Alan Furst
Alan Furst
Alan Furstis an American author of historical spy novels. Furst has been called "an heir to the tradition of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene," whom he cites along with Joseph Roth and Arthur Koestler as important influences. Most of his novels since 1988 have been set just prior to or during the Second World War and he is noted for his successful evocations of Eastern European peoples and places during the period from 1933 to 1944...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 February 1941
CountryUnited States of America
I am there to entertain. I call my work high escape fiction; it's high, it's good - but it's escape, and I have no delusions about that. I have no ambition to be a serious writer, whatever that means.
For John le Carre, it was always who's betraying who: the hall-of-mirrors kind of thing. When you go back to the '30s, it's a case of good vs. evil, and no kidding. When I have a hero who believes France and Britain are on the right side, a reader is not going to question that.
You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.
Women take great care of themselves in France. It's a culture dedicated to making women beautiful and to manners.
What I discovered is I don't like to repeat lead characters because one of the most pleasurable things in a book to me is learning about the lead.
The brutalization of humans by other humans never fails to get to me in some angry-making way. It shot up in me like an explosion.
Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way.
Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way.
People know accuracy when they read it; they can feel it.
My theory is that sometimes writers write books because they want to read them, and they aren't there to be read. And I think that was true of me.
Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.
I've never lived in Eastern Europe, although both my wife and I have ancestors in Poland and Russia - but I can see the scenes I create.
I've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that.
I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.