ALAN FURST'S HERO IN FRANCE

It's Paris, 1941. Half of France is occupied by the Germans, the other half is run by Petain's Vichy government. The Resistance is starting to take shape, and Mathieu (his nom de guerre) is the lynch-pin of a group that smuggles downed flyers back to Britain. It's Alan Furst territory. 

A Hero In France (oddly, the book was published as A Hero Of France in the US, and changed for the UK. I prefer that title because it speaks of La Patrie in a specific suggestive way) is somewhat different from Alan Furst's novels, which specialised in slow-building, atmospheric stories. This time, almost a reflection of the fragmented nature of this resistance operation, it's a fragmented story, one that cuts quickly between locations and operations. The atmosphere is set in broader strokes, because the pace is faster and the swirling cast of characters come and go—we learn about them quickly and briefly, and we, like Mathieu himself in many instances, don't know who can be trusted and who cannot. The reader is aware of the possibility of betrayal, but many of the side stories remain unresolved: an old flame of Mathieu's is a committed communist working in their group, and tries to recruit him; we wonder if he could be sold out for their purposes. The success of his operation leads the Germans to send a civilian detective to Paris to investigate; we wonder if he will be the bloodhound who finally sniffs out the conspirators. There are French toughs and the usual Furstian mix of shady people of shadowy origins coming in and out of the story. And there are untold stories hinted at or merely seen in passing. This makes it seem slighter in some ways, but this makes for a sense of time getting faster, gathering momentum like a snowball rolling downhill.

It works very well. The episodes build and the tension builds with it, and again you feel Furst deliberately trying to recreate a more individual atmosphere, trying to put you in Mathieu's mind, make you see how well he copes with the ever-changing, always-dangerous world around him. At first I thought this was a somewhat slighter version of the shadowy genre Furst has made his own, but by the time I finished I realised it was more a different perspective on that genre, the protagonist's own perspective. Oftentimes in Furst's work, sides are sorting themselves out. Here, the battle lines have been drawn clearly, and men like Mathieu have a single course to pursue. Because it moves so relentlessly, this is actually a decent place for new readers to encounter Furst for the, ahem, furst time; for those of us who've been with him a long time, it's a fascinating variation on a theme. Perhaps it ends too quickly, with too few wartime questions answered, but it's a compelling tale of heroism. It delivers what the title promises.

A Hero In France by Alan Furst

Weidenfeld & Nicholson £18.99 ISBN 9781474602907

ALAN FURST'S NIGHT SOLDIERS

Night Soldiers was the 1988 novel in which Alan Furst began to work the territory which through him we now know so well: Europe in the 1930s, in the build up to World War II, and in the early years of that war. It's fascinating because a number of the characters from this book will pop up again – particularly in his next novel Dark Star, but Ilya Goldman recurs four times—but also because this novel is presented in a series of four episodes, starting with the recruitment and training of Bulgarian Khristo Stoianev to the Soviet NKVD, and through the Spanish Civil War, pre-war Paris, and the efforts of the French Resistance during the War. In a sense, it encapsulates all the concerns which would come to define Furst's later works, not least the sense in which putative allies can often be one's worst enemies.

The most successful of the four is called 'Blue Lantern', set during the Spanish Civil War. But for the fact that the back story of some of the characters has been filled in by the previous section, this actually reads like a excellent short story, beginning and ending with the olive trees of San Ximene, a metaphor which works without being overbearing. Of course it isn't self-contained; it has set the stage for the story to move on, and for other characters who will come back, but I found it instructive both as a story and as an indication in just how well Furst makes this episodic approach work.

Furst is often compared to Eric Ambler, and sometimes to Graham Greene, and there is validity in each, but that is more the surface of the stories. When you go underneath, the better comparisons might be to LeCarre, and that is the other thing that makes his writing work. It's the way situations exist in flux; assignments, betrayals, relationships. Stoianev may not be Furst's most-fully delineated character, but that suits the style. His very identity is constantly morphing, his nationality, his allegiances, his dreams. Even the most deep personal anchors turn out to be ephemeral, at least in reality, if not memory or emotion. That is the beauty of Furst's writing, and if this is not the most polished example, it is certainly a many-faceted jewel of a story.

Night Soldiers by Alan Furst

Orion Phoenix (2009) £7.99 ISBN 978-0753826355

ALAN FURST'S MISSION TO PARIS

Mission To Paris, like most of Alan Furst's work, is set in the period just before the Second World War, when Europe is about to come apart at the seams. It's also set in Paris, which makes it a little different, as Furst has actually dealt with Paris during the War itself. Which leads me to think about where this stands in his oeuvre, especially since it follows Spies Of The Balkans, which was a Richard & Judy choice and in this country his most successful novel yet (you can read my review of that book here).

Like Balkans, Mission has a pared down plot—and oddly, considering it's set mostly in Paris, somewhat less atmosphere than his early books. Perhaps he, or we, know Paris too well? Its main character, unusually for Furst, is an American of sorts, Hollywood star Frederic Stahl (to me his name recalls Frederic March and John Stahl, both Americans who might well have been Europeans) born in Vienna, with a Slovene father, now loaned out by Warner Bros. to make a movie in 1938 Paris. But the Germans are waging a deep and complicated propaganda battle within France, trying to keep public opinion away from the idea of preparing for war, and Stahl soon finds himself the object of the affectionate Nazi eye, to his growing discomfort.

From there the story proceeds along familiar lines—through a series of vignettes, set in Paris, Berlin, Morocco, and finally Rumainia, and each ends with an unexpected and sudden death. This is Furst's world, where even the most commonplace of human activities can be fraught with danger, and his stock in trade is recreating that atmosphere of unsettled paranoia and fear.

But this book moves onto a slightly different track in a couple of ways. It's far less ambiguous than many of his previous novels. Furst actually sets up any number of questions for the reader—can we trust so-and-so at Warner Bros, him at the film company, her at the German hostess' party-- and in every case it turns out that we can, or that we were wrong simply to worry. This goes against the great strength of his work, which is that we can never know what positions the people on whom we are forced to depend have taken, and we can never know if that means they can or can't be trusted. So in that sense, this story is more straightforward.

It's also, as I said, less atmospheric. The most interesting parts of Paris don't rise up from the page, they seem to fade in the background of the story. Indeed, the best description is saved for the workings of the film industry (there's even a sly nod to Jean Casson, a hero of previous Furst novels). Even when he visits the wardrobe woman's modest digs, we don't get the deeper sense of what the surroundings mean to her that we've come to expect. Similarly, his Berlin, on Kristallnacht no less, remains something heard off-stage, and he really seems to move through the more exotic settings with even more dispatch.

In a more important way it is more straightforward as well—because Stahl falls in love, and in that sense his 'mission' to Paris has been to do what people have done, have gone to Paris to do, forever. I said in my review of Spies Of The Balkans that there seems to be less 'action' in each successive Furst novel, but that appears to have allowed his love stories to become more involved, more detailed, and I would guess more satisfying for a wider audience. I suspect Mission To Paris will be optioned quickly for a film which, paradoxically, might render what I have taken to be a relatively less well-drawn atmosphere, and convert it into a film whose atmosphere will steal the screen. Furst's work deserves no less.

Mission To Paris by Alan Furst

Weidenfeld & Nicholson £18.99 ISBN 9780863922

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

ALAN FURST'S SPIES OF THE BALKANS

Reviewing Furst's The Foreign Correspondent for the Spectator (you can find the whole review here) I wrote that in his novels it always seems to be twilight, and by that I meant the sort of twilight that comes when a shadow descends on life, the shadow being the inevitable (especially to us, reading fiction as history) coming of World War II. In this case, the war is about to visit Greece, as Italy launches its ill-fated surprise invasion, but it is the spectre of Germany which winds up changing the life of Costa Zannis, a very special policeman in Salonika, the most cosmopolitan of Greek cities.

Furst's books are always set in such places, way stations for those who come from cultures displaced by wars; Salonika sits close to the Yugoslav and Bulgarian borders, and of course far closer to its old rulers from the Ottoman Empire. Zannis himself, as it happens, has grown up in Paris; his assistant comes from Salonika's large Jewish community. Which makes it interesting as the story starts with the docking of a Turkish tramp freighter which carries a German passenger not mentioned in its manifest. He turns out to have photos of the Rupel Pass, the key to any invasion of Greece from the north. This is a direct reference to Furst's previous book, The Spies Of Warsaw, a signal of what is coming, but though Zannis may suspect the Germans eventually, he cannot realise what is coming for him.

Before long he is drawn into various operations. He begins to help Jews escaping from Germany while they still can, and is drawn into the British intelligence net. He returns to Paris to rescue a valuable British scientist marooned there. He does these things not from coercion, nor from nationalism, but because they are, basically, the right things to do, the human things to do, if one can do them. Although we often compare Furst with Graham Greene, and even better Eric Ambler, and rightly so, it's important to note the basic influence of Hemingway here, the concept of grace under pressure--as the war draws closer, as people's dilemmas become more and more pressing, Zannis acts not because he is forced to, but because he cannot think of a good reason why he should not.

Like most of Furst's protagonists he is a man of the world, not prone to panic, and comfortable surfacing in a strange country and making his way home. Unlike some, in this novel he draws upon deep resources, unlimited budgets of dollars, fortunate family connections in Paris, his network of friendly cops around the Balkans. Thriller fans may wonder where the suspense lies, but Furst isn't into chase scenes, what he does is set up atmosphere and let his characters embrace it. Costas, of course, is short for Constantine, who transformed Byzantium into Constantinople, and who was, in that sense, a prototype man of the world getting business done in dangerous times. There is also a sense of real dichotomy in this this. Furst shows wealthy people in both Germany and Greece; the former are helping friends to escape the Nazis, the latter are plotting their own getaway, should the Germans invade. As ever, money talks...

As does love. After discovering one lover was in fact a British spy (unbeknownst to him, which is his one fallibility) he then falls in love with a woman named Demetria, after the goddess of spring. As with Costa's own name, this one is rife with connotation. Spring of course is a time of rebirth, but in Furst's novels, it is also the time nations launch invasions. The story comes full circle, back to that Turkish tramp steamer, and if the ending seems a bit rushed, and perhaps a bit of what the ending of Casablanca might have been had Ilsa showed up at the railway station in Paris, it also raises the distinct possibility that Zannis could return, in Spies of the Levant perhaps, a novel that could make great things from the character of Smyrna/Izmir, and perhaps pay hommage to Ambler as well.

As I said when reviewing The Foreign Correspondent, Furst provides rather less action in every book. Yet in his moving of Zannis round the chess board of 1941 Europe, what he has done is raise all sorts of questions about the way we react not only to war, but to life. Furst's novels are like small but great films that were never made in the Forties, and like those films, they remind of the different values, the different personal values of the time. And the values that do not change over time. They are compelling, not because of their thriller suspense, but because of their human suspense, and that's why he is one of my absolute favourite writers.

Spies Of The Balkans by Alan Furst
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £18.99, ISBN 9780297858881

ANDREW WILLIAMS' INTERROGATOR

Douglas Lindsay was first officer on a destroyer sunk by a German U-Boat, a sinking he believes he could have prevented had he stood up to the ship's captain. Since his mother is German, and he is fluent in the language, he is now working for Naval Intelligence as an interrogator, and he is convinced that the Germans are reading Britain's naval signals. Unknown to him, the British are desperate to protect the fact that they have broken the Germans' own, Enigma code, and Lindsay, with his German background (and a cousin who is himself a U-Boat captain) is always under suspicion. But when one of the foremost U-Boat skippers, the man who sunk Lindsay's own ship, is captured, Lindsay is called in for the crucial questioning, and something more than a battle of wits, or wills, ensues.

From this synopsis you will see why reviewers compared Williams' debut novel to Robert Harris' Enigma, and Williams' own background as a documentary producer and author of World War II history reinforced that comparison. (Although, as an aside, I marvel at how Enigma received a pass from British historical nit-pickers, since in reality its Polish villain would not have been allowed anywhere near Bletchley, despite the Poles having given the British an enigma machine and gone some way toward cracking its codes.) Williams' setting, within naval intelligence (where a certain Ian Fleming is an important officer) and indeed within wartime London, is utterly convincing, atmospheric enough to sometimes remind me of Alan Furst.

Williams story rests on two different matters of suspense, the first, will Lindsay get the information he wants, is the weaker of the two, but it is the one that persists, and its solution is rather telegraphed (that is, unencrypted) and somewhat melodramatic; we've seen it in too many cop shows. The stronger element of suspense is the question of where Lindsay's loyalties lie, and as long as Williams is able to perpetuate the ambiguity of his position, the worry that perhaps he is more interested in uncovering British secrets than German ones, the better the story is. This is true because beyond the mystery of codes central to the plot, Lindsay has begun a relationship with Mary Henderson, an academic and the only woman in an analyst's position. This provides a parallel story, because their relationship also revolves around protecting secrets from each other, they both talk in codes, and there are moments when Lindsay becomes the interrogator with his lover, and moments when she realises that he has. This personal story helps pick up the slack when the nature of Lindsay's true loyalty is finally revealed, and really, I felt the book might have been better had it amplified its somewhat tragic wartime end, tragic both in terms of British shipping losses and Lindsay's own relationships, rather than providing a more bittersweet coda set long after the war.

These quibbles are small, because the nature of Williams' challenge was huge. He keeps this book involving, suspenseful and fascinating to the end, and it is a remarkable first novel.

The Interrogator
Andrew Williams
John Murray £6.99 ISBN 9780719523816

NOTE: This review also appears at www.crimetime.co.uk

FURST WITH THE MOST: SPIES OF WARSAW

The Spies Of Warsaw
Alan Furst
Weidenfeld & Nicholson 16.99
ISBN 9780297855415

'I think you like this kind of war,' Anna Szarbek tells the French military attache Jean-Francois Mercier, who of course is a spy, and this kind of war is of course no real war at all, just preparation for the war which they, in 1937 Warsaw, know is coming inevitably. 'This job has grown into me,' Mercier replies, and that could be the answer Alan Furst might give to the same question. 'This kind of war' has been his subject in nine previous novels, in which time he has recreated the black and white era of Thirties espionage with the precision, the emphasis on subtle shading of mood, the finely judged nuance of a Vermeer. What is particularly telling in this story is the way Mercier is himself made to serve as symbol of both the old, aristocratic Europe which is already in sharp, if ignorant, decline, and which is about to be blown away by Hitler's new world order. His family has a distinguised name, but their estates are in tatters, a metaphor for the nation and the old order.

Germany is preparing for war, and Mercier has spotted, indirectly, the evidence that their attack on France will come with tanks plowing through the Ardennes, something the French high command, secure behind their Maginot Line, regards as unthinkable. Meanwhile, the Nazis are becoming more and more active in Poland, and as they do, Polish intelligence, apart from the admirable Colonel Vyborg, whom Furst's regulars will recall from The Polish Officer, are more concerned with rounding up left-wingers, and protecting themselves from the Russians to their east.

Within Warsaw's world of espionage, and diplomacy, all is more gentlemanly, and Mercier finds himself beginning an affair with Anna, a French lawyer for the League of Nations, by definition a practitioner in an even-greater, more idealistic futility, whose family were Polish Jews. Every action has its ramifications, from the fate of Anna's former lover to the revenge of an SS officer whose kidnap plans in Warsaw Mercier foils. Meanwhile, Furst engages with all types of agents, and their motives, willing and unwilling, desperate or simply adjusting to the changing, and dangerous times. It proceeds at its own pace, the pieces linking tenuously, sometimes not at all, with the inevitability of failure an historical reality which, if anything, adds to the story's foggy atmosphere. More than anyone, Furst recalls Eric Ambler, particularly in the way his spies are often from the business world, motivated by personal greeds, and often people being forced into spying. In both cases, it is difficult to pretend one is engaged in a gentlemanly business.

The conclusion is more problematical, however, as Furst jumps ahead to the start of the war, and mentions that, 'after many adventures' (exactly the line Robert Mitchum uses in voice-over at the end of 'Tombstone'!), Mercier and Anna made their way to London, where they went to work for the French and Polish intelligence services. This suggests a sequel, if not multiple sequels, and even knowing that they make it to Britain, the story of their getting there, in Furst's hands, would not be disappointing.