The Elusive Spy Story

The Elusive Spy Story
By Alan Furst

The other day, FilmInFocus asked me to write something about wartime espionage movies, my favorites. This was difficult, because I don't really like any of the ones I've seen. However, on thinking about it, I realized that I do have one espionage movie I could recommend –not WWII – which would be the BBC version of John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, with a magnificent Alec Guinness. I also like some movies not about espionage, but about resistance, which I also write about – Four Days of Naples (Le Quattro giornate di Napoli) directed by Nanni Loy [about the four days in which Neapolitans launched a popular insurgency against the invading Nazis], and Open City by Roberto Rossellini, with a screenplay by Federico Fellini [in which a resistance leader tries to flee Rome before being captured by the Gestapo]. This is really good. I also like John Frankenheimer's The Train, about the French resistance's rescue of national artworks.

Real spy movies, like real spy novels, are difficult to create. Because spying is the clandestine theft of information for political purposes – not a car chase, not a love scene. For my own work, Dark Star is a spy novel – Brits in 1939 figuring out German fighter plane manufacture numbers by knowledge of production of swage wire, used for control of airplane wing flaps. Thrilling! Well, I tried, and I hope it's interesting, but what could you show on the screen? Somebody with a camera? That was done in the movie [Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Five Fingers] about the spy called Cicero, valet in the British embassy in Istanbul. Maybe not so thrilling. Even le Carré does personnel problems – the mole, the mole – and here it's Alec Guinness who made the movie. Anyhow, both me and Hollywood could try harder, it can be done, but it's not so apparent that it can be.

Alan Furst was born and raised in Manhattan. He lived in the South of France–as a Fulbright Teaching fellow at the Faculté des Lettres at the University of Montpellier, then in Seattle, where he worked for the City of Seattle Arts Commission. He wrote for magazines–travel pieces and book reviews for Esquire, and wrote and published four novels. Returning to France, he lived in Paris, wrote a weekly column for The International Herald Tribune, and wrote his first historical espionage novel, Night Soldiers (1988). This was followed by Dark Star (1991), The Polish Officer (1995), The World at Night (1996), Red Gold (1999), Kingdom of Shadows (2000), Blood of Victory (2002), Dark Voyage (2004), and The Foreign Correspondent (2006). His novels have been translated into fifteen languages.