Andrew Taylor

A choice of crime novels | 8 October 2008

Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw<br /> George Pelecanos, The Turnaround<br /> Ian Rankin, Doors Open<br type="_moz" />

issue 11 October 2008

Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw
George Pelecanos, The Turnaround
Ian Rankin, Doors Open

Alan Furst’s espionage novels have a melancholic tinge, depending, as they so often do, on the debacles of recent history and, on a personal level, on the mechanics of betrayal. His tenth, The Spies of Warsaw (Weidenfeld, £16.99), is set in his trademark period, Auden’s low, dishonest decade, and provides another monochrome glimpse of a continent sliding inexorably towards war. The dashing but damaged war hero, Colonel Jean-François Mercier, is France’s military attaché in Warsaw in 1937. Through a network of venal but scarcely evil informers he gathers scraps of technical material that, properly interpreted, reveal much about Germany’s military plans in the event of war. But Mercier’s real problem is how to convince his superiors in Paris of the danger that Germany poses and, in particular, how to warn them of the plan to bypass the Maginot Line.

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