William Boyd called him his "discovery of the year" while Robert Harris writes "his ability to recreate the terrors of espionage is matchless". Yet Alan Furst is hardly a household name, at least not yet, possibly because he is that curious hybrid, an American author who writes European novels, European novels moreover set in the 1930s and 1940s, the period which saw the rise of Hitler, the start of the Soviet purges and the destruction of Europe.
"That period 1933 to 1944, is magic," he explains. "It starts with the ascent of Hitler. And then simultaneously as Hitler grows, the purges start in 1934, Stalin came in around 1926." Furst's fictional odysseys illuminate the moral ambiguities of shifting allegiances with the clarity of truth. Reading his novels is like unearthing a family secret, known about, but not admitted; shedding light on a rich, if terrifying landscape that finally makes sense of everything else. We meet in a hotel in London, a stopover between Long Island where he now lives, and Paris, where one feels he really belongs.
Furst was born in Manhattan in 1945. He describes his family as nouveau pauvre. Emigre Jewish, he says. "Polish, Lithuanian. Something like that. Not German Jewish, God no." And he raises his hands in mock horror. "The odd thing about me is that my background is a rather normal American writer's background, it's just that this American writer was bowled over by realities that took place in Europe and I'm enough of a European by instinct somehow, that when I'm writing, I'm not the person you're talking with now. You won't meet the person who writes these books. The person who writes these books is not here." Indeed there is nothing European about the way the man I'm talking to speaks: staccato sentences fired at shotgun speed and the vocabulary is standard US fare: "I guess", "oftentimes", "second of all". The only non-American giveaway is a nice line in irony.
Alan Furst discovered Europe when he was at high school. "Those were the days of the black and white French films, the nouvelle vague. French culture was glorified and it swept over me and it meant sexual excitement and great food. It meant that you could read good books and weren't considered a fink. It was a very exciting culture as looked at from the US in the 1950s. Ozzie and Harriet, who cares? It was far more interesting to read Jean Paul Sartre, to read Camus, to go to Jules and Jim." He remembers his excitement on finding a restaurant on 9th Street frequented by French sailors where they actually had red and white tablecloths and candles in wine bottles.
To live in France became an obsession, and - after working his way around the US in what he calls dust-jacket jobs: driving taxis, picking fruit, working fairgrounds, to get the money together - at 23 he finally made it. First a year teaching in Montpellier and eventually Paris where he made a living writing "mysteries" for the American market, now conspicuously out of print. ("They were good, they were funny, nasty, dirty.") He also dabbled in journalism and one day in 1983 he found himself in Moscow on his way to the Black Sea to write a travel piece for Esquire on the same day that the Korean aircraft was shot down.
"I discover I'm in the middle of this palpable fear. These people were terrified. This was not subtle. People were frightened. They were frightened the day before I arrived, they would be frightened after I left. It wasn't funny. You had this abstract idea, it's a totalitarian nation but, hey, they have good health care, it's free. The view we had was grey. Margaret Thatcher's wasn't grey. Ronald Reagan's wasn't grey. And mine wasn't grey - after I'd been there. And I thought, you could never write a spy novel here, they'd arrest you. They'd know you were doing it. And me being crazy, I thought I'll write those novels. I finally cared about something, something that mattered. I finally had something to write about."
Novels of 20th-century espionage were, of course, nothing new and Furst was already a connoisseur: Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, John Le Carre. And not just the big three, he says, there was Derek Marlowe (A Dandy In Aspic) and Nicholas Freeling. But Furst's aim was something broader, less partisan.
Although the amphitheatre in which his dramas are played out remains the same, the emphasis and the tone of each book is different. "If it's set in Paris, it's romantic, if it's in Poland it's valiant and courageous," he explains. "I'm hoping very much to shadow the national characteristics as the struggle went on. It's the same struggle, but it feels different when you read about it. The Poles had awful things happen to them and the French wriggled their way through, as they do."
In Kingdom of Shadows, his sixth novel (he doesn't count his early work: "My first was my fifth") Furst's searchlight is turned on Hungary and focuses on the build-up to Munich, the annexation of Czechoslovakia and Hungary's attempt to stay neutral. His hero is a junior diplomat, a Hungarian aristocrat based in Paris who finds himself sucked into undercover work before he has time to say No. Like all Furst's novels, the moral complexities faced by the characters drive the plot.
What impresses is the quality and depth of research, the sense that what you read on the page is only the tip of Furst's iceberg of knowledge. It took him several months he says ("and I'm not talking two or three") to come to grips with Hungary's history, "fearlessly reading", from official histories to never-published memoirs. Novel upon novel, the detail is built up. Characters who make brief appearances in one, turn up elsewhere. Yet don't be fooled, he says. Although the history is soundly based, everything else is "total me". There's more than a hint of pride when he admits that he has only a fleeting acquaintance with the middle Europe he describes so vividly: "I'm not such a bad writer, so I can make you believe that I have been to these places."
The key figure in his development he says, was Margaret Mead. "I took a course with her - Columbia general studies - she was the smartest person I ever met in my life and I became fascinated by anthropology, which is not a bad preparation to write novels." He leans forward to deliver a lengthy aside: "PS: If you know someone who wants to write novels, don't sent them to a literature course, send them to an anthropology course. Send them to learn about people who are acting the only way they know how. And if it's their tragedy that they must act their way because of the time they're in and the politics and the surge of power, too bad. They're going to have a chance to be a hero or a villain."
As for the characters that give life to Alan Furst's teeming world, they too are entirely invented. "Where they come from again I don't know. But I did decide this in terms of process: most times if you read a book there are eight characters and at the end of the book you know what happens to all eight characters. And I went, `life's not like that'. People come and go; they appear on the horizon; they disappear. You know where the technique is coming from? From Anthony Powell. He does that. He has little flickers of wonderful characters and you never see them again. Or maybe 20 years later you see them again in some entirely different context. When I read him it knocked me out because I understood what he was about."
Just as in Dance to the Music of Time, each of Furst's sequence of novels stands alone. It doesn't matter where you start and there are more to come: the next is centred on Odessa "the home of Jewish gangsters, a city of chicken markets and Palladian balustrades". He has already achieved cult status, has he ambitions to be taken seriously as a literary novelist? Alan Furst smiles with the confidence of a man who's on a roll. "If you're smart, you'll take me very seriously. It's unavoidably there. I know what I'm doing. And it's for other people to say at what level they believe it exists. It's not for me."
Alan Furst's latest novel, Kingdom of Shadows, is reviewed on Weekend 10