Alan Furst's novels, of which Kingdom of Shadows is his sixth (his other novels, all published by Orion, include Night Soldiers, Dark Star, The Polish Officer, The World At Night and Red Gold), are a literary version of black and white spy films from the 1940s. Filled with intrigue and shadows, they take place on trains and in various cafes of Europe- particularly Eastern Europe and Paris- and cover the period between 1933 and 1944. Born and raised in Manhattan, and of Jewish descent, Furst has lived for long periods in Paris, but now lives in Long Island, New York.
You must do a lot of research for these books?
Quite a bit. Which is, of course, the most addictive thing in the world. You would love to do nothing but research. Why? Because you're reading extraordinary and fascinating accounts by people who were in an important place at an important moment, they think. Frankly, my period, 1933-1944 is endless. No one will ever tell all the stories, or even know all the stories from that period, because it was such an immense kind of thing.
Have you travelled a lot to Eastern Europe? Because your descriptions are extraordinarily vivid.
Just Russia. Then I was in pretty much all, or a lot, of the Balkans on a Russian river cruiser on behalf of Esquire when I was writing journalism. But even though I haven't travelled extensively, I know what those places look like. If you're going to ask me how I know, I'm not really going to be able to answer you. I have some kind of understanding of things that isn't necessarily empirical. But if it isn't that, I don't know what it is - I'm a very secular person. I don't say that it's received wisdom or anything like that. On the other hand, I know what European rivers look like. I know what European villages look like. I know what they look like in the Balkans as opposed to what they look like in Austria.
Your books are very cinematic. I was wondering if you were influenced by various 1940s black and white spy films?
Influenced by that. Influenced by the music. Influenced by the cultural sense of the moment that existed in that period. And that I understand very well indeed. I really can project myself into thinking like a Frenchman in 1940, hoping the axe wasn't going to fall. Then, after it did, hoping it wasn't going to be too bad. I also like black and white photographs from the period. I have a small archive. Being a historical novelist, I'm writing about near history. There are plenty of people around who fought in that war. So it's with us still, but just barely.
After I finished Kingdom of Shadows, I read Joseph Roth's The Hotel Savoy, which figures heavily in the book.
I'm very influenced by Roth. He's a wonderful novelist. That's why I did the funeral scene in Kingdom of Shadows. It's dedicated to him. His story is so strange. He started out in a ghetto in Galicia, and in the middle of his life decided to become a Catholic, a monarchist and a partisan of the Hapsburgs. This is a man who went from one end of the spectrum to the other, who fought on the Eastern Front as part of the Austrian army, along with Oscar Kokoschka and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
What about spy novelists like Le Carré and Graham Greene?
Absolutely. But as I tell everyone, those aren't the only ones. There are also people like Derek Marlowe, who wrote a wonderful book called The Dandy In Aspic. That's a terrific book. I don't think he wrote any other spy novels. I don't read that much contemporary fiction. I'm basically reading and doing research in the thirties and forties. That doesn't leave me time to work on the bestseller list.
I
read Eric Ambler for the first time in a number of years not so long ago. People don't write like that any more.
In fact, the first paragraph of Kingdom of Shadows is a direct citation of Eric Ambler. It's nothing but that. It is Eric Ambler. I wrote an Eric Ambler paragraph to begin that book. And I meant for people, if they knew who Eric Ambler was, to look at it and read it in exactly that way.
Your books aren't really leftwing, though they've obviously been influenced by leftwing writing.
I'm a humanist. I think in a way that's what most writers are. But in those days one could be a communist writer. Like Malraux. Or Victor Serge, who certainly writes Trotskyist novels. Wonderful books. And Koestler, who is an anti-communist writer, but a former communist. Communism is a crucial element, because it was the idealism of the 1930s. If you wonder about that, take a look at photographs of the aristocracy of that period, and you see some very obnoxious people. In doing the research for Kingdom of Shadows, I came on a prescription for slapping peasants, and exactly how you were supposed to do that. The writer said you should slap them on the neck. I don't even remember why. It was bizarre that one human would slap another human, or would have the right to do so. He went on to say that the hard part is when it's an old man, because they start crying before you hit them. But they're crying from humiliation, not from pain. You read that stuff, and you go, well, I really wonder why people join the communist party.
One thing I like about Kingdom of Shadows is that you don't know exactly what's going on until quite a bit into the book.
You're not really supposed to know. I want you in the dark. Just like the character's in the dark. He doesn't know what's going on. He wonders what's going on. He also decides that he won't think about it too much. Because this is what his uncle tells him. He says, "Myself, I choose not to think about it." People are saying that, as we're sitting here, about a variety of things in the world. That's their privilege, though they may regret it later.
How much are your characters based on real people?
None of my characters are meant to be representations of real people. But the fact of the matter is, in Dark Star the lead character is a Russified Polish Jew who is a foreign correspondent for Pravda. So are we talking about Ilya Ahrenberg? Not really. But he's like that. Obviously there were Hungarians like Count Polanyi and Nicholas Morath. I don't know their names, but I'm sure they existed. And though you never see Stalin or Churchill in my novels, they're there, in the newsreels and newspapers.
What are you writing now?
I'm working on a book about Odessa. And thinking about Issac Babel, who is a writer that I really like. He had a very interesting life, though it didn't last all that long. Odessa was a place of Palladian balustrades and chicken markets. Home of Jewish gangsters, and substantial Greek, Italian and Polish populations. A city of intrigue, which it still is today. Babel was arrested and taken away in 1938 and apparently killed in 1939. Though my Babel-like character won't be executed. He might even know Babel. He will maybe think he could write as well as Babel does, given certain circumstances. But I want to write about fictional characters. I don't like being constrained by the lives of non-fictional characters. I think it'll be interesting. But, you know, when you start out, you start out going here and you think you're going there, and, in fact, you end up going some place completely different.
With Kingdom of Shadows, the American writer Alan Furst has finally achieved the kind of recognition he has so long deserved as one of the most gifted and intelligent writers practising today. Furst, who has enjoyed favourable comparisons with Robert Harris, Graham Greene and John Le Carré, writes immensely rich and detailed novels that function as both serious literary pieces and (reluctant though the author is to admit it) utterly compelling thrillers. Books such as The World at Night and Red Gold had already created considerable word-of-mouth acclaim, but his move to a new publisher, Orion, has produced a book that he considers his very best work - and it's hard to disagree with him. Crime Time caught up with him on the fifteenth floor of his hotel near the BBC and talked to the confident but unassuming Furst as he gazed out at a breathtaking panorama of London.
Looking out at London like this, do you still feel more European than American, as you've described yourself in the past?
Oh, I'm a European. My family's time in America has been brief compared to their European legacy.
And many of the writers who inspired you - Greene, Conrad, Eric Ambler - were European.
One of the reasons I started writing was to produce the kind of books that these writers were famous for: Greene's This Gun for Hire (which I believe is A Gun for Sale in the UK), Ambler's The Mask of Dimitrios. These were beautifully written, stunningly plotted - and I knew many people like me still wanted to read this kind of fiction. But so much indifferent writing was clogging the bestseller lists, and I wasn't sure that there were enough people around who wanted something better. But I hoped that I'd be able to produce something approaching that kind of quality - and that readers might be hungry for it.
You have certainly acquired a reputation as a writer who principally appeals to readers who want something a touch more challenging.
Well, fiction that entertains can be challenging: have you tried reading Dorothy Sayer's The Nine Tailors recently? That's a tough book! But she knew that her readers would want this - there was no Danielle Steel crowd then. And I'm glad that the appetite for something more substantial seems to be out there.
Yes, writers like Greene and Ambler were able to make telling political points within the context of the thriller.
Absolutely. But there are so many writers who could invest the form with much more than conventional excitement: Derek Malcolm's A Dandy in Aspic is another favourite of mine. Speaking to my publishers, we all loved these books…
But you move in a bookish circle, and such people are more likely to want to read more substantial work, surely?
No, there are far more people out there making these demands. There is always a counter-current: readers who regard themselves as maverick. Although we might look in despair at many of the books that people buy these days, there is always an appetite for something better. And I don't just mean older readers: I've had young people tell me how much more they enjoyed Kingdom of Shadows than the more formulaic thrillers they'd read.
Well, that book has every sign of enjoying even more success than your earlier books. But did you always have a strategy of slowing accruing a reputation, and avoiding easy crowd-pleasing tactics in favour of something far more powerful?
I always tell people that the only way you can achieve something is to work at the absolute top of your ability. That's what people like Sidney Sheldon and Jacqueline Suzanne did in their fields - really! - and it's true for me too.
So you're writing at the very limits of your ability now?
I'm hanging by my fingertips, and desperately trying not to fall off. It's the only way I can work. So there was no strategy in the way the books were written or published. Although I suppose that the reason I feel that the new book is my best is because it took me five books to perfect exactly what I was trying to do. This was the book I always wanted to write.
Rather lucky for your new publishers, Orion, that you made the move with this book!
Well, Malcolm Edwards at Orion was closely involved this. And, of course, there was a definite impetus with a new publisher to launch yourself with something really special.
So when you were writing Kingdom of Shadows were you saying to yourself "Something is happening here that hasn't happened before"?
Yes. I determined to change certain things, and cast off certain constraints.
Such as?
It's commonplace in a novel to have eight characters, and at the end of the book, you know what happened to all of them. I made sure that this slightly artificial convention didn't apply to Kingdom of Shadows. Plus, I tried to initiate something that felt very weird to me: why couldn't I write a book in which the hero is in ignorance about certain issues, and remains in ignorance even at the end. Just like the rest of us! In life, things are not packaged that neatly.
But that's taking away one of the comforting pleasures of books: the sense of order being wrought from chaos…
Well, the important things are sorted out in the book - I couldn't ignore that imperative. But I also thought that if you were a man like my protagonist Polanyi who operates in a shadowy world, why would you tell your nephew anything? Polanyi's nephew Nicholas Morath, who undertakes this dangerous work for him, is never in full possession of the facts.
The reader always senses that change of gears in bad writing, when the paragraph of explanation kicks in.
That's right.
In books like this one, and The Polish Officer, your characters inhabit a world of queasy values in which there are no moral certainties. They are always caught in a kind of shifting morass…
I think I feel that is the way life is. You view things from a certain angle, and then you discover that viewpoint simply isn't valid any more. The paradigm for United States history used to go: Abraham Lincoln fought the Civil War to free the slaves. Then, it was: Abraham Lincoln fought the Civil War so that the North, which was industrial, would be triumphal over the agrarian South. Then, no: on the third level, he fought the war to free the slaves. That paradigm works for fiction, and it works for everything else.
Although you don't principally identify yourself as a thriller writer, you've just encapsulated the tension that underlines all your books: the reader is cast adrift in this uncertain universe.
But closure is possible, both in fiction and the real world. When the right thing is finally done (as witness Albania, as witness Bosnia) we all breathe a collective sigh.
But even there, in many such cases, the rug is pulled from under our feet again very quickly. The Middle East, Northern Ireland…
That's exactly right. But all I'm doing is trying to suggest that the world is redefined on a daily basis. And it always was, even in the periods I cover: Hungary in the Second World War in the new book for instance.
In your earlier books, was there ever any pressure to streamline you, to make you a more conventional writer following all the standard bestseller shibboleths?
No. I've been really lucky in that regard: my editors have always seen what I've been trying to do and have supported me. And as long as I can deliver the goods, I hope that will continue to be the case.
Titles
all title links to amazon.co.uk
except where specified
