 Paul Christopher as a central character never is older than his forties—see "Tears of Autumn"—which is the same as McCarry was when he wrote it; after Tears, Christopher spends twenty (unseen) years at hard labor in a remote Chinese prison camp, and then is a minor character in his own rescue.The novelist Alan Furst has written in "The Book of Spies" that "[Graham] Greene, [John] le Carré, [Somerset] Maugham, and McCarry write with a kind of cloaked anger, a belief that the world is a place where political power is maintained by treachery and betrayal..." In its subtitle, Furst's book calls such writing "literary espionage.