Alan Furst

• Born: February 20, 1941
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

TYPES OF PLOT: Espionage; historical

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Night Soldiers, 1988-2019

Contribution

Although he did not attain large-scale success until he was fifty, Alan Furst became the most successful new writer of espionage fiction in the 1990s, a success that continued on a larger scale in the twenty-first century. Furst pioneered the genre of the atmospheric thriller, as important for its evocation of times and places gone by as for the excitement of its plot. His novels are steeped in the ambience of Europe before and during World War II. Furst writes historical fiction that happens to contain spying as much as he composes spy novels that happen to contain a historical setting. Though Furst lived for many years in Paris, a city that tends to be a motif in his fiction, he also sets much of his action in Eastern European countries less familiar to readers of this genre.

Furst often features protagonists who are communists or working for the communists. His preoccupation with Communism and Eastern European settings can be seen as a product of the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-1991. He explores this period from the perspective of the 1990s and after, now that it is no longer possible to see a powerful Soviet Union as a permanent outcome of World War II. Nonetheless, Furst’s communists are three-dimensional charactersnot cardboard ideologueswho fall in love, feel pain, and register the full range of psychological reactions. A master of historical detail, Furst also allows his characters to hold complex and deeply felt beliefs, which he may not necessarily share, but which reflect a particular time and place. In this way, Furst’s novels attain a romantic sense of the past that contributes to the atmosphere of his mysteries.

Biography

Alan Furst was born to Jewish American parents on the Upper West Side in New York City in 1941. He received a bachelor of arts degree in English from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1962 and a master of arts degree in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1967. Later, he took courses at the School for General Studies at Columbia University in New York, where he encountered the prominent anthropologist Margaret Mead, for whom he later briefly worked as an assistant. He worked as a freelance writer for magazines before moving to France in 1969 as a result of receiving a Fulbright Award to teach abroad. Once in France, he contributed a regular column to the International Herald Tribune. Later, he moved back to the United States to work for the Arts Commission in Seattle, but he made frequent visits to Paris and soaked in the atmosphere of the city that was to become a cynosure for his major fiction.

While in France, Furst began to publish fiction. Although Your Day in the Barrel (1976) had the thriller-genre elements so central to Furst’s later fiction, it was basically a comic mystery about a drug dealer named Roger Levin. The book was influenced by the exuberant, countercultural style of Tom Robbins, who provided a blurb on the novel’s back cover. The book received appreciation only in Seattle, where Furst was then working. The Paris Drop (1980) and The Caribbean Account (1981) are suspense novels that concern drug dealing, although their plots are more conventional and their appeal more mass-market. Shadow Trade (1983) was Furst’s initial foray into the genre of espionage, although unlike his later books, it has a more or less contemporary setting.

In the mid-1980s, Furst visited Eastern Europe while researching an article he had been commissioned to write for Esquire Magazine. Night Soldiers (1988) was inspired by this trip and marked the beginning of Furst’s historical espionage novels. Night Soldiers and Dark Star (1991) were long and possessed considerable meditative passages. It was only with The Polish Officer (1995) that Furst fully mastered a stripped-down technique and an ability to convey historical information without disrupting the excitement of a suspenseful plot. This book was followed by The World at Night and Red Gold, Furst’s only books sharing a protagonist, the French film producer Jean Casson. Furst was not tempted by the stability and marketing potential of a Jean Casson series, however, turning to stand-alone protagonists for his next three books. Kingdom of Shadows (2001) and The Foreign Correspondent (2006) concern Eastern European émigrés in prewar Paris and Rome, respectively, while Dark Voyage (2004) focused on a Dutch captain aboard a seemingly neutral freighter.

Though Furst lived in Paris at the beginning of his work on the historical espionage books, by the mid-1990s he had moved to Sag Harbor, New York, on the east end of Long Island. By 2002, he had become a prominent figure in the literary world, as evidenced by a major profile in The New York Times as well as by his writing the copy for an advertisement for Absolut vodka. Furst’s novels Dark Voyage and The Foreign Correspondent were given the space and depth of treatment in newspaper review sections usually reserved for major works of mainstream fiction and marked Furst’s development from cult writer beloved by aficionados to a figure with an increasing popular readership.

Analysis

Alan Furst’s appeal has a good deal to do with his choice of setting. Though many spy novels have been written about World War II, most emphasized action, military intelligence, or the technical and scientific details of weaponry. Furst’s focus on psychology, atmosphere, and political relations between and within nation-states provides pleasures that are as intellectual as visceral.

Although inspired by ’s spy novels of the 1930s and ’s “entertainments” focusing on Cold War machinations, Furst is writing from the viewpoint of a later time period and evokes rather than shares in the passionate left-wing political allegiance of the two British novelists. Another British novelist of the Greene-Ambler generation, , exerted a profound influence on Furst’s fiction. Powell’s sense of social history, interest in ordinary life during wartime, and ability to entwine discursive background with quick, terse dialogue are features emulated by Furst’s mature work. Interestingly, however, despite his admiration for these British writers and a general Britishness of tone noted by many reviewers in Furst’s work, Britain seldom, if ever, appears as a setting in his fiction.

The first two historical espionage books written by Furst, Night Soldiers and Dark Star, show the author immersing himself in the background of his books while also trying to communicate a compelling story. These novels serve as groundwork for their more seamless and faster-paced successors, starting with The Polish Officer. By Dark Voyage, Furst’s denouement involving a final chase through the Baltic Sea is as exciting as any action-thriller.

For most writers, historical information and description are background. For Furst, they are content, a substantial part of what the reader expects. He conducts massive research, from securing names and dates relevant to the settings of his stories to determining what cigars the characters would have smoked, what restaurants they might have eaten in, and what popular songs they might have heard.

Furst’s protagonists are always male and are almost always single. As with the traditional espionage or hard-boiled detective novel protagonists, they are loyal ultimately only to themselves, although they may be enveloped in a network of business and ideological associations. Furst’s protagonists differ, however, from those in the hard-boiled or traditional spy novel in that they are consciously intellectual, often cultured, and have a keen sense of style. His protagonists are often active in the arts either as practitioners, like Jean Casson, or as afficionados like Jean Szara, the protagonist of Dark Star, whose name alludes to the Romanian Dadaist writer . Even Eric DeHaan, the Dutch sea captain who is the protagonist of Dark Voyage, is somebody who reads and reflects beyond his immediate circumstances. Furst’s protagonists are more detached and disaffiliated at the start of the novel than at the end. Often, they find themselves engaged in a moral or ideological sense during the course of the novel, whether because of a romantic attachment, an acquired sense of mission, or a dormant sense of morality that is awakened by the dire, life-or-death circumstances into which they have been thrust. Because Furst’s characters wake up to their existential situation rather than espousing a predetermined attitude, the novels often chronicle the philosophical growth of their protagonists.

Furst tells his stories almost exclusively from the point of view of his heroes; readers learn about the characters’ world as they do, and readers feel themselves to be in the characters’ shoes as they struggle to thread their way through a murky and perilous reality. Furst’s protagonists often try to address their isolation through relationships with women; Furst does not write love scenes as smoothly as he writes passages of pursuit and flight, but the sexual element is a crucial one in his work. Though some of these relationships succeed better than others, these love stories provide a counterpoint to the pervasive presence of war and politics, but they also demonstrate that the World War II era was one in which the private could not remain untouched by the political.

Furst’s heroes tend to be middle-aged, middle-class, reserved, and unsuccessful in love but sympathetic to and intrigued by women; they are intellectual though not literary, and while slow to commit themselves, Furst’s heroes eventually come to care deeply about the activity of espionage, partially out of moral considerations but also out of love of the game. Though Furst’s heroes encounter many perils, they always emerge alive at the end; however, Jean Casson aside, his protagonists are not repeated from book to book. The protagonist’s survival is not to ensure the next adventure but instead is an affirmation of personal integrity in a world that often seems ready to dismiss it. Furst may seem to emphasize political events and circumstances, but his novels forcefully convey the importance of unprepossessing people who are able to rise to the occasion at a time of crisis.

Red Gold

The title of Red Gold refers to the funding of the communist resistance in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, the sources of which Germany is determined to find. Jean Casson, an apolitical man and former filmmaker, returns to France to pursue a woman with whom he is infatuated. Casson is recruited into the Resistance by a police officer who realizes that because Casson has a network of contracts in the film industry, he has unwittingly met a lot of communists. Casson’s assignment to foil German attempts to ferret out the “red gold” allows Furst to demonstrate the way in which prewar glamour can be transmuted into grim wartime determination. Red Gold is Furst’s only novel set fully in France, a setting his readers know better than the Eastern European countries he often explores. Furst’s ability to evoke an original sense of atmosphere is all the more remarkable.

Dark Star

In Dark Star, Jean Szara is a journalist for the Soviet newspaper Pravda who, despite his communist conviction, is not an ideologue. Therefore, it marks a change for him when he is asked by the NKVD, the Soviet spy agency, to monitor activity in Paris. Szara finds himself torn between what are, in his mind, competing goods: the communist ideological struggle and his growing awareness of his own Jewishness, which leads him to try to save the Jews of Europe from Nazism even though that is not within the mandate given him by his Soviet superiors. This novel, covering a wider span of time (1937-1940) than most of Furst’s subsequent works, sets the tone for them by charting the growth of the protagonist’s awareness of himself and his world.

The Polish Officer

Poland was quickly conquered in 1939 by the armed might of Germany and the perfidy of the Soviet Union, but the Polish resistance, forced abroad, is just beginning the fight in The Polish Officer. Captain Alexander de Milja, who makes maps for a living, experiences the map of Europe in a visceral way to help underwrite the Polish resistance in exile as he tries to smuggle the Polish gold reserves out of the country via the one open border with Romania. This novel gives a good overview of the Eastern Front of the early years of World War II and shows de Milja as both an ardent patriot and a vulnerable human being subject to stress and temptation.

Dark Voyage

Dark Voyage explores diplomatic ambiguities of World War II, especially the importance of governments in exile and the potential of the few neutral countries, like Spain, to become sites of espionage and skullduggery. Dutch captain Eric DeHaan disguises his ship, the MV Noordendaam, as a Spanish freighter while plotting to aid the resistance to the Nazis who have occupied his country. Following an exciting itinerary that takes him and his ship from Tunisia in the Mediterranean to Estonia in the Baltic, DeHaan shows how paradoxically easy it is for a political mission, when disguised as an economic enterprise, to escape notice even in a world at war. Dark Voyage is arguably Furst’s most gripping and most thoughtful work.

Principal Series Character:

• Jean Casson is the only protagonist to appear more than once in Furst’s World War II-era spy novels. He is a French film producer who initially epitomizes the pleasure-seeking abandon of interwar Paris but gradually becomes drawn into wartime intrigue and into committing himself to political action and a moral position. In The World at Night (1996), Casson is infatuated with the actress Citrine and is torn between this passion and his growing desire to help France resist the Nazis. In Red Gold (1999), Casson, a new recruit to the world of espionage, is chosen by the Resistance as a key contact person because many of his friends from his cinema days had become activists and fighters.

Bibliography

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007.

Dunn, Adam. “Publishers Weekly Talks with Alan Furst.” Publishers Weekly 249, no. 26 (July, 2002): 52.

Foreman, Jonathan. “Furst Among Equals.” Review of Dark Voyage, by Alan Furst. Weekly Standard 10, no. 9 (November, 2004): 37-38.

Gross, Ken. “Paris Noir.” The New York Times Magazine: Sophisticated Traveler, June 4, 2006, 148-152.

McMasters, Kelly. “Author Alan Furst Talks about His Latest Spy Thriller 'Under Occupation.'” The Gazette, 2 Feb. 2020, www.thegazette.com/books/author-alan-furst-talks-about-his-latest-spy-thriller-under-occupation/. Accessed 16 July 2024.

Paretsky, Sara. “Alan Furst’s ‘A Hero of France.’” The New York Times, 30 May 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/books/review/alan-fursts-a-hero-of-france.html. Accessed 16 July 2024.

Schrag, Peter. “Graham Greene, Roll Over.” The Nation, October 12, 2002, 31-34.

Taylor, Charles. “A Stylish Contradiction: Furst’s Romantic Realism.” The New York Observer, June 7, 2006, 20.