#alan furst

[bookcoversonly]

Title: The World at Night | Author: Alan Furst | Publisher: Random House (2002)

[oldshrewsburyian]

Idk if you can help me in my quest, but since you've got things about Bond I thought I could give it a try : I love spy novels (Le Carré, Fleming...) but I'm dying, buried under way too many british white men saviors of the world. Do you know if there's any nice spy novel which has female protagonists and/or non-british/americans main characters? Crawling my way out of that hole is a challenge T_T

I do indeed have Things about Bond!! I would also argue that one of Le Carré's great gifts to the genre is to undermine that trope, but I do take your point.

Rudyard Kipling, Kim [Biracial adolescent too smart for his own good, plus Mahboub Ali the red-bearded horse trader, the umbrella-carrying Hurree Chunder Mukerjee, and other unforgettable characters negotiating their fates and their identities between rival empires and rival philosophies.]

Maria Dueñas, The Time In Between [Spanish woman in Morocco between the wars]

Alan Furst's opus. The books are written in 3rd-person limited, and the POV characters are so far invariably male, but there are always interesting and well-rounded women in the books, always more than one interesting woman per book, never a woman who is only a love interest, and almost exclusively non-Anglo protagonists. I'm going to keep saying I want a Mission to Paris movie with Goran Višnjić until the world notices.

I always feel guilty about not being more enthusiastic about Helen MacInnes, but her protagonists tend to conform to the gendered norms of the mid-century in ways I find annoying. I usually find them and their relationships boring, I feel (someone show me how to like Helen MacInnes more, please.)

Several of Laurie R. King's Mary Russell series (Sherlock Holmes pastiches) feature early 20th-century espionage, if you're up for dipping in and out of a series. O Jerusalem, The Game (of course), and Dreaming Spies would all suit. Mary is the main protagonist, and all of these novels also feature non-Anglo deuteragonists.

If any followers have recs, I'd welcome them! I've actually done a bit of research on the origins of the spy novel, and it is a surprisingly Anglocentric/Anglophone genre, but surely by now there must be other traditions I just haven't discovered yet...?

[justforbooks]

What is it that makes World War II spy fiction and summer go hand in hand like gin and tonic? I ask this as someone who rereads suspense standards like Ken Follett’s “Eye of the Needle” and Graham Greene’s “The Ministry of Fear” with the same seasonal regularity as dandelions sprouting.

With its menacing Nazis, Alan Furst’s latest tale — his 12th — returns to the loamy slice of 1930s history exploited by Follett and Greene. Called “Mission to Paris,” it’s a classic cloak-and-dagger title that, with its promise of rakish fedoras, encrypted telegrams and Walther P38s, practically sings out: Summertime!

In the noble tradition of historical spy fiction that educates as it entertains, “Mission to Paris” clues readers into the propaganda warfare that the Nazis and their right-wing French sympathizers waged in France, long before conquering tanks rolled down the Champs-Elysees. Another storyline involves the informal network of intelligence agents (many of them well-placed friends of FDR) who gathered information overseas prior to the formation of the OSS in 1942. Hollywood’s role in undermining the Nazis — on and off the screen — is the third narrative strand here. Enter our hero, Fredric Stahl, a dishy leading man under contract to Warner Bros. In the summer of 1938, Stahl is loaned out to Paramount and sent to Paris to make a film. The Nazi propaganda mongers (the “Ribbentropburo”) prick up their ears at this news: Now an American citizen but born in Vienna, Stahl seems like a promising, high-profile figure who could be used to spout pro-Nazi sentiments in France. But Hitler’s hacks don’t know their man.

“He’d been scrawny as a boy but two years as an ordinary seaman, scraping rust, painting decks, had put just enough muscle on him so he could be filmed wearing a bathing suit. He couldn’t punch another man, he wasn’t Clark Gable, and he couldn’t fight a duel, he was not Errol Flynn. But neither was he Charles Boyer — he wasn’t so sophisticated. Mostly he played a warm man in a cold world.”

Which is the very same “role” he plays in this novel!

When Stahl refuses the oily overtures of some expatriate German aristocrats in Paris, the bad guys get to work strong-arming his cooperation. An interview he gives to the newspaper Le Matin is manipulated so that Stahl sounds as if he’s advocating a policy of appeasing Hitler. A sleazy German acquaintance bursts into a closed rehearsal at the movie studio in Paris and acts all chummy with Stahl, embarrassing him in front of his fellow actors and left-wing director. As the pressure to cooperate with the propaganda meisters escalates, Stahl seeks help from the American Embassy. That’s when Roosevelt’s amateur spy masters decide that Stahl may be useful to them as a courier and information gatherer. Off he flies to a film festival in Berlin, just in time to witness Kristallnacht.

“Mission to Paris” is not Furst-rate. The best parts of this story are those filled with period details about movie making and tense moments in which the tentacles of the Nazis and their wealthy French sympathizers tighten around Stahl’s famous chest. The settings here are evocative (a rainy autumn in Paris, a snowy Christmas in Budapest), although sometimes Furst lays the schmaltz on a tad thick. For instance, excusing Stahl’s romantic dalliance with a young woman he meets at a salon held by an expatriate German, the third-person narrator gives a cheesy Gallic shrug: “When you are in Paris, you have to make love to somebody.”

“Mission to Paris” is perfectly agreeable summer suspense reading, but what keeps it out of the five-star company of Furst stunners like “Night Soldiers,” “Dark Star” and “Spies of the Balkans” is the weak denouements of the key action-adventure moments. It’s as though Furst came up with crackerjack ideas for kidnappings and murders and then got drowsy as he was writing those scenes. I could say more, but then I’d have to swallow a cyanide pill.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[bookbagged]

Remember when I said yesterday was the lost load of books I was buying from the book sale? Well, I’m a dirty forking liar and my pants are on fire. But this is the last load because the book sale is officially over and done with.

Only cost $2, though.

[maitre-kuroneko]

As he often did, Mercier thought of Annemarie as he drifted off. He was lonely for her, three years gone from influenza - thought at first, and for too long,  to be a winter grippe. Despite all the time he'd spent away  from her, they'd been a close couple, given to the small, continual affections of married life. They'd had two daughters, both now in their early twenties, one married to an archaeologist and living in Cairo, the other working at a museum in Copenhagen : adventurers like their father and, alas, like him, terribly independent. It was what he'd wished for, and what he got - so life went. Every now and then, a newsy letter, but it had been a long time since he'd seen either one of them. They were attractive, not beautiful, and moderately celestial, floating just above the daily world, not unlike Annemarie. Annemarie. Now and then, with a late supper for two planned, after the girls left home, they would make love at this time - that seductive hour between afternoon and night, l'heure bleue, in the French tradition, named after its deepening shadow.

Spies of Warsaw

[oldshrewsburyian]

Hi! I was at a used book fair this week and I managed to pick up seven Alan Furst books for a dollar each! I also got The Game of Kings and two Le Carres, so I'm very well stocked for autumn - super excited to dive in. (Also, since I've asked you for advice about grad applications in the past, I just want to say: I was accepted! To multiple programs! Classes start this Friday)

What a good autumnal acquisition! Have fun reading espionage, and congrats on committing to some leisure time for reading as you adjust to grad school. Also, congratulations on grad school! I hope you have a lovely cohort.

[oldshrewsburyian]

Anti-fascist fiction: Alan Furst

@thelibraryiscool replied to this post:

That sounds...very relevant to my interests, say more! (If you would like to)

Yes! So! Alan Furst writes lyrical, atmospheric, darkly funny and very sexy espionage novels set in Europe from about 1933-1938. A rarity for espionage fiction: all of his women characters are fascinating. And they’ve only been getting better from the early books on. His POV protagonists are always male (so far) but while there are always romances, the women are never merely sex objects, either in the view of the author or the male protagonists. This may seem like a low bar? but it’s one that has proved infamously hard to clear. And I especially appreciate this for women from a variety of class backgrounds -- and no one is ever sex-shamed, glory hallelujah.

Anyway, these are not just novels with great romance subplots (whether steamy or confined to unbearably tender hand-holding.) They are also wonderful novels about morally grey people being heroic. Some of the people are deeply religious; some of them are agnostic or atheists. There’s a Hungarian count who likes hunting grouse and also Nazis. There’s a Polish colonel who speaks French and has unbearably sad eyes. There’s a Bulgarian teenager who joins the resistance when his brother is beaten to death. There’s a costume seamstress who talks about spying without dropping a stitch. There’s an aristocratic Englishwoman who wears silk cravats and spies in the Balkans and makes love to a Greek policeman. There are middle-aged married people in love. There are Jewish resistance fighters and people hiding their Jewish neighbors. There are people drinking to forget. There are journalists who smoke Sobranies and learn how to lie. There’s an actor who gets talked into espionage and is adorably bewildered by it. There are rings of radio operators and there is a woman who takes a cyanide capsule with her when she heads off to become the mistress of a German general. I love everyone in this bar. And this bar, very often, is the Brasserie Heininger, a recurring character, with a shattered mirror and the best sauerkraut in Paris. 

...I used to read these books for escapism, and now I read them as a different kind of consolation, but anyway, yes, they’re great.

[oldshrewsburyian]

@queenofattolia replied to this post:

it looked on goodreads like they were a series. so they don't have to be read in order?

They don’t! I’ll elaborate a little on this. (Earlier installments in my Alan Furst promotion here and here, for the curious.) If you want to know the truth about what happened to the bullet-shattered mirror at the Brasserie Heininger, you need to read the first novel. But I think of them more as linked novels than a series. Red Gold and The World at Night form a duology, with the same protagonist, but they are exceptional. I’ve been told that Midnight in Europe and A Hero of France also contain enough of the same protagonists that you should read Midnight in Europe first, so as not to be spoiled for who survives. Also, the first two novels, Night Soldiers and Dark Star, contain many of the same secondary characters. 

Mostly, there are just some intermittently reoccurring characters... including the Brasserie Heiniger and its mirror! It’s lots of fun to recognize and reencounter them (I love János Polanyi so much) but you’re not going to be left intellectually or emotionally adrift if you haven’t read the novels in their order of publication. Oh, and if you want to start with the one that, inexplicably, is the only one so far to get a screen adaptation, that’s The Spies of Warsaw, featuring this guy: