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.
