When Alan Furst appeared last year before a standing-room-only audience at Warwick's in La Jolla, he promised that his next book would appear this year. He was true to his word and “The Spies of Warsaw” – Furst's 10th historical spy novel – is one of his best, a richly satisfying read that should appeal to both newcomers and longtime fans.
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The Spies of Warsaw
Alan Furst
Random House, 266 pages, $25
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“In the dying light of an autumn day in 1937,” it begins, “a certain Herr Edvard Uhl, a secret agent, descended from a first-class railway carriage in the city of Warsaw.”
From that first sentence, we are plunged into the Furstian world of danger and intrigue, a place where war looms, spies gather information over embassy cocktails and you're lucky if a Nazi thug does nothing worse than smack you in the face with his riding crop.
The hero is Col. Jean-Francois Mercier de Boutillon, an aristocratic French widower and World War I veteran who's investigating the role Hitler's tanks might play in the invasion of France. While we know the Nazis will ultimately be defeated, we're riveted to the story, which involves everything from Mercier's romance with a League of Nations lawyer to references to “The Polish Officer,” Furst's melancholy masterwork from 1995.
The 67-year-old New York native has been compared to such masters of suspense as John le Carre, Eric Ambler and Alfred Hitchcock. But his style is elegantly distinctive. It blends meticulous research with prose so cinematic it's like a movie playing in your head.
Beyond the big, pulse-quickening moments, it's the small descriptive details that captivate. The look of snow on Warsaw streets. The smell of Paris at night. The friendliness of Mercier's hunting dogs and the happiness he feels when discovering his lover on the same train to Belgrade.
Furst has described his genre as “the spy novel with a heart.” However you want to characterize his books, they can be utterly addictive. I know; I've read all his novels. And once you finish “The Spies of Warsaw,” you may want to read it again, to savor each nuance.
Valerie Scher is classical music critic of the
Union-Tribune.
