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Fiction. Suspense. Thriller. Historical Fiction. HTML:NOW A MINISERIES ON BBC AMERICA STARRING DAVID TENNANT An autumn evening in 1937. A German engineer arrives at the Warsaw railway station. Tonight, he will be with his Polish mistress; tomorrow, at a workers’ bar in the city’s factory district, he will meet with the military attaché from the French embassy. Information will be exchanged for money. So begins The Spies of Warsaw, the brilliant new novel by Alan Furst, lauded by The New York Times as “America’s preeminent spy novelist.” War is coming to Europe. French and German intelligence operatives are locked in a life-and-death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, the new military attaché, Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, a decorated hero of the 1914 war, is drawn into a world of abduction, betrayal, and intrigue in the diplomatic salons and back alleys of Warsaw. At the same time, the handsome aristocrat finds himself in a passionate love affair with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage, a lawyer for the League of Nations. Colonel Mercier must work in the shadows, amid an extraordinary cast of venal and dangerous characters–Colonel Anton Vyborg of Polish military intelligence; the mysterious and sophisticated Dr. Lapp, senior German Abwehr officer in Warsaw; Malka and Viktor Rozen, at work for the Russian secret service; and Mercier’s brutal and vindictive opponent, Major August Voss of SS counterintelligence. And there are many more, some known to Mercier as spies, some never to be revealed. The Houston Chronicle has described Furst as “the greatest living writer of espionage fiction.” The Spies of Warsaw is his finest novel to date–the history precise, the writing evocative and powerful, more a novel about spies than a spy novel, exciting, atmospheric, erotic, and impossible to put down. “As close to heaven as popular fiction can get.” –Los Angeles Times, about The Foreign Correspondent “What gleams on the surface in Furst’s books is his vivid, precise evocation of mood, time, place, a letter-perfect re-creation of the quotidian details of World War II Europe that wraps around us like the rich fug of a wartime railway station.” –Time “A rich, deeply moving novel of suspense that is equal parts espionage thriller, European history and love story.” –Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times, about Dark Star “Some books you read. Others you live. They seep into your dreams and haunt your waking hours until eventually they seem the stuff of memory and experience. Such are the novels of Alan Furst, who uses the shadowy world of espionage to illuminate history and politics with immediacy.” –Nancy Pate, Orlando Sentinel.… (more)
User reviews
A small story but beautifully drawn and told. Suspense is built slowly, but the author never goes overboard, content to foreshadow the dark threat that is coming to Europe. The main character is a quiet yet patriotic man who does his job with intelligence and courage. Side stories shed light on what Warsaw was like during these years of 1937-1938.
Accurate period detail, rich characterization, and a taunt and compact plot have been blended together by this author to produce an atmospheric and compelling book.
This book takes place mostly in and around Warsaw before WWII, with some trips to a few other places, such as Paris, and Germany. We follow Mercier, the French attache to Warsaw who has recently been assigned there, as he goes about doing his job, both the public and private aspects. Great Story.
I've just been in Asia too long and know too much (and really not that much) about French imperial history in Asia to ever find a French military character a hero figure. And one aligned with the insatiable DeGaulle. What's one million Vietnamese starved to death in 1945 alone as long as the empire is saved? This book is taking place in the late 1930s--a decade of terrible famine in Vietnam, a brutal crackdown on a widespread rebellion, decimation of the VNQDD national party, slavery in rubber plantations, French colons sending postcards of piles of guillotined heads. I think anyone familiar with the French history in Africa would read it with the same eye-roll.
Moreover at times, our major thinks fleetingly of alternative postings in warmer climes. I think he had previously been in Beirut, the Levant. (It's an airport novel, the details slip away quickly.) But some of us then think of what the warmer climes under French rule were like. Ah, say, South Pacific islands under the French. Vietnamese plantation laborers, working off their head taxes for decades on end and their kids don't get any schooling either. That's the life, when the dark skins knew their place. As someone said about the Master and Commander books or movie, or that awful English Patient movie, you can *hint* that there's an alternative point of view
On the positive side is that you get a feel for the mix of nationalities and political allegiances in Warsaw at this time. Notably the Jewish Russian spies who turn sides when they're called home for the purge trials. You get little sense of the extreme politics of France of the period.
Mercier runs an agent who works as engineer in an armaments company Germany, but who also develops a taste for Warsaw honey and promptly falls into the honey trap. By indirect route that leads to a one-sided vendetta against Mercier of which he is the unknowing target. Mercier falls in lust early in the book, but later finds himself fully in love while he continues to troll for secrets and potential agents. His work leads him into several adventures in which the risks of failure range from embarrassing to deadly.
Furst brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of pre-war days - the end of happiness and hope. Mercier's attempts for even a brief mental respite from the looming NAZI threat are futile; the reminders everywhere. His description of the formal dining room at a Warsaw party in the city's finest hotel puts the reader in the room: the "sheen of the damask tablecloth, the heavy silver, and the gold-rimmed china glowed in the light of a dozen candelabra".
Details to delight. A trip to Paris includes the now-obligatory Furstian visit to Brasserie Heininger and a peak at the infamous bullet hole in the mirror of Table 14. We learn that Mercier is a fan of Georges Simenon and Stendhal.
Mercier struggles to help France resist the NAZI's in the coming war that palpably hangs over Europe and every page in the book. As he learns, however, there are those in France who view Soviet Russia as the true enemy and Nazi Germany as potential allies. Moreover, intelligence that questions accepted wisdom, in this case of Marshal Petain and the ruling clique in the military, is seldom welcome. The books powerful ending leaves the reader angry and impotent. Highest recommendation.
As someone who is not well versed in WWII history, I did struggle to understand the significance of several situations. I felt I had to have a laptop with the internet when reading the book. He does use random detail that was intriguing but borderline useless. For instance, his noting that Mercier sat in a chair in the hotel lobby with a pillar on one side and a potted palm on the other.
The end seemed anticlimatic, but the book seemed to be want to read as a non-fiction, rather than have the plot twists and turns of a fiction.
sets the scene —
French/Brits/German/Russian — everyone spying on everyone — like Today
War is coming to Europe. French and German intelligence operatives are locked in a life-and-death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, the new military attache,
Mercier learns that loyalties are not set in stone in this environment and also that his own government leaves a lot to be desired in the ethics department. His various adventures with a German arms engineer, a pair of Soviet spies on the outs with Stalin,a German counter spy who hates Hitler and, of course, his own personal ambitions are realistically told and kept me quickly turning the pages.
I find that when it comes to noir thrillers, you just cannot go wrong wth Alan Furst.