onegoodmove

Alan Furst writes historical fiction, or to be more precise he writes historical war fiction. Add to that a spy or two and you have a winning combination. I have read three of his books so far and I'm satisfied and will be reading the rest. I read this type of fiction to relax, it's a great stress reliever and just plain fun. The first Night Soldiers code for spies you know begins: In Bulgaria in 1934, on a muddy street in the river town of Vidin, Khristo Stoianev saw his brother kicked to death by fascist militia. His brother was fifteen, no more than a blameless fool with a big mouth, and in calmer days his foolishness would have been accommodated in the usual ways--a slap in the face for humiliation, a few cold words to chill the blood, and a kick in the backside to send him on his way. That much was tradition. But these were political times, and it was very important to think before you spoke. Nikko Stoianev spoke without thinking, and so he died. Kristov is then recruited into the NKVD, the Soviet Secret Service trained in spycraft, and sent to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Furst got it exactly right the setting and the ethos. It reminded me of Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls, the story of a few days in the life of Robert Jordan, an American Spanish professor who volunteered to fight with the loyalists. Night Soldiers, as I was saying is a story of struggle between Russia and Germany for eastern Europe and a good story it is.
In his second offering, Dark Star, Andre Sarza a journalist finds himself in the spy business, and the moral ambiguity of the work, the real politik at a personal level. Sometimes Furst fails to develop secondary characters adequately, and leaves those of us with failing memories adrift. A minor distraction, and probably not one everyone will notice, but you'll like Sarza and his story. The third book, The Polish Officer, begins in Poland in 1939. Germany is quickly advancing, The pessimists are learning German. The optomists are learning English. The realists are learning Russian. George Bush is learning English as a second language. Sorry I simply couldn't resist that. Back to the story, Captain Alexander De Milja a plolyglot is recruited into the Polish underground and runs spies in Poland, France, and the Ukraine. How would you transport 11 million in bullion out of Warsaw a question he must answer. I particularly liked the day to day detail of the characters, like this snippet, Nothing good lasted in the world, Lezhev thought, that's why you needed poets to grab it as it went flying by. The compelling thing for me in these stories is the detail of the history. Whether your familiar with the history of the time or not Alan Furst fills in the gaps, while maintaining the flow of the overall history. So the next time you're at the bookstore grab one of these titles, and the time will go flying by.