Historical Intrigue: Alan Furst's 'The Spies of Warsaw'

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"YOU PICK UP a book and you open the first page and you're supposed to be in a different world," said spy novelist Alan Furst. "It's supposed to take you away from whatever world you're in. I try to get a feeling of atmosphere. When you read my book — if I'm doing it correctly — you're supposed to feel, 'Oh, I'm in Paris, it's nighttime, it's snowing ....' That's what I want you to feel as a reader."

With more than 10 historical espionage novels under his belt, Furst is quite good at mastering atmosphere. His latest novel, "The Spies of Warsaw," follows the life of the French military attache in 1937 Warsaw as he works with German spies and attempts to find out what Hitler's army has planned as World War II looms.

As Furst takes his readers through Paris, Germany, French Ardennes forest country and, of course, Warsaw, his attention to detail and history immerses the reader in the subtle details of European politics and culture in the late 1930s.

"When I started this series, I wanted to write what I thought of as a 'panoramic historical spy novel.' It was very quickly that I discovered the 1930s and 1940s. It had this 'good and evil politics' of Nazis and Stalinists on the evil side and the British and French on the good side," Furst said.

"A lot of my books are in the late '30s, so what you have is a moral conflict — you have heroes, you have villains, you have fugitives, you have victims. The thing about the period is that everybody was involved; there was no avoiding it. You couldn't just stay home — it came to you."

Capturing that all-encompassing mentality of Europe, Furst worked hard to make the reader feel as though he or she were also drawn into the European struggle. Visiting Europe and experiencing the cities himself, Furst said, further enabled him to capture the atmosphere of the time.

"I was in Poland before I wrote 'The Spies of Warsaw.' You get such interesting things when you go there. You never get what you think you're going to get; you get different things, but you get a huge amount.

"I get a feel for what the city is really like. I don't know if I can put that in words, but when it comes time to writing about it, the writing comes out a certain way and if I do it right, it feels like that city."

His passion for his work and research is unmistakable. Even after two decades of World War II espionage novels, Furst said he is still not done researching the period.

"There's a huge amount of research and there's a good reason for that. The depth of what went on in that period is unbelievably deep. In Europe, every country's history is different as though they were different novels. They have their own logic, they have their own side they were on, they have each of them fascism, communists, centrists, so I never stop doing research.

"My challenge is, as a writer, to always come up with some new true story from within the period. That's true of 'The Spies of Warsaw' — that's a completely true story. The characters are changed — in other words, those are not real people I'm writing about — but they might as well be real people because the real people were not that different from the characters in that book."

For all his attention to detail and in-depth research, Furst doesn't take his books or himself too seriously.

"If you learn some history, that's great. Basically, I'm an entertainment novelist. I want to go on your airplane trip with you; I want to be on your night table. ... I'm not there to teach anybody anything. I have to be an entertainment novelist because that's the way I'm successful."

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Written by Express contributor Katherine Silkaitis
Photo by Shonna Valeska