Alan Furst exploded onto the espionage literary scene with his 1988 novel, Night Soldiers. A former Fulbright Teaching fellow at the Faculte des Lettres at the University of Montpellier, freelance writer for magazines, and author of four novels, Furst returned to France in the mid 1980s where he began writing for the International Herald Tribune. There he penned the first of his espionage novels, which has been followed in succession by ten further novels that take the reader into the interwar period in Eastern, Central, and Western Europe.
I must confess to a personal abiding admiration for that first novel, followed close upon by my love for The Polish Officer, from 1995. But each of Furst’s novels delivers a loving and endearing evocation of a particular time and place–Europe between the First and Second World Wars.
Dubbed “America’s preeminent spy novelist” by the New York Times,
Furst, a native of Manhattan, has featured about every European capital you can think of, from Istanbul to Paris to Rome to Sofia. In his intricate, realistic, and believable narratives, Furst serves up protagonists (for he does not feature any one person in his novels) who risk their lives to fight against evil in the world. That specific evil is Nazi power on the eve of World War II. (more…)
Scene of the Crime 