The Ace Of Spies

By Johanna McGeary

Alan Furst remembers exactly when he first looked on evil. In Russia, in 1983. A visiting journalist, he saw it reflected in the tired eyes of a middle-aged woman on a Moscow bus; in the frightened obedience of a man when a Soviet policeman shook his finger at the man; in a jab in the back when he offended a Yalta ferry purser. Says Furst, who talks with the same cinematic vigor that fills his six fine spy novels: "I thought, I'll pay him back when I get to the typewriter."

The evil that Furst, 60, writes about so passionately is the arrogance of power exercised at the expense of ordinary men. Once he saw a police state, he was angry for the rest of his life. "I hate what people do to people," he says. "I have no armor against it. It's always fresh to me. I can't stand it." That anger has given birth to five novels that attracted a cult following, but the recently published Kingdom of Shadows (Random House; 239 pages; $24.95) is provoking mainstream attention.

Furst transmuted his political horrors to the bleak years from 1938 to 1942 when Europe was in extremis. The totalitarianism his reluctant heroes combat is Nazism, but his books are less about Hitler than all the Hitlers: his belief that the suffering was not caused just by one man, but by the lust for power of all the predators out there. "And if you think they're dead," Furst adds, "take a look at Yugoslavia. They're still out there, alive and well."

This sense of outrage lurks in the shadows of his texts. In Kingdom, Hungarian emigre Nicholas Morath is drawn ever deeper into clandestine missions he doesn't understand to stop his country's drift into collaboration with the Nazis. Though Furst sees himself as a political novelist, he has chosen a storyteller's genre, and his books do not stand on a soapbox. His tales have got leaner as he keeps refining them down, explaining less, saying more in fewer words. While there is a moment in every book when some character cuts to the bone to pinpoint the evil of power, the preaching is subtle, the moral left to nag at the reader after the story is done.

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. He puts us on the exact street where the Daisy Bar sat in Montmartre, gives us the heavy smell of an eau de toilette called Zouave. His stories rumble along in the dreary trains that seemed to be forever crisscrossing Europe.

"It eludes me how I'm able to make things come alive," Furst says, then launches into an excited tour of the "astonishingly eccentric" range of research, random and planned, that brings such authenticity to his crepuscular world: the vanity bio of a 1920s Lithuanian, the essays of French photographer Brassai, old Paris Baedekers, and so on. He constantly makes notes of telling details: the cabaret performer with a red light bulb at his crotch that Furst once spotted in a book by Cyrus Sulzberger turns up in Kingdom.

Re-creating such a distant atmosphere is an uncanny skill for a man who grew up on Manhattan's intellectual Upper West Side. The son of a hat manufacturer, whose maternal grandmother fled from revolutionary Russia, Furst found his literary inspiration in France. He became a "pathological Francophile" the day in 1965 when he lay on his back after a picnic in the town square of Grignan and "felt the blood in the earth" of Provence. Paris, where he lived for eight years before moving to Sag Harbor, N.Y., in 1993, remains for him the center of Western civilization, the "consolation for life's difficulties," and his books always go back there. At the same time, he regards France as a land residually authoritarian, where citizens are expected to fill out mysterious forms and the fear of police and politicians lingers in the heart.

As his edgy plots unwind through the murky terrors of enforced espionage, Furst's heroes are always deeply human, if not particularly heroic. They are not professional spies but bystanders drafted by events, often Eastern Europeans from the downtrodden states of the continent's core. They live in a fog of moral ambiguity, caught in the shifting alliances and "gray positions" of current events, until unexpected circumstances force them to make choices without understanding the consequences of their acts. These enigmatic men--and the reader--almost never find out what really happened. Not everything is revealed; the story trails off, just as in life.