Product Description
An autumn evening in 1937. A German engineer arrives at the Warsaw railway station. Tonight, he will be with his Polish mistress; tomorrow, at a workers’ bar in the city’s factory district, he will meet with the military attaché from the French embassy. Information will be exchanged for money. So begins The Spies of Warsaw, the brilliant new novel by Alan Furst, lauded by The New York Times as “America’s preeminent spy novelist.”
War is coming to Europe. French and German intelligence operatives are locked in a life-and-death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, the new military attaché, Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, a decorated hero of the 1914 war, is drawn into a world of abduction, betrayal, and intrigue in the diplomatic salons and back alleys of Warsaw. At the same time, the handsome aristocrat finds himself in a passionate love affair with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage, a lawyer for the League of Nations.
Colonel Mercier must work in the shadows, amid an extraordinary cast of venal and dangerous characters–Colonel Anton Vyborg of Polish military intelligence; the mysterious and sophisticated Dr. Lapp, senior German Abwehr officer in Warsaw; Malka and Viktor Rozen, at work for the Russian secret service; and Mercier’s brutal and vindictive opponent, Major August Voss of SS counterintelligence. And there are many more, some known to Mercier as spies, some never to be revealed.
The Houston Chronicle has described Furst as “the greatest living writer of espionage fiction.” The Spies of Warsaw is his finest novel to date–the history precise, the writing evocative and powerful, more a novel about spies than a spy novel, exciting, atmospheric, erotic, and impossible to put down.
“As close to heaven as popular fiction can get.”
–Los Angeles Times, about The Foreign Correspondent
“What gleams on the surface in Furst’s books is his vivid, precise evocation of mood, time, place, a letter-perfect re-creation of the quotidian details of World War II Europe that wraps around us like the rich fug of a wartime railway station.”
–Time
“A rich, deeply moving novel of suspense that is equal parts espionage thriller, European history and love story.”
–Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times, about Dark Star
“Some books you read. Others you live. They seep into your dreams and haunt your waking hours until eventually they seem the stuff of memory and experience. Such are the novels of Alan Furst, who uses the shadowy world of espionage to illuminate history and politics with immediacy.”
–Nancy Pate, Orlando Sentinel
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 Credit where credit is due ( narre )
I have to say that I much enjoyed this from Alan Furst, and that I think we have to allow a writer a little space to write differently, to change.
This is not Dark Star, with its terrifically effective weight of many episodes to bring out very much of its characters, and of its years.
Yet The Spies of Warsaw is sharp, very clear and telling, and has much effect in a shorter novel. A different level of intensity is used, and what we do see, we see very well.
The use of plots that may or may not come to closure is very well done, and leads to some real suspense, where our high attention is turned to other interesting matters.
Some of the characters are greyer, out of faces that might be more familiar today. Surely any amount of the players in this side of the war must have been so, not as brilliant or brilliant to draw as Szara and Baumann and Marta Haecht; yet very interesting in their own true selves, and full of the real unexpected in persons, as shows in good surprise more than once here.
It is a different kind of intensity, of wakefulness, and I hope Furst finds it a way to draw in other interests, as another branch of these stories which can engage us with much appreciation and enjoyment.
With regards, one would say, of course...
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 Enjoyed the book
Good book. Though I will explore other WWI and WWII historical fiction authors before returning to Alan Furst.
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 Slow Burn All The Way
The Spies of Warsaw is not your high-powered spy novel with chase scenes, torture, derring-do etc. More of a slow burn during the run-up to the Second World War, which is true to the Furst style. The plot revolves around a French embassy attache who recruits spies in Warsaw and pries information from the Germans in clever ways. Furst has been paring his style over the years, giving the reader fewer words, which concerns me a little as the sparseness now borders on frugality. I wouldn't mind if he painted the pictures with a little more detail now and then. Still, a decent read about the ups and downs of people in tight spots doing tough jobs.
Colonel Mercier was in the Great War, but unlike his relatives and ancestors, he would like to live through the next one. Thus, he's careful about his operations and when they go wrong, does his best to correct the situation. He's not immune from a past heartbreak and finds himself drawn to a woman who plays the game as well as he does. Through all this, the Germans are up to no good, the French General Staff denying reality, and people on the ground like Mercier are making the best of it.
My hope is that Furst fleshes out his future books a little more than this one, which could have benefitted from some of the scene-setting that can be found in Night Soldiers.
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A thrilling mystery beyond the ordinary
This is an excellent read for anyone who enjoys thinking through a plot and is interested in WWII. Alan Furst is a brillant author who entices the reader with creative dialog and vivid descriptions.
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Another first-rate evocation of pre-World War II Europe ( tstroll )
Alan Furst is the master of evoking the atmosphere of pre-World War II Europe through his thrillers. I've figured out a couple of the rhetorical devices he uses to keep his writing so vivid. First, he's not afraid of run-on sentences, and his selective use of them gives his writing a European quality--a number of European languages, notably French, do not frown on run-on sentences as we English speakers do. He's also deft at omitting the verb "to be" to make a number of sentences pithy and direct.
I noticed what I thought were a couple of mistakes in Furst's renderings in French and would be happy (if he's reading this) to proofread French, Spanish, or Portuguese phrases before he sends his next novel to the publisher, assuming he's doing me and other fans the favor of continuing to write.
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