That’s more like it.

Alan Furst speacialises in taut espionage stories set in Europe during the run up to the Second World War. Since publishing the first of these, Night Soldiers, in 1989 Furst can stake a legitimate claim to having revitalised the entire spy fiction genre. Now twenty years on he writes in a far more crowded field but continues to represent the gold standard against which all spy books must be judged.

The Spies of Warsaw, like much of Furst’s work, divides its time between Paris and mittel Europe as the lights go out one by one. It is a world of emigres, attaches, journalists, officers, people with deep roots and displaced people with no roots – all of whom have been drawn by circumstance into the dark world of espionage. Initially drawn in by events, all eventually become agents of conscience, fulfilling either their professional sense of duty, or  gradually awakened to the importance of personal responsibilities.

And as ever with Furst, gradual is the word. These are not thrillers in the conventional sense, but recreations of a creeping sense of impending doom and imminent disaster.  The action, such as it is, takes place away from the centre of grand European events with the players simply being swept along in their tide. Neither are they melodramatic books, his spies are not caught up in plots to kill Hitler/Stalin/Churchill but are far more likely to be interested in train timetables or shipping manifests. Occasional bursts of dangerous stuff happens, but these are distractions as the spies return once more to the overwhelmingly tense daily routine.

Furst’s people are not making grand gestures. The world is intruding on them, not the other way round. These are people forced into small acts of heroism, fortitude and sacrifice. And then amid the violence and tension emerges the possibility of redemption by love and in this Furst’s books echo nothing more than the bruised romanticism you find in a good Hemingway. Honest.

The stories are mostly very similar  and his latest book, The Spies of Warsaw, focuses on Major Mercier de Butillon, military attache to the French embassy in Warsaw and a gentleman spymaster running a small network of agents with knowledge of German industry. His is a world of embassy receptions, trade visits and the occasional clandestine meeting in a cafe followed by a report to the Deuxieme in Paris. Not a lot happens in an Alan Furst. It is the sense of doom and the human responses that create all the drama. Many try to imitate this style that is somehow both taut and languid, but in lesser hands the creation of atmosphere over plot is a one way ticket to boredom. With The Spies of Warsaw he has pulled it off wonderfully well – again.

This is probably because Furst has spent twenty years polishing the same Faberge egg. He is constantly tweaking and improving, essentially rewriting the same book over and over again and the cumulative effect is of  the creation of a fully realised world that is uniquely and completely his own. In its own small way, The Spies of Warsaw is quite brilliant really.

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