In his distinctly unrevealing introduction to the anthology, Furst remarks that characters in spy novels

"work at the blurred edge of the Manichean universe, where Good struggles with Evil for the destiny of humankind. Work, often enough, is plagued by moral uncertainty, and always in secrecy--thus always in danger, in foreign lands, living the sort of independent and adventurous existence that may lead to love or lechery or both."

Furst tells us far more of what he really thinks in a brief but devastatingly acute passage on John Le Carr‚, for whom the Cold War was "44 years of obliquity, treachery, lies and counter lies--the perfect battleground for the Le Carr‚ style, which is dark, ironic, and bristling with aristocratic contempt, a very sharp tool encountered far more agreeably in literature than in daily life."

Furst, who has no professional intelligence background, notes that those who do (Greene, Le Carr‚, Maugham and McCarry)

"write with a kind of cloaked anger, a belief that the world is a place where political power is maintained by means of treachery and betrayal, and worse, that this gloomy fact of life has as much to do with elemental human nature as it does with the ambitions of states. By the final paragraph, it's evident that victory is not a moral triumph, and with a few turns of the globe and changes in politics, no longer victory. Not good."

That is not Furst's view at all. His characters are the good guys, whatever wicked deeds and betrayals they might perform. There is none of the squalid moral equivalency of Greene or Le Carr‚. This is refreshing; we know where we are. They may be bumbling, incompetent, out of their depth, but Furst's heroes believe in the historic and human necessity of fighting against Hitler, or rebelling against Stalin. Furst's first effort, Night Soldiers (1988), emerged from a travel-journalism assignment to the Danube in the mid-1980s, as the Soviet empire began to crumble from within. This first novel, a clumsy effort by later standards, begins with a Bulgarian village's local fascist group bullying its enemies. A boy is killed; his brother is recruited by the communists, taken to Moscow and trained to become a Comintern agent. He is the sent to Spain's civil war, falls in love with a young American woman and becomes disillusioned with the betrayals and anti-Trotskyist purges of his Stalinist masters and escapes to France, and after many adventures is drawn into the French resistance. The second novel, Dark Star (1990), covers much the same ground, with a thoughtfully drawn Russian Comintern agent and Pravda foreign correspondent, who again grows disillusioned with the NKVD's internal purges.

The third novel, The Polish Officer (1994), marked the coming of the mature and distinctive Alan Furst, with its focus on one of the minor players of the war. Most World War II novels and spy tales have concentrated on the heavyweights, on British and German intelligence, or the Russians and Americans. Furst has mined the other belligerents to brilliant effect. The Polish Officer begins with the doomed defense of Warsaw in September 1939, and then our hero, Alexander de Milja of the cartographic service of the Polish general staff, has to organize the evacuation of the central bank's gold reserves. (A distinctive feature of Furst's writing is that he understands the importance of logistics and of money in war and espionage; a sub-plot of Night Soldiers is the Russian ploy to secure the gold reserves of republican Spain.) With Poland overrun and occupied, he then has to make the country useful by building its own intelligence service in a way that supports the essential British ally while preserving some element of independence.

The fourth and fifth novels, The World At Night (1996) and Red Gold, feature the French film producer Jean Casson. The sixth, Kingdom of Shadows (2000), takes us back to pre-war Paris in the appeasement years. Nicholas Morath, a young Hungarian aristocrat who runs a small advertising agency, is recruited into a small anti-Nazi intelligence operation by Count Janos Polanyi, his uncle. Polanyi, a very loosely drawn character who reappears in other novels, works closely with British intelligence. The seventh novel, Blood of Victory (2002), introduces the exiled Russian writer I. A. Serebin, whose nationality makes him a neutral in that year between the fall of France and the invasion of Russia, and thus unusually free to travel. He is also recruited by Polanyi. Serebin's mistress, the wife of a complaisant French diplomat based in Trieste, calls him "mon ours" (my bear) and is one of Furst's few successful women characters. Most seem there to provide bedmates, romantic interest and some reasonably dignified sex scenes. But then, who needs classic characterization, when Furst can conjure so much of a woman from the handful of words he uses to describe Serebin's previous mistress, Tamara? "They'd had two love affairs; at age 15 and again at 35. Then Russia had taken her, as it took people."

It is a curiosity of Furst's writing that some of his minor characters are far more memorable than his stars. The blackmailing of one of Casson's mistresses, a partly Jewish woman, by a colleague in a Paris travel agency, is a memorable and wholly convincing sub-plot. Other minor figures like Weiss, one of the top communist agents in Paris, who simply fell into the Soviet service after being released from a prisoner-of-war camp by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, are equally credible. Weiss, a bureaucrat of the underground who obeys Moscow's orders even when he thinks them foolish, remains a decent fellow, even when launching the killings of random German officers in the knowledge that they will lead to bloody reprisals. Other minor characters--a Jewish scriptwriter who can churn out charming resort hotel comedies while on the run, a Dutch naval officer trying desperately to find some tools and human assets that will make him useful to the British, a Romanian professor who gets shot by a random bullet in a coup--stick in the memory.

Furst's novels work, and satisfy on a very high level, because the real character is Europe itself, a sprawling yet controlled and familiar landscape being subjected to the indignities of war and occupation. It is Europe as victim, as pawn in the ideological clash between Nazism and communism, while Furst's characters strive not to be victims of history and to retain some sense of self, of choice and of decency even when so little of their fate is in their own hands. Because of the intensity of the morality play, World War II has become to the modern West what the Troy tales were to classical civilization--instructive drama as well as founding myth--and this is the landscape that Furst has made his own.

He is not the first in this field. In Hollywood, the Epstein brothers saw the opportunity even as the war raged, and Humphrey Bogart played his finest role as Rick, a character who would be entirely at home in a Furst novel. As Walter Shapiro noted in a review in Time, "Nothing can be like watching Casablanca for the first time, but Furst comes closer than anyone has in years." And as master of the ambience of Europe in the years of 1933-45, a time defined by the grim shadows of Hitler and Stalin, he has won a devoted body of admirers. They include some formidable modern novelists. In reviews in Britain, Robert Harries (of Enigma fame) has called him matchless, and William Boyd says, "in the world of the espionage thriller, Alan Furst is in a class of his own." The Berkeley economist Brad de Long gives copies of Furst's novels to his new graduate students, to emphasize the brute power of barbarism and the vulnerability of civilization. Newt Gingrich, a compulsive reader whose prolific reviews on Amazon.com are worth following, sees him as "our pre-eminent historical-espionage novelist."

"Anyone seeking to understand the horrors of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran and North Korea should read Furst's books", Gingrich recommends.

"In the end, the horror of one man or woman being destroyed and tortured by another within a state system of power is remarkably the same even if the reason is different. Furst clearly grasps this larger moral issue: 'Hitler wasn't mad, he was evil', he writes. 'And that was a notion educated people didn't like, it offended their sense of the rational world. Yet it was true. And just as true of his mirror image, Stalin.' This is the insight that made Churchill historic and Chamberlain impotent in dealing with evil. This is the insight that enabled Ronald Reagan to bring down the Soviet Union. And it is this kind of insight that makes Alan Furst worth reading."

After its extraordinary flowering in the 1960s and 1970s, we have come to think of the spy novel as the distinctive literary form of the Cold War. In the absence of direct hostilities, the war of the shadows and of John Le Carr‚'s Berlin Rules became a hospitable platform for cheap thrillers and serious novels alike, for dashing heroes and crude villains, for simplistic anti-communism and the most complex subtleties of betrayal. There were certain similarities to the form, even across the Iron Curtain. The West had its James Bond and the Russians had Julian Semyonov's Stirlitz, the ultimate Soviet spy, who drove a magnificent Horch sports car very fast, listened to Edith Piaf, and single-handedly frustrated the dastardly Anglo-American plot to sign a separate peace with Hitler. His Seventeen Moments of Spring, in which Colonel Maksim Isaev masqueraded as Standartenfuhrer Stirlitz of the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (the intelligence arm of the SS), became perhaps the most successful example of genuinely popular culture that the Soviet Union ever produced. Streets emptied and Aeroflot planes delayed their flights when the TV series was broadcast.

Essay Types: Book Review