Writers I Like - Alan Furst

"In the late autumn of 1937, in the steady beat of North Sea rain that comes with dawn in that season, the tramp freighter Nicea stood at anchor off the Belgian city of Ostend.  In the distance, a berthing tug made slow progress through the harbor swell, the rhythm of its engine distinct over the water, its amber running lights twin blurs in the darkness." - Dark Star by Alan Furst, opening paragraph

Starting in 1976, Alan Furst wrote four novels over a decade with little success.  In the late 1980s he decided to focus his writing on European settings during the period leading up to WWII and the early years of the war.  Starting with Night Soldiers in 1988, he's written eleven superb novels capturing those years. These novels are thematically a series but they feature different characters and countries and are not arranged chronologically so you can read them in any order. The books take you to Moscow, Warsaw, Spain, Paris, Salonika, to small villages in Bulgaria, tugboats on the Danube and isolated hotels in Switzerland where those on "your" side may not really be on "your" side or, perhaps, you are not on "their" side.  The twelfth book in the series, Mission To Paris, will be released next week.


Here's what reviewers have said about the Furst novels:

"Alan Furst is now the greatest living writer of espionage fiction"

"Trust me, if you read one you'll eventually find your way to all the others, so addictive is Furst's captivating prose"

 "Furst's depictions of wartime Europe have the richness and complexity of the fiction of John LeCarre and Somerset Maugham" 

Furst's books feature the "night soldiers" - the spies, part-time spies, correspondents, attaches, aristocrats, bystanders and other individuals who find themselves pulled into the murky world of Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s.  Many of his best characters are caught in a gray world where the choices are serving Stalin or Hitler, and finding out, no matter what their choices, that it may still not be clear whom they serve.  Furst captures well the intricate dance between Stalin and Hitler and their secret services that culminated in the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 1939 and what it meant for the night soldiers caught in the whirlwind.  It is an unsettling time for all - as one of Furst's characters says "You wonder why we recruit friends, family, lovers?  We might as well - they're going to be considered guilty anyhow".  It gives a sense of the times that the "Nonaggression Pact" was actually an agreement to carve up Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Romania and opened the path to a wider European war.  As Leon Trotsky said in a quote used in one of Furst's books:

"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you"

The first two novels in the series differ from the rest.  Night Soldiers and Dark Star are "bigger" novels than the next nine.  They cover longer time periods, more geography and more characters than the later books and are more like epic novels or sagas.  Night Soldiers, for example, takes a young man from a Bulgarian village in 1934 through training by Stalin's secret police in Moscow, to Spain during its Civil War, to France and other parts of Europe before ending in the chaos of the Soviet advance into Eastern Europe in the spring of 1945.

The timeline for Dark Star is more compressed, running from 1937 to 1941, following the tortured path of Andre Szara, Pravda correspondent and occasional "friend" to the Soviet Secret Services.  He finds himself enmeshed in the intrigues of three competing Soviet spy factions during Stalin's purges and in the events leading up to the Nonaggression Pact.  These two books are a great place to start if you are not already deeply familiar with the machinations of the European powers during these years and provide a jumping off place for understanding the context of the later novels.

The books after Dark Star are much more limited in their chronological and geographic scope.  They cover specific episodes of these years and the events are told in a more impressionistic and sometimes, indirect, way - they are like miniaturist portraits.  The occasional history lectures that occur in the first two books are absent in the later books. A review in The Economist of Red Gold captures the style well:
  

"Mr. Furst excels at period atmosphere, which he conjures up, not with a litany of facts absorbed and reproduced, but with light touches that suggest the broader scene. . . The prose is as meagerly rationed as wartime food, the high political background only fleetingly hinted at, and the dangers emanating not just from the occupiers but the occupied as well are clearly but subtly expressed".   

Furst's skill is such that even with prose "meagerly rationed" you can smell the smoke in the cafes, hear the footsteps on a sidewalk at night and feel the fears of the characters as they move through a forest or set a roadblock for the approaching Germans.  If you've seen, and liked, the movie The Third Man with Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton (set in Vienna just after WWII) you'll like Furst's books.

A few days ago, The Wall Street Journal carried an interview with Alan Furst which you can find here

Night Soldier Novels
Night Soldiers
Dark Star
The Polish Officer
The World At Night
Red Gold
Kingdom of Shadows
Blood of Victory
Dark Voyage
The Foreign Correspondent
The Spies of Warsaw
Spies of the Balkans