Today, it’s more than a little eerie to read Charles McCarry’s gripping and intricate 1995 political thriller, “Shelley’s Heart.” At the time the book first appeared, nearly 30 years ago, it was hailed by The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley as the best novel about Washington politics ever written, a view shared by Richard Condon, author of “The Manchurian Candidate.”

Read today, it will leave you wondering: Was McCarry unnervingly prescient about 9/11, the Middle East, recent national elections, the underestimated importance of the Supreme Court, and much else? Or could his book have actually provided ideas, even a blueprint, for those who have brought about the political upheavals of the past several years? If so, it would seem that history – that jokester! – has reversed many of the novel’s left-right polarities.

To read

Overlook Press

“Shelley’s Heart: A Thriller”

By Charles McCarry

Overlook. E-book. $9.99

Set in the 1990s, “Shelley’s Heart” opens on a snowy day at the funeral for the chief justice of the United States. Just as the service at Washington National Cathedral is about to begin, wealthy businessman Franklin Mallory, who has just lost his bid to regain the presidency after a four-year hiatus, stops the newly reelected Bedford Forrest Lockwood and secretly hands him a note. It reads: “I must see you urgently, and alone, well before you take the presidential oath tomorrow, to make you aware of documentary evidence of election fraud in California, Michigan and New York that brings into question your legal right to assume office.”

Through the help of a hard-right billionaire in the tech and communications industry, Mallory has discovered that a former intelligence operative named Horace Hubbard and his computer whiz girlfriend have shifted just enough votes – a surprisingly small number – to ensure a victory for Mallory’s liberal opponent. Only Horace’s half brother, Julian Hubbard, who is Lockwood’s chief of staff, knows about this chicanery. Lockwood, however, refuses to believe Mallory’s evidence, decides to go through with the inauguration, and vows to fight these and some even more damaging accusations.

The next day, on the morning of the inauguration, a gunman who has been hiding inside a snowbank suddenly emerges, rapid-fires a dozen bullets in an apparent attempt to assassinate Mallory, and then miraculously escapes. But was Mallory the actual target?

All this happens within the first 49 pages of this 500-plus-page novel, which quickly grows exceptionally suspenseful and byzantine. In short, dialogue-rich chapters, the action shifts from Capitol Hill to Kalorama Triangle to Rock Creek Park and even, at one point, to Bolivia.

To Democrats, Mallory had been “their worst nightmare come true the first time he got himself elected.” However, unlike today’s most prominent Republican, Mallory is invariably courteous and well-spoken, values his privacy, and spends hours every day reading serious writers like Macaulay and Goethe. Since the death of his beloved wife, he has been faithful to his companion and adviser, Susan Grant. In short, McCarry presents Mallory as a cultivated, even cosmopolitan intellectual, the kind of conservative who truly believes in democracy and the good of the nation. How old-fashioned!

At the same time, the tall, plain-spoken Lockwood is more than a little like his hero, Abraham Lincoln. Yet moral uprightness may not be enough to preserve his presidency. So, to thwart Mallory, the scheming Julian turns for help to the novel’s third major character: Archimedes Hammett, a puritanical Yale law professor who is pathologically frightened of being touched and infected by a passing virus. He is also a crusading left-wing fanatic – and a very dangerous one. “From an early age Hammett had wanted to change the world, and he had always realized that it could only be changed piecemeal, according to a systematic plan.” Consequently, over many years, he has quietly installed his students and acolytes in positions of power in the government, the media and, especially, the judiciary. As one character observes, “Extremists … have always regarded control of the Supreme Court, and of the federal court system in general, as the key to political action because the rulings of the Court are not subject to democratic restraints.”

Even more disturbingly, Hammett views the Supreme Court itself “as a mechanism to overthrow the elected government of the United States and seize absolute power for twenty-five years.” His ultimate dream is to remake American society into a vaguely socialistic utopia, albeit one under the steady guidance of himself. In nearly every way, Hammett calls to mind Theodor Adorno’s definition of the authoritarian personality: “A man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.” In his own stealthy, decades-long political ambitions, Hammett is assisted by his fellow members of the ultrasecret Shelley Society, about which I will say no more.

During his life, McCarry – a former CIA operative and longtime Washingtonian who died in 2019 at age 88 – was widely admired for his beautifully written espionage thrillers featuring Paul Christopher and several generations of the Christopher-Hubbard family. Among these is Paul’s mysterious daughter Zarah, who appears in “Shelley’s Heart” and whom Hammett instinctively fears. But as we are frequently reminded, the Christopher dynasty of spies is unlucky, regularly suffering “disappearances, lost loves, death at the hands of fools, betrayal by friends, hopeless desire – every kind of psychic imprisonment provided by the twentieth century.”

Like his English counterpart, John le Carré, McCarry regularly returned to the same characters in his books, uncovering new facets to past events or even overturning what we thought we knew. What the dogged, Columbo-like private investigator John L.S. McGraw, one of the minor heroes of “Shelley’s Heart,” says about rereading is equally applicable to intelligence operations: “You seldom understood everything the first time you looked at something – no matter how systematic you thought you were being. It was impossible to grasp every detail unless you kept going back for another look, and then another and another.”

In this regard, “Shelley’s Heart” repeatedly harks back to events chronicled in “The Better Angels” (1979), set during Lockwood’s first term. In that book, Ibn Awad, an aging, manic-depressive Middle Eastern sheik, finances the construction of two nuclear bombs intended to be detonated in Tel Aviv and New York by a terrorist group called the Eye of Gaza. Horace Hubbard eventually deals with the situation, but the question remains: Did President Lockwood authorize the murder of Ibn Awad, despite his public declarations otherwise? And what of various unintended consequences? Revenge is a dominant theme in McCarry’s fiction, starting with his masterpiece about the Kennedy assassination, “The Tears of Autumn” (1974).

While McCarry’s early novels sometimes seem to idealize privilege, wealth and family, that’s not the case in “Shelley’s Heart.” To these smug Whiffenpoofs, as one character disdainfully dubs them, even President Lockwood is simply “a man from the underclass whom they had raised up to power so that he could act on the basis of their wisdom.” As such, he is expendable. Appropriately, then, it is the broken-down, Bible-quoting speaker of the House, an alcoholic skirt-chaser now dying from cirrhosis, who will become the shrewd and implacable nemesis of all these “rich boys.”

Besides the clean, mildly ironic style of his exposition and descriptions, McCarry could also reproduce seemingly every variety of spoken English, from the prissily correct to the vulgarly sexist. Above all, though, his book never lets up on our sense of impending threat, especially to Zarah. When a little girl speaks to the dead through a Ouija board, it deeply unsettles Hammett, but this seems hardly less strange than that two lesbian lawyers, members of the Womonkind’s Coalition, are waiting on him, preparing his special meals and carrying out his enigmatic wishes. As today, even abortion and something like IVF clinics play an important role in the novel. Still, always looming in the background are the obvious questions: When will the assassin strike again? Who will be the target? And is there a connection to the political cat-and-mouse games taking place on Capitol Hill?

In the end, “Shelley’s Heart” comes down strongly for the primacy of simple humanity and decency over ideology, for intelligence over privilege and, above all, for the recognition that in politics nothing is ever final.