Printed newspapers arrive these days like the Pony Express, containing dispatches on events days earlier that have already been parsed widely on the Internet. So it was Tuesday morning when a delivery driver tossed The Washington Post onto my driveway that included a fulsome obituary for Jason Matthews, the former CIA operative turned espionage author who had died last week, age 69, from a degenerative nerve disease that cruelly disables the brain.

Gone way too soon.

Shock and dismay has greeted the untimely death of Matthews, who had emerged from the shadows eight years ago as one of the finest espionage novelists of all time. His debut novel Red Sparrow, the first in what became a trilogy of tense, importantly instructive thrillers on both the cunning nature of our Kremlin adversary and the foibles of CIA and FBI spy hunters, had drawn widespread, even ecstatic praise, “with comparisons to not just John le Carré and Ian Fleming but …