After months of considerable control, I finally broke down and read the final Alan Furst novel on my shelf, Spies of the Balkans (2010). Is it more of the same in Furst’s familiar milieu? Yes. Is it still awesome? Absolutely. As in other recent Furst books, this one is on a somewhat smaller scale than [...]
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On the strength of his volume-closing novella “You Know What’s Going On” from Agents of Treachery, I moved on to Olen Steinhauer‘s The Tourist (2009), an invigorating contemporary spy thriller. (And not to be mistaken for the recent Jolie-Depp film, by the way.) The dense, twisty plot follows Milo Weaver, a “Tourist” for the CIA: [...]
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The French film Army of Crime (2009) is an effective WWII historical examining a faction of the French Resistance that was composed largely of immigrants from Eastern Europe. At the center of the group are Armenian poet Missak Manouchian (Simon Abkarian) and his wife Mélinée (Virginie Ledoyen). The group, in the wake of Germany’s invasion [...]
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The latest, excellent Alan Furst adventure, The Spies of Warsaw (2008), takes us to Warsaw in the mid-thirties, where newly appointed French military attache’ Jean-Francois Mercier, a veteran of the Great War and a widower, has become a soldier of the intelligence world. His first assignment in Poland involves putting the squeeze on a German [...]
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Since discovering the work of Alan Furst, I’ve been rationing out his novels in order to make sure I always have a new one in my back pocket for special occasions. Last week, I indulged by grabbing The Foreign Correspondent (2006) off my reading pile, and blazed through it in about three or four reading [...]
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After a couple of challenging science fiction novels, I was ready for something brisk and intriguing. Charles Cumming‘s A Spy By Nature (2001) totally fit that bill, a quick-moving and thoroughly enjoyable contemporary espionage tale. In my constant search for new spy novelists to get hooked on, Cumming looks to have jumped up the queue, [...]
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As much as I enjoy the espionage genre in film and television, for some reason I haven’t found that many spy novelists that appeal to me. In my book John LeCarre’ still sets the standard, but if I had to pick a runner-up, it would be Alan Furst. Furst writes atmospheric, realistic espionage novels set [...]
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