But the Cold War was not the only period in which the spy novel flowered. The first widespread appearance of the genre came in England in the years before 1914, as war with the Kaiser's Germany became more and more likely. Erskine Childers's The Riddle Of The Sands, the 1903 tale of a yachting trip to the Friesian Islands that uncovers a secret German invasion plan, is sometimes cited as the first herald of the new genre. There were many others. Sherlock Holmes investigated the loss of naval secrets. Although rooted in the great games of India and Central Asia rather than Europe, Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901) still has claims to be the finest of all novels of espionage. But Edwardian best-sellers like E. Phillips Oppenheim's The Great Impersonation and The Double Traitor are more typical of the wave of popular spy fiction. There was a second wave in the years before 1939, with Graham Greene's Stamboul Train and The Confidential Agent and Eric Ambler's A Mask for Dimitrios.

The point is that revivals of the spy novel as a genre do not come out of nowhere. They are products of particular times, when the international situation heats up, when war seems near, when civilization is in peril and the battle in the shadows is already joined. Such, of course, has been the current condition since September 11, 2001, finally ending that decade-long holiday from history after the Soviet collapse. Once again, the West faces attack from an enemy who can be neither bought off nor placated. We have no choice in this war that has been thrust upon us. Furst has an acute sense of the responses this can provoke. One of his best characters, Jean Casson, is watching a troop of French cavalry trotting through Paris in May 1940, just after the German attacks had begun.

"Now the band played the Marseillaise and Casson held his hand over his heart. War with Germans, he thought, it doesn't stop. They'd lost in 1870, won--barely--in 1918, and now they had to do it again. A nightmare: an enemy attacks, you beat him, still he attacks. You surrender, still he attacks. Casson's stomach twisted, he wanted to cry, or to fight, it was the same feeling."

It is thus at once fitting and no accident that Furst's novels have made the transition from succŠs d'estime to best-seller status in the last three years as we have come to understand that the enemy is a new kind of fascism, in a new kind of war that must be fought in the shadows and alleys as well as the airwaves and cafŽs and mosques and minds. Furst himself understands this. As one of Casson's chiefs tells him in Red Gold: "The sad truth is a country can't survive unless people fight for it." Furst explicitly understands this connection to 9/11, as he made clear recently in an interview with the magazine The Writer. In Blood of Victory, one of the characters declares: "If you don't stand up to evil, it eats you first and kills you later, but not soon enough." In his interview, Furst commented:

"I put that passage in after 9/11 as a memorial. I did it absolutely on purpose. That was a late fix. At the end of the day after that experience, I thought, well, it's the truest thing I know to say. I'm not a public spokesman or anything like that, but I do write books and they are publicly read. That gives me the right to say something sometimes that's close to my heart. That's exactly what I did. The world is a place where good struggles with evil. You can see it. Turn on the television. It's not far away from you. And that has been true in all history. When didn't you have terribly negative things going on, evil people, brutal things, catastrophes, predatory people? Then you have heroes who come along and try to save the day. To save is such an elemental part of humanity. When you see how 9/11 finally is playing itself out . . . we have chosen to think about it in terms of the fireman and policeman. That is the emotional final paragraph of 9/11. That's the hopeful thing [we] found in it--that there are people who are heroic. What does it mean to be heroic? It means you try to save people when they need to be saved. My books are about that all of the time. None of these people have to do what they do. None of my heroes. I always give them an option."

Essay Types: Book Review