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Rare is the novelist who gets to invent a new subgenre, and rarer still the one who coins a name for it.
Since 1988, when “Night Soldiers” came out,” Alan Furst has managed both. So far he’s written 10 thrillers set during the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, when European intelligence agencies jostled to gain advantage in the war all knew was coming. He calls his books “historical espionage,” a term he happily lays claim to.
“I never wanted to be a Cold War novelist,” Furst says from San Francisco, where he’s on tour promoting his latest, “The Spies of Warsaw.” “For John LeCarre, it was always who’s betraying who, the hall-of-mirrors kind of thing. When you go back to the ‘30s, it’s a case of good vs. evil, and no kidding. When I have a hero who believes France and Britain are on the right side, a reader is not going to question that.”
Furst says World War II was the “great ideological conflict” of the 20th century. Looking back, victory over fascism may seem to have been inevitable, but it was, in fact, “the great struggle,” one that determined the survival of freedom in the West. If Hitler and his fascist allies had triumphed, he adds, the world would be very different today.
“For one thing, I wouldn’t be here,” says Furst, 68. “I’m Jewish.”
The actual fighting of the war - the invasion of Poland, Pearl Harbor - interests Furst less than what he calls “the espionage war.”
“The war took three years to get going,” Furst says. “A lot of secret services were involved. The Russian NKVD, the Nazis, the French and British and so on.”
Yet the heroes of Furst’s books are seldom professional spies. They tend, instead, to be ordinary men - sophisticated and worldly Continentals, to be sure - drawn into espionage through a confluence of chance, opportunity and conscience. Casson, the French film producer in “The World at Night” (1995), is one example. So is Hungarian expatriate Nicholas Morath, co-owner of a Parisian advertising agency, in “Kingdom of Shadows” (2000).
In real life, Furst says, some of the most important pre-war spies were amateurs, among them three film producers. The ordinary demands of such jobs afforded perfect cover for skulduggery - coming and going at odd hours, managing large sums and large numbers of people, having military uniforms and guns on hand.
Furst is so good at creating such characters that people often assume he’s a former foreign correspondent. That’s why he makes the distinction that he was a travel writer, primarily for Esquire, not a journalist. “I never went out and got the story,” he says.
Instead, Furst’s early work as an assistant to famed anthropologist Margaret Mead - “one of the smartest people I’ve ever known” - enables the Manhattan native to see the world through other people’s eyes. “She had incredible insight into how people conduct themselves, how they work,” says Furst. “That’s what an anthropologist is supposed to do.”
For instance, in writing from Casson’s perspective, Furst says he must keep in mind not only what a French film producer would know in 1940, but also what he would not know.
“That’s definitely a major part of how to write from a European point of view,” Furst says. “And I’ve spent 10 years living in Paris, reading the newspapers, being there every day, living the life the French live. That conditions you.”
Another aspect of the period that attracts Furst (who now lives in Sag Harbor, Long Island) is the loss of Old Europe, and the way of life that went with it - reverence for civility, sophistication, learning, high standards of quality. “Old Europe was dying,” Furst says. “Meanwhile, a lot of people didn’t eat, so we won’t be too nostalgic for it.”
Paris serves as the symbol of what was good about Old Europe, in reality as well as in Furst’s novels. When the city fell to the Germans, he says, a wave of suicides swept Poland.
“Paris was the beacon, a kind of hope for Europe,” Furst says. “You could go there and live the way the Parisians lived. You could have freedom, intellectual freedom. When Paris fell, a lot of people thought life was over for them.”
The French, Furst adds, did not commit suicide. “No, they tried to figure out what do we do now - they’re French!” he says.
Furst’s interest in the passing of Old Europe led to his new novel being set in Poland. “Warsaw was completely destroyed by the Germans,” he says. “I wanted to show it alive and vibrant during the 1930s.”
Furst’s novels attract rapturous critical accolades - he’s frequently linked with 20th century giants like Graham Greene and Eric Ambler - and they sell a lot of copies, too. He’s been called America’s “greatest living spy novelist” by The New York Times and The Houston Chronicle.
But he never made a conscious decision to write above the usual level of popular fiction.
“Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn’t work that way,” Furst says. “Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can’t tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.”
