![]() ![]() The French military attaché Colonel Mercier is having a spot of bother with one of his agents, but all the while he must continue the diplomatic minuet. Really, they should have been written on the Left Bank, not in a studio on Long Island. ![]() ![]() So, in addition to the spy novel's typical freight of mental trauma - betrayal and deception - these books carry a wagonload of existential crisis. ![]() Within this self-imposed time frame, Furst's characters are doomed, if not to failure, then at best to limited success. Furst is immersed in Europe at its darkest he wanted to call the series 'Midnight in the Century', but that title was already taken by Victor Serge's 1939 novel about Stalin's purges. Only in the first, the over-long and over-egged Night Soldiers, does the action travel much beyond the American entry into the war and there is a good reason for this. His leading characters, whether Hungarian diplomats, Dutch ship captains or émigré Russian writers, are drawn to the clandestine world of Europe just before or in the early years of the Second World War by clouded mixtures of patriotism, noblesse oblige or, more often, because they have no choice. Alan Furst's historical espionage novels, of which this is the 10th, share many characteristics. ![]()
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