Hearts of darkness

THOUGH he has lived for 10 years in France, off and on, Alan Furst is a New Yorker born and bred, from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, “where writers are made.” It’s a world away from the Europe, circa 1933 to 1945, where his historical espionage novels’ lonely heroes and their women battle the evil unleashed by Stalin and Hitler. Those encounters take place in violent and murky settings, as their titles -- beginning with “Night Soldiers” (1988) through “Dark Voyage,” a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist in 2004, to his newest, “The Foreign Correspondent” -- suggest.

Furst’s heroes, displaced wanderers all, would envy the settled domesticity of their creator’s home in Sag Harbor, an old whaling port on the south fork of Long Island. An American flag hangs from the porch of the modest 1890s-era village house where he and his wife, Karen, sip iced tea and scratch the ears of their English setter, Mattie. Hollyhocks bloom in the lushly planted backyard -- the seeds swiped from a municipal garden in Paris, Furst notes mischievously. The only hazards in this placid setting are marauding deer, which live in the woods that border nearby Peconic Bay.

Furst’s study, a converted one-car garage, is bright but Spartan, with no air-conditioning and a tiny space heater that barely dispels the winter chill. (“The English are right,” says Furst. “You work better when you’re cold.”) There are no rugs on the brick floor that he laid himself, the walls are nearly bare of books and pictures because of the dampness and the furniture consists of a lumpy couch and chair and a simple desk with an electric typewriter. “I like the feel of metal against paper,” he says, the tactile effort of typing out versions of a passage, sometimes a score or more.

Furst’s novels rely heavily on research, done entirely on his own. “I’m a Hoover,” he says. He scours mountains of books about the period and vacuums up details about swage wire (essential for heavy-duty steering controls for German fighter planes), the practice of dumping old generators in the Danube (to forestall shipments of Romanian oil to the Nazis) and -- particularly shocking -- Stalin’s years as a spy for the czar. “For eleven years, from 1906 to 1917, he had been the Okhrana’s pet pig, snouting up the most rare and delicious truffles that the underground so thoughtlessly hid from its enemies,” he wrote in “Dark Star.”

Furst softens the shadows of his stories with jokes when he can and sometimes with gallows humor at the expense of the enemy -- “The Polish Officer’s” clever German technician, for example, whose reward when he opens the back panel of a clandestine French Resistance radio is to be reduced to his gold fillings after the bomb in the radio goes off.

He also spares readers the more ghastly details of torture, such as those found in the conclusion of Andre Malraux’s “Man’s Fate” -- in which the hero is tossed into a locomotive boiler. “Never, ever will I do that to a reader. Lord have mercy, I can’t begin to tell you the horrors I’ve uncovered,” he says, but he isn’t one to wring reactions from his readers through grotesque details. He regards himself rather as a writer of “consolation,” whose protagonists find meaning in honorable resistance to tyranny.

Furst found what would become his consuming subject in 1982, when he was working as a freelance travel writer for the International Herald Tribune and was assigned to do a piece on the Danube in Hungary and Romania. He had to go to Moscow to get permission to snoop around in its satellites. The face of the Soviet official who inspected his passport was obscured by a curtain; only his hands were visible, offering Furst a mordant vision of what life was like in a police state.

The image of the disconnected hands transformed the travel writer whose earlier efforts at fiction included a self-described disaster about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Now he had found not just his subject but his passion. He immersed himself in chronicles of the period, especially British intelligence histories and, as time went by, in the minutely detailed accounts by John Lukacs, which showed him how to find “the stress points, where the gears are, the differential: the things that make the machine run.”

Two years after his trip to Moscow, Furst sat back in wonder in his Paris apartment, having “burned off” the first eight pages of what would become “Night Soldiers”: “Where had that come from?” he wondered. Whether from his reading or from the depths of a sympathetic imagination, the resulting book remains impressive. The opening sentence suggests Hemingway’s “In Our Time” -- “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” -- and the reader is held in thrall for 456 pages until the satisfying end of Khristo’s odyssey. Though the later novels would become more tightly constructed, “Night Soldiers” remains the touchstone for everything that makes Furst’s fiction a compelling combination of intellectual adventure and romance.

New York publishers shied away from an unknown novelist’s dark saga; it didn’t help that it was almost entirely about Europeans rather than about Americans in Europe. The manuscript “crawled about on all fours for several years,” says Furst, before finding a receptive editor, Robie Macaulay, at Houghton Mifflin.

The most remarkable quality of Furst’s novels is the re-creation of life-as-it-was-lived-then, the blending of day-to-day boredom and fatigue with excitement and terror. The avoidance of anachronism is accordingly one of Furst’s chief goals -- his stories are timeless because he captures the period so well. But like his readers, he also lives in this moment, which he considers one of Islamic fascism -- “there’s no other name for it,” he says grimly.

On the bright, warm morning of Sept. 11, 2001, he was reading the galley proofs of his seventh novel, “Blood of Victory,” which takes place in 1940 and 1941. In an early scene, a Russian woman, dying of tuberculosis, says goodbye to her former lover. She asks when he will join the fight against the Nazis. He demurs, preferring simply to be left alone. To that refusal to get involved, Furst added a few words that readers quickly noted as equally apropos in 1941 and in 2001. “First you say you’ll pretend to do what they want, then you do what they want, then you’re one of them. Oldest story in the world: if you don’t stand up to evil it eats you first and kills you later, but not soon enough.”