, who had been in two earlier books, and the first appearance of his wife, Cathy, as well David Patchen, a Harvard roommate, fellow soldier in World War II, and colleague in their intelligence agency. Barney Wolkowicz, who will have important roles in Christopher's future, is chief of the Berlin station here.