THE ANTI-LECARRE:

Furst in His Class: : Alan Furst is a master of the historical spy novel. His latest work is The Foreign Correspondent, available now from Random House. TCS Daily's Josh Manchester recently caught up with Furst. (Josh Manchester, 09 Aug 2006, Tech Central Station)

Josh Manchcester: Are you an historical novelist who happens to write about espionage, or a spy novelist who confines himself to one period of history?

Alan Furst: My shorthand has always been 'historical espionage novel' -- a genre I went looking to read, in the early eighties, couldn't find, so decided to write. I thought surely the Russians had some great mid-thirties stuff, but they were busy being executed, and there's only Bulgakov's White Guard (a terrific novel, by the way) to see what the political adventure genre might have been had these people been permitted to write.

What I say about my own work, is that I write novels about the intelligence wars of the mid-thirties, a form of political adventure novel. See Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Malreaux, Man's Fate, Conrad, The Secret Agent -- yes, fancy literary names but don't kid yourself, it's just fine to read on a plane.

Manchester: How did you choose the 1930s and World War II Europe as your subject matter? When you started writing the Cold War was still going strong, yes?

Furst: Yes, but I always knew I could never be a cold war novelist -- LeCarre has that mean upper-class British cynical voice; it like, drips, which was perfect for the hall of mirrors and all that "was Petrov disguised as Laval? Or Laval disguised as Petrov?" stuff that characterized the Cold War.

For me, the thirties was an heroic period, good versus evil, and all the best will likely die. People in the mid-century were idealists, or victims, or fugitives, or heroes, or villains -- but you had to be something, you couldn't get out of the way, what was coming down was too big, you had to stand up.