The Crime Scene: Spies & More Spies

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The New York Sun

World War II has often been described as the last good war. Even if you accept the notion that no war is good, World War II nonetheless has much to recommend it, because the right side won.

Amazingly, there are those who dispute this, including Patrick J. Buchanan — whose book “Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World” is convincing evidence that he has lost his mind — and Nicholson Baker, whose book “Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization” is equally persuasive in reaching the same conclusion about him.

Fortunately, writers of fiction about that war — who describe the struggles of those who worked so hard and risked so much to assure a favorable outcome — have offered a far more cogent view of those unhappy days.

Several English writers, notably Graham Greene and, to a greater degree, Eric Ambler, wrote about people ensnared in the struggle between fascism and democracy, producing some of the finest espionage novels ever written. Greene’s “This Gun for Hire,” “The Confidential Agent,” and “The Ministry of Fear” remain enthralling more than six decades after they were written. Ambler’s “Background to Danger,” “Epitaph for a Spy,” “Cause for Alarm,” and “A Coffin for Dimitrios” are required reading for anyone interested in spy stories — or World War II, for that matter.

The contemporary master of the espionage novel, who has produced the most distinguished fiction about the secret adventures of those attempting to provide a small advantage to their side in this massive conflict, is Alan Furst. Having carved out this niche, he has produced 10 novels, none of which is less than very good, and several of which will be read in the 22nd century, just as Ambler and Greene are read in the 21st.

The most recent addition to his shelf of modern classics is “The Spies of Warsaw” (Random House, 266 pages, $25), returning to pre-war Poland, where he had set his brilliant earlier novel, “The Polish Officer.”

Like Ambler, Mr. Furst does not populate his books with heroic figures capable of extraordinary feats of physical acrobatics, whether in a martial arts display or a bedroom tryst. His characters are fairly ordinary, though they perform courageously in the face of difficulty, as most of us like to think we would under similar circumstances.

It is 1937, and the central figure in “The Spies of Warsaw,” Jean-François Mercier, a French World War I hero and the military attaché in Poland, fears that Germany, outraged over the reparations forced upon it after losing the “Great War,” will launch a military strike against Poland. One of the spies he has hired, a German engineer, Edvard Uhl, has been providing him with valuable information about the tanks with which Hitler is so enamored. When Uhl is lured into an ambush by an angelic-looking young woman, his best source of information is lost.

There may not be any mastermind spies in Warsaw, but there are a lot of spies — French, Polish, Russian and German — all preparing for what history tells us will be the invasion of Poland in 1939 and the beginning of Armageddon.

No matter where Mr. Furst sets his novels, whether France (“The World at Night,” “Red Gold”), Bulgaria (“Night Soldiers”), the Balkans (“Blood of Victory”), Moscow, Berlin, and Prague (“Dark Star”), or Poland, the reader feels as if he knows exactly how those cities looked and felt as they were mobilizing for war.

The winding alleys, posh restaurants, dark bars, civilized embassies, gilded hotels, and the people who move from one to another in Mr. Furst’s novels come to vivid life as if seen on a wide screen. The locales are as much a part of the books as are the spies, diplomats, military personnel, and those caught in their machinations.

As is also the case in Mr. Furst’s other novels, few of the characters in “The Spies of Warsaw” are presented as one-dimensionally good or evil, but there can be no doubt as to who the bad guys are, and who the good ones — at least after the various duplicities and betrayals have been sorted out.

An underlying understanding of human character and weakness, as well as strength, elevates the current book, as it did the previous nine — an excellent sensibility for an author who writes about people whose very lives, and possibly the lives of millions, depend upon their skill at subterfuge.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual Best American Mystery Stories. He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.


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