Alan Furst is fascinated by the heroism of ordinary people. The world of his historical spy novels, which take place in Europe between 1933 and 1943, is one in which a hedonistic French film producer wakes up one morning to find that the Nazis have taken control of his beloved Paris. Soon he is reduced to penury, living in a cheap hotel room under a false name, almost as afraid of the concierge as he is of the Gestapo. Eventually, he joins the resistance. And so it goes with many other Furst protagonists. It is a world in which poets become spies, strangers become lovers, and everybody’s life is turned upside down.

Mr. Furst loves that world, and the people in it. He believes that novels must be about human values and a threat to human values, and the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s was rich in both. It was ravishingly beautiful, yet filled with poison. The summit of civilization, and its nadir, too. Mr. Furst feels lucky to be writing about it.

“How do you write about the present?” he asks. “Somebody gets up in the morning and looks at their e-mail?”

On the afternoon I met him, Mr. Furst had just made the three-hour journey into New York from his home in Sag Harbor, Long Island, where he lives with his wife, Karen, a landscape architect. He was preparing for a reading at an uptown Barnes & Noble. “You have to campaign a novel now,” he said. “It’s show business.”

Dressed in a blue shirt and khaki pants, Mr. Furst, 63, looked fit and energetic, eager to engage with the world. He has dark, intensely expressive eyes, and a quick, impassioned manner. On the mostly bald crown of his head, strands of black hair still do valiant battle. Sitting in his hotel room, smoking a cigarette, he might almost have been one of his own mittel European characters. Only it was an expensive hotel, the pack of cigarettes was full, and no one was waiting to arrest him outside.

Mr. Furst’s latest novel, “Dark Voyage,” takes place in 1941 aboard a Dutch tramp freighter whose captain, Eric DeHaan, is called upon to perform clandestine service for the British in the war against Germany. It begins in Tangier – “A white city, and steep; alleys, souks, and cafes, their patrons gathering for love and business as the light faded away” – and ends, thousands of miles later, in Finland. Between those two points, we see how even the most peripheral and seemingly minor of missions, carried out in this case by a multinational crew that includes an Egyptian radio man and a dissident female Soviet journalist, contributed to the overall Allied victory.

“DeHaan fights and wins,” Mr. Furst said. “He delivers the material on his freighter to the people who need it. How long they’re going to last he doesn’t know. And he says to himself, in conversation with his first mate, ‘We’re not the only ones making a clandestine delivery in Europe tonight.’ And I want people to think about that, that it’s so many people doing the right thing in so far as they’re able to see it.”

Perhaps what most fascinates Mr. Furst about the war years is that, in a perverse way, they provided the more fortunate with a second chance in life, a shot at heroism. When he first started researching the period, what surprised him was the extent to which intellectuals were involved in the fighting.

“That means people like you and me. And what are we doing today? Okay? Nothing wrong with being on a book tour, and there’s nothing wrong with being a journalist, but your doppelganger and mine were probably doing something very different. We would have been very different kind of people, very dragged into politics.”

Mr. Furst was given a second chance, himself. When he started out as a novelist, he did not write about Europe or World War II. He wrote a series of what he calls “smart-ass detective novels” about a Jewish drug-dealer from New York. They did not sell well, and he supported himself through freelance journalism. In 1983, he persuaded an editor at Esquire magazine to send him to Eastern Europe to write a political travel piece about a trip down the Danube river. He had never been behind the Iron Curtain – he flew into Moscow on the day the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner after it had strayed into their airspace, killing all 269 people aboard – and he was stunned by the fear and paranoia and sheer suffering of the people.

“I’d never been in a police state,” he said. “I didn’t know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.”

Once he did, the scales fell from his eyes. He decided that Ronald Reagan had been right about the “Evil Empire.” He also found his metier, his literary calling. It was not, as he had imagined, to write comedic thrillers in a pre-Carl Hiassen vein. It was to write “panoramic spy novels” about the death of Europe. The opening sentence of “Night Soldiers,” the first book in the series, reads: “In Bulgaria, in 1934, on a muddy street in the river town of Vidin, Khristo Stoianev saw his brother kicked to death by fascist militia.”

Mr. Furst said he wrote that sentence, and the first few pages of the novel, as if he were “a mega-historian writing from Olympian heights.” The experience of that moment still amazes him, haunts him, even, with the force of a religious conversion. “I pulled back from the typewriter and said” – Mr. Furst lowered his voice to an incredulous, high-pitched whisper – “‘How do I know all this stuff? Where’s it coming from? What is this?'”

Whatever it was, Mr. Furst decided to go with it. His first three European novels – “Night Soldiers” (1988), “Dark Star” (1991), and “The Polish Officer” (1995) – sold modestly but attracted the notice both of critics and of legendary American spy novelists such as Richard Condon and Charles McCarry. His early readers were mostly British, along with some expatriate Americans, diplomats, foreign correspondents, and the like.

“I write entertainment novels,” said Mr. Furst. “I write what I call novels of consolation for people who are bright and sophisticated. I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language, I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.”

From 1987 to 1993 Mr. Furst and his wife lived in Paris so that he could be closer to his subject matter. Now they are thinking of moving there again.

“I miss it,” he explained simply. “It’s still a very old European culture. Supposedly the war was the death of Europe, and I wrote about the death of old Europe. I would sit in my French apartment and look out my French window onto the beautiful courtyard, and think, ‘I seem to be in charge of writing about the death of old Europe. Why me?’ It seemed like utter presumption on my part. Who was I? I had no license, no writ, no patent, just sheer writing intent was what I was operating with. Because I knew that what I was doing was right, because it was a huge amount of force, and it impelled me, the material itself, it was like riding a huge, violent and powerful wave, again and again – that’s the way I wrote those books. I passionately wrote those books. If they’re good, that’s why they’re good.”

France, ironically, is both the heart of his old Europe – each of his books contains at least one scene at the Brasserie Heininger in Paris – and a country in which he has never been published. “I don’t understand it,” said this smitten Francophile, reeling off the names of European countries – Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Britain – where his books have appeared in translation.

Could it be because he writes so much about Paris under German occupation, the subject of both “The World at Night” (1996) and “Red Gold” (1999)?

“Perhaps,” he replied cautiously.

“Maybe. They published one novel and then withdrew it at the moment of publication. It’s odd.”

Commercially, Mr. Furst’s career really took off in 2001 with the publication of the sixth novel in the series, “Kingdom of Shadows.” Ann Godoff, then his editor at Random House, hit upon the idea of using a stunningly romantic photograph by Brassai of a foggy Parisian street scene for the cover of the paperback edition. When the decision was made to reissue all the books in paperback, each with a different photograph of 1930s Paris by either Brassai or Andre Kertesz, words and image formed a heavenly match. The books no longer looked like novels so much as movies to be filmed in your own mind.

On the tenth of March, 1938, the night train from Budapest pulled into the Gare du Nord a little after four in the morning. There were storms in the Ruhr valley and down through Picardy and the sides of the wagons-lits glistened with rain. In the station at Vienna, a brick had been thrown at the window of a first-class compartment, leaving a frosted star in the glass. And later that day there’d been difficulties at the frontiers for some of the passengers, so in the end the train was late getting into Paris.

So begins “Kingdom of Shadows” in the great tradition of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler.

“Read and loved Eric Ambler,” Mr. Furst mentioned, and for a moment the writer was replaced by the fan. “My theory is that sometimes writers write books because they want to read them and they aren’t there to be read. And I think that was true of me. I would have loved to have another 10 Eric Ambler books.”

“I just thought, ‘I want more of that.’ More of “A Coffin for Dimitrios,” which is a perfect spy novel. And I’d liked for years, since I was 21 years old, Malraux’s “Man’s Fate.” I liked Conrad. They’re intellectual adventure novels. Those are my models. I like those novels. It is one river, and I’m just another port town on that river. There should be more.”

Mr. Bernhard is the East Coast correspondent for LA Weekly.