Spy thrillers with a moral center

To make a great spy novel, all you really need are three things: a rainy night, a rumpled trench coat and moral ambiguity.

Tossing in a doomed love affair doesn’t hurt, of course, and cigarettes and pistols can add a touch of alluring menace. But in depicting the world of espionage, the crucial element is fixed and eternal: It’s weather -- the weather in the soul as well as what’s outside the window.

Years pass and wars rage and allegiances flip-flop and shadows shift, but the rain is always falling somewhere, and somebody is always having to decide to whom to be loyal and for how long.

Maybe that’s why the novels of Alan Furst, set during the grimmest days of World War II in places such as Paris and Moscow and Madrid, seem as fresh and imperative as today’s front page. The bad guys have changed and some of the countries are called by different names, but the rain still falls.

How is it that fiction -- really just a complicated lie, when you think about it -- can tell us as many truths about our perilous, precarious world as can a scrupulously researched news story or relentlessly up-to-the-minute documentary?

How is it that Furst, whose recently published novel “Dark Voyage,” the eighth in his series about World War II intelligence operations, is describing events from more than half a century ago but you’d almost swear they happened last week? How is it that, while the names in Furst’s novel are Roosevelt and Churchill, you blink to make sure you didn’t see Bush and Blair?

“It’s not me. It’s what I’m writing about,” Furst said during a recent visit to Chicago. “I don’t go, ‘Oh, what a clever way to write about Bush and the CIA.’ But guess what? If you write honestly and honorably, it comes right up off the page.

“Nothing has changed,” Furst added in his intense, rapid voice. “Sadly, nothing has changed.”

Furst writes about 1934, not 2004, and his bad guys are Nazis, not Al Qaeda operatives, yet the night-world of his novels -- including the undercover struggles against some exceedingly nasty people -- will still be there when the sun goes down tonight. It feels all too familiar.

Odd, then, that it wasn’t until the sixth novel in Furst’s series -- “Kingdom of Shadows” -- that things clicked. The cash register confirmed that readers finally were willing to follow him back to the late 1930s and early ‘40s, when a vicious clown named Hitler turned the world upside down.

The same readers who had ignored “The Polish Officer” and other works suddenly snapped to attention. They began comparing Furst to scribbling spymasters such as Graham Greene and John Le Carre -- writers who rejected the easy polarities of right and wrong and instead blended their stories with the tangled mess of 20th century politics, a world of insidious compromise and a lesser-of-two-evils leitmotif.

For Furst, who now lives on Long Island but has spent long periods of time in Europe, it meant vindication. “I had just thought, ‘I’m going to write a book for no one in the world but myself -- every word on every page,’ ” he declared, dark eyes glittering with the memory of that pledge. “And I had an enormous success.”

Furst’s books are meticulously researched to achieve a visceral, you-are-there authenticity, right down to the brand of cigarettes someone might smoke in 1942 or how a car of that era would sound if it spun out of control and landed in a snow bank. Most of his main characters -- the French film director, the Hungarian playboy -- are dapper and charming and casually philosophical, fond of nightclubs and beautiful women. They play at life.

And then the world is flung into the chipper shredder known as World War II. What comes out the other end is no longer recognizable to Furst’s gallant, puzzled protagonists, who have, in the meantime, joined in with clandestine efforts to preserve what they see as the last ragtag remnants of civilization.

It’s all there in Furst’s novels -- the midnight meetings, the mysterious deliveries, the phone that rings a single time and then no more. Is it a signal or a wrong number? Furst’s crisp sentences paint this world in a few deft strokes.

Thomas Powers, author of several nonfiction books on the history of spy operations, including “Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From Hitler to Al-Qaeda,” said Furst provides “an absolutely spot-on” picture of intelligence operations in places such as France, the United States and what was then the Soviet Union.

In “Night Soldiers,” the first novel of the spy series -- Furst published three mysteries before embarking on what he considers his true calling -- Furst follows a young Bulgarian who joins the Soviet secret service.

“He [Furst] has a wonderful feel for what was going on in the Soviet intelligence services, for people who started out as idealists but found themselves working for a monster and couldn’t escape,” Powers said. “He obviously did a lot of research. It’s a very convincing portrait.”

Robert Birnbaum, a critic who writes for the literary website Identitytheory.com and who has interviewed Furst several times, said, “He’s a very moral writer. He throws in detail and atmosphere so that the reader goes through it all with him, but it’s a moral issue for him.”

Furst traces his breakthrough to a recognition that morality -- a fusty, old-fashioned word for a contemporary writer -- is literature’s beating heart.

“In college they made me read Matthew Arnold, who said that if there is no moral drive to fiction, it’s no good, and to that I said, ‘Ugh,’ ” Furst declared, twisting his face. “But you know what? He was right. Dead-on right. As soon as I had some kind of emotional, moral purpose, I started writing books that made me very proud.”

His epiphany came from a 1983 trip for Esquire magazine to what was then the Soviet Union. “I saw what happens to people in a police state,” Furst said. “Moscow was the darkest place I’ve ever been. I had a political fury. I thought, ‘How I hate you, for what you do to people.’ My wife said the husband she sent to Russia never came home.”

The evolution of Furst’s characters from elegant bystanders to scruffy freedom fighters -- albeit secret ones, moving as they do through midnight fogs -- is analogous to the maturation of the century itself, as one of his characters notes. “Degrave looked down. ‘The sad truth is,’ he said quietly, ‘a country can’t survive unless people fight for it.’ ” And so Furst’s novels march along, straddling the border between then and now, between yesterday and today, prodding their reluctant heroes to rouse themselves to an unlikely pitch of selflessness and sacrifice.

Fiction, too, needs that sort of pitchfork in the pants, Furst said. “There has to be some engine” pushing novels along, he declared. “Something inside. Some cranking motor.”

“Honor,” “decency,” “justice,” “valor” -- the words seem stiff with age and a bit too showy, like Grandpa’s dress uniform stashed in the attic. Yet somehow, like that dusty sartorial relic, they still fit.

Julia Keller is cultural critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.