Spies of the Balkans - Alan Furst

On the face of it, Furst works in a limited canvas - war comes to ... wherever. But that's the beauty of a World War; it tends to happen everywhere. This time we are in Salonika: the year is 1940 and our hero is Costa Zannis, in charge of a Byzantine special unit of police, part Special Branch, part Diplomatic Corps.

Zannis is good-looking and single. He starts off sleeping with an English spy, hatches a plot with a German Jewess married to a Wehrmacht officer to facilitate the escape of Jewish escapees to Turkey, and ends up seducing the wife of the dubious local millionaire who financed the said escapes. Inbetween time he is called up to active service as the German army masses on the border and recruited to evacuate an English agent from Paris.

As well as exploring the various facets of Zannis's character, Furst also brings to life his family and associates. This is what brings me back time and again to Furst's novels.  So much detail, such effective writing, faultless research, a labyrinthine plot - and all in less than 300 pages. The sheer rigor is astonishing, the results captivating.  Absolutely my favourite writer of World War II spy fiction.

The Second Son - Jonathan Rabb

Rabb is one of many contemporary crime novelists exploring the Nazification of Germany from the point of view of non-Nazi policemen.  Philip Kerr is by far the best of these.  In this, the third of his Berlin Trilogy, Rabb takes us to civil war Spain at the time of the alternative Olympics in 1936.  Again this is not new (see Alan Furst, Midnight in Europe, and Jack Ludlow, A Broken Land) and would have been better had he told us something worth knowing about the event.  The alternative Olympics would be a great theme for a novel but it is not the theme of this one.  Quite what is, I'm not sure. Perhaps I'm in the dark because this is the third of a trilogy and I haven't read the other two.  It shouldn't be the case - you can read Smiley's People, for example, without having read The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.  I certainly did.

Forcibly-retired Police Inspector Nikolai Hoffner takes himself off to Spain in search of his second son, Georg, a newsreel cameraman who has gone missing.  Previous novels presumably deal with his estrangement from his older son, Sasha.  Hoffner has cryptic clues to follow in a telegram that is nowhere near as implausible as the later revelation of where it came from.  He meets a female doctor, Mila, much younger than himself, and they (again slightly implausibly) become lovers and set off on a cross-country quest.

That's pretty much it.  Rabb clearly knows his subject matter but does not feel the urge to share it adequately with those of us who don't.  He writes well, his style crisp, well-paced and authoritative.  I'm sorry, but whilst the narrative kept me interested, I found I couldn't care less about the characters.

Mission to Paris - Alan Furst

Furst really pins all his colours to the 'eve-of-war' scenario.  We know The Spies of Warsaw is 1938, Midnight in Europe was definitely 1938 (see my earlier review) and now Mission to Paris is set ... guess when?  And it's also set in Paris, so no surprises there.

In this case, our hero is Frederic Stahl, a Viennese adventurer turned Hollywood star - a sort of cross between Anton Walbrook and Gary Cooper.  He has been loaned by Warner Brothers to Paramount who want him to star in a European feature about the aftermath of World War I.  Stahl lived in Paris as a young man and is more than happy to revisit.  Equally keen to renew old acquaintance are his colleagues from a brief stint in the Austrian Embassy in Barcelona.  Now, since the Anschluss, part of Greater Germany, they ostensibly want Stahl to chair the judging panel for a German festival of mountain films (a neat and historically accurate touch).  Of course, they also want to claim him as a fine specimen of Aryan manhood.  Stahl is repelled by Nazis and flatly refuses, but is then persuaded by American diplomats to act as their go-between with agents high places in the Reich.  Thus Stahl is launched on the other Furst trope, spying.

It's a cracking read.  One advantage of Furst's narrow canvas is that you can be sure he really knows his period material.  As a much-travelled man, his geography and cityscapes are equally reliable.  Most importantly, he manages to bring so much that is new to each 1938 European spy novel.  Here we are completely misled, not once but twice, as to the girl Stahl will really end up with.  Furst manages to keep the tension going until the very last page and still tie up all loose ends, which is pretty damn clever.

For me, the highlight was the movie Stahl is making, Apres la Guerre.  This could so easily have been embarrassing, but Furst gets it more or less pitch-perfect.  This is exactly the sort of movie second-string American leading men were making in non-Nazi Europe in the late thirties and precisely the way the Europeans made them.

I liked Midnight in Europe a lot.  I liked Mission to Paris a lot more.  Top quality.

Midnight in Europe - Alan Furst

I'd seen the TV version of The Spies of Warsaw, which I liked a lot, but I hadn't read Alan Furst until I came across this, his latest, in my local library.  It takes a while to get the tone, and I was worried at first that we seemed to be spending undue time with characters who clearly weren't going further.  But the main characters, Cristian Ferrar, Spanish ex-pat, living in Paris and partner in a prestigious New York law firm, and Max de Lyon, stateless soldier of fortune, are immensely likeable and multi-faceted.  There are no real villains - the villain is Fascism, in Spain for this novel but looming on the horizon for everyone when midnight turns in Europe.  The 1938 flavour seeps through every descriptive passage.  Nothing jarred against my eye or ear, and that's all a period novel has to achieve.  I liked the comparatively short length - 250 pages in the hardback.  Far too often novels in this eve-of-war espionage genre go on far too long.  Furst's economy of style means nothing wasted, nothing superfluous, and leaves you wanting more.  I certainly do.  The plotting which worried at me to begin with turned out to be a stroke of genius, and by no means the only one.  Highly recommended.