Alan Furst is one of the best spy novelists of this or any era, and anyone skeptical of that assertion should immediately read his brand new novel, The Spies of Warsaw. All of Furst’s novels take place in the days just before or just after the start of World War II; this one is the story of a French military officer stationed In Warsaw who has an interest in German tank construction and tactics. The novel’s plot is lively enough, but plot is seldom the main point of Furst’s stories. They are more about character, mood, atmosphere—a way of life that knows it is about to be obliterated by the gathering storm. Furst is a wonderful writer—his descriptions of small gestures, his observations of small moments, are specific and illuminating, conjuring his characters from a familiar yet irretrievably lost time and place. Certain scenes were especially impressive—an informer’s rising paranoia as he approaches a checkpoint, our hero’s lunch with a world-weary superior, the walk two lovers take in a freezing gale. I’m grateful that Alan answered some questions for playboy.com.
PLAYBOY: All of your novels take place in Middle and Western Europe in the late thirties and early forties. How did you decide to focus on this period, and why does it speak to you?
FURST: The mid-century years saw a desperate conflict between tyranny–Hitler’s Germany, and Stalin’s Russia–and freedom; Great Britain and France. This was an epic struggle, which saw the Soviet purges, the murder of Jews, the Spanish civil war, and the occupation of Europe. Those who stood against it were heroic, and often enough doomed. So this was a tragic and romantic period at the same time. This is very magnetic for a novelist, and, for a novelist who writes spy novels–or novels about spies–the fact that the intelligence services of all the countries in Europe fought each other, in the salons and the back alleys, even more so.
PLAYBOY: Among the pleasures of your novels is seeing how you create a sense of character or place through the accretion of detail—through descriptions of physical sensations, certainly, but also through the use and description of objects or brands once familiar but now all but unknown. How do you accumulate this detail? Are you constantly researching the style and culture of this period in order to amass the suitable details?
FURST: The details I find come from an enormous appetite for research–contemporary histories–30s and 40s, histories written now, novels, journalism, anything and everything. I spend a lot of time reading, because the passion and conflict of those days was deep and endless and inspired all the writers, and the best among them Iincluded.
PLAYBOY: How do you create your heroes? More to the point, how do you keep these brave and dedicated fellows from blending together?
FURST: My heroes are different because their vocations were different, and so are their nationalities, though they’re all European. They are characters taken from the period: a French military attache in The Spies of Warsaw, an Italian Reuters reporter in The Foreign Correspondent, captain of a Dutch tramp freighter in Dark Voyage, a former Hungarian cavalry officer in Kingdom of Shadows, a Parisian movie producer in The World at Night. These would not be similar people in life, so they work that way in the novels.
PLAYBOY: What is your process? Does the character come first, or the plot? Do you at any given moment have several ideas rattling around, one of which eventually pushes itself forward in the creative queue? Or are you totally absorbed by one idea at a time?
FURST: My process works like this: first I pick a country, then I learn the political history of the period, then I look for might have been spy stories within that history, then the hero comes from that milieu. It has a kind of loony novelist logic to it.
PLAYBOY: What is the hardest part about writing fiction in this genre?
FURST: The hardest part is dealing with the conventions of the genre–I don’t feel I have to have a car chase but, if it does happen, it can’t be overdone, and it has to be natural to the story and the characters, you can’t just throw it in there and say “Here—Car Chase, okay? Now seduction.” As I mentioned, these may be more novels about spies then spy novels, and they’re for women as well as men, and they depend on being very authentic and very sophisticated. None of that is easy, but it is necessary for my audience.
PLAYBOY: Do you keep up with other spy novelists, or do you keep them at a distance? What do you read for pleasure? What writers do you admire, and why?
FURST: I don’t read any contemporary fiction, spy or otherwise, because I simply don’t have time. I read almost exclusively in the 30s and 40s, or about that period. I’m afraid I’m like one of those strange English philologists of the 19th Century, absolutely fixated on research. Believe me, I never thought that my life would be like that but it happened. I imagine a lot of your readers would say the same thing.