Midnight in Europe

NOTE 1

“I want to find whoever invented sex and ask them what they’re working on now.”  James Ellroy

NOTE 2

Tony Lane piece in The New Yorker, firewalled, about Dutch Leonard, the occasion being a new biography, Cooler Than Cool, published by Mariner, and a three-volume set from the Library of America.  Cheap at twice the price.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/07/elmore-leonards-perfect-pitch

Cooler Than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/cooler-than-cool-c-m-kushins?variant=43113097527330

Library of America

https://www.loa.org/books/writer/206-elmore-leonard/

 

I’ve mentioned in a couple of past columns what an unexpected bonus it is to run across books by favorite writers that you haven’t yet read.  This happened to me recently with a Lehane, and a Leonard, and then I pulled an Alan Furst off the shelf, t’other day, Midnight in Europe, and realized I hadn’t read that one, either.  I’d obviously bought it, and let it slide off my radar.

I should remark that I thought Furst’s books fell off a little, in the middle, but then he came slamming back, the last couple.  I could be wrong, and it was me.  If you’re not familiar with his work, Night Soldiers came out in 1988, and Under Occupation, the fifteenth historical, and most recent, in 2019, so he’s maintained a consistent pace, across thirty years.  You want him to keep them coming. 

The novels are WWII espionage adventures, set in Europe - Occupied Paris more often than not - from the early 1930’s to the collapse of the Axis, in 1945.  They go down some odd and unexplored byways, with the big guns, Germany and Soviet Russia, casting a long shadow, but the characters in the foreground generally cautious about showing their true colors.  Sometimes, in fact, they’re not quite sure.  And neither are we, always.  But the stakes are life-and-death.  The business people are engaged in might seem like small potatoes, in one book, smuggling anti-Fascist newsletters into Italy, but Mussolini’s security police went after the Italian émigré community with ruthless terror tactics – surprisingly, to those later readers who’ve been schooled to think of il Duce as cartoonish.  He established the secret police in 1927, before the Nazis came to power in Germany, and Heinrich Himmler modeled the Gestapo after the Italian version. 

Midnight in Europe is about smuggling guns to the Republicans in Spain, in 1938.  It’s a doomed effort, but the people involved hope otherwise.  This points up two things about Alan Furst’s novels.  The first is dramatic irony.  We know that the Spanish Civil War ended in defeat for the Republicans, we know the Allies beat Hitler.  But at the time, these were unknowns, and unknowable.  The characters in a Furst book don’t know the outcome.  The second thing is that the books, over time, have narrowed their focus.  Night Soldiers covers a wide canvas, from 1934 Bulgaria, to Spain, to Occupied Paris, to a brief coda in postwar New York.  Later books, like Dark Voyage or Spies of the Balkans, are tight and contained, and sometimes too much so, confined, even.  But again, to the people living the immediate story, the events crowding them in are evil sufficient to the day. 

Like the Bernie Gunther novels that Philip Kerr wrote, over a comparable thirty years, the Alan Furst books, loosely connected internally, create a known world, in parallel to a past reality, that seems as authentic and recognizable to us as the world we inhabit.