Alan Furst's historical espionage thrillers have garnered considerable praise and comparisons with Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, but I suspect they will soon become cult items, much as Patrick O'Brien's sea novels have. For both writers, setting is the strong point. But for Furst, setting is not so much the actual detail of the 1930s and 1940s, which may be presented more minutely by, say, J. Robert Janes, but the detail of the shadowy half-world in which his spies move. It's not the world of agents and adventures, either, although that figures into it, but more the demimonde of expatriates, where five languages are spoken simultaneously, where identities are temporary fictions, and where deals are made and broken constantly. Sometimes it seems as if nothing happens.
The main action in this book, an attempt to block the progress of Romanian oil to Nazi Germany, is almost anti-climactic. The real action comes around smoky nightclub tables, in the offices of Russian emigré groups, and in anonymous hotel rooms. It's not so much that the actual historical detail is lacking, as that the real detail is the kind of shadows we remember from films of the 1940s: all it needs is Dooley Wilson singing and Peter Lorre disappearing into police custody. In fact, the closest comparison to Furst is the Max Friedman graphic novels by Vittorio Giardino, which present the same sort of world in the same sort of grey mundanity, where atmosphere invokes setting, and setting creates suspense. I recommend them, and I recommend Furst.
