Acting on intelligence

Alan Furst’s thrillers have been compared to le Carré’s, which does neither author much service. His espionage novels are set mainly in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. They don’t form a series, though there are connections between their characters. Most of them explore the choices forced on ordinary people whom the current of history has washed up on the murky shores of intelligence-gathering.

Not that Frederic Stahl, the main character of Furst’s 12th spy novel, Mission to Paris, is exactly ordinary. He’s Viennese by birth and, after a varied career, has turned to acting. In the summer of 1938, a few months after the Anschluss, he’s a resident alien in Hollywood: a rising filmstar in the Cary Grant mould, he specialises in playing ‘a warm man in a cold world’. The story kicks into action when his studio, Warner Bros, loans him to Paramount in Paris to make a film called, rather poignantly, Après la Guerre.