Alan Furst has published 10 acclaimed espionage novels set in the years just before and during the Second World War, most recently The Spies of Warsaw.
When did you decide to focus on this period in history?
In 1983, I did a piece for Esquire, which was simply supposed to be about the Danube, but the Russians wouldn’t let me go directly to the town where the riverboat I was to take originated. Instead, they forced me to go first to Moscow, where the way I saw people treated made me understand emotionally what it meant that the Soviet Union was a police state. That experience led to my starting this series of books, although I’ve written fiction all my life, including some mysteries that I wrote when I was nine.
Have your plot lines come directly from your historical research?
Yes, I have had to embroider some, but basically I’ve discovered that history’s a better novelist than any novelist. You can’t make this stuff up—it’s too unusual and surprising.
How challenging is it to write a suspenseful book when your readers know how it will all come out?
What I love about The Spies of Warsaw is that everyone knows the ending. The whole pleasure is that it involves people who try to make the outcome different; now we know the outcome wasn’t different, so it’s a book about how, not about what. A lot of my characters are fighting because it’s important for them to act against what they feel to be evil; it doesn’t mean that they were successful.
What has your study of the 1930s and 1940s taught you?
It’s led me to understand my own ignorance of the period and of political history. I think an awful lot of readers are surprised at things that they find in my books, just as I was before I found them out and put them in. For example, I didn’t realize that Hitler followed Mussolini’s example—I had thought it was the other way around.
Do you consider yourself in any way an educator?
No, my job is to be an entertainer. I basically write fiction that’s meant to console, to help people get away from things. However, if in the course of reading one of my books, people find the history of that period resonant in any way with their own, and that causes them to see things a bit differently, I don’t mind at all.
