The Spies of Warsaw

Author Alan Furst has written a number of excellent European espionage stories set during the years leading up to World War II, and The Spies of Warsaw is another outstanding contribution. Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, as the new military attaché to the French embassy in Warsaw, in involved daily in political intrigue in this Polish city that is at the crossroads of Germany, Russia and Eastern Europe. Piecing together tidbits of information acquired from an informer, he comes to understand that Nazi Germany are drawing up plans to invade France, and these plans have no interest in the Maginot Line upon which France rests her security. Of course convincing his superiors that this is more than a deliberate mislead on the part of the show more Germans is actually much more difficult than actually acquiring the information. The powers-that-be consider France invincible from invasion due to both the Maginot Line and geography.

A small story but beautifully drawn and told. Suspense is built slowly, but the author never goes overboard, content to foreshadow the dark threat that is coming to Europe. The main character is a quiet yet patriotic man who does his job with intelligence and courage. Side stories shed light on what Warsaw was like during these years of 1937-1938.

Accurate period detail, rich characterization, and a taunt and compact plot have been blended together by this author to produce an atmospheric and compelling book. show less

This novel takes place in Poland in the lead-up to World War 2, more specifically in 1937, two years before the war. In it we follow the exploits of a French military attaché who is running spies against the Germans, trying to figure out how they are re-arming and what plans they have for the rest of Europe.

I should have taken a warning from the part of the publisher's blurb that describes The Spies of Warsaw as "more a novel about spies than a spy novel" as well as "erotic". Or rather, the latter adjective should have received more careful consideration. A novel about spies as opposed to a spy novel is one thing; a novel about spies that contains two erotic scenes in the first 20 pages is quite another -- the characters have not show more really been introduced, so there doesn't seem to be much of a purpose to the scenes except titillation. A third scene later on, this time involving the protagonist and his cousin (!), was so completely gratuitous that I had to stop reading.

The spy parts of the story were all right -- interesting for me to look at from the French perspective after having recently been immersed in the vagaries of the British intelligence system -- but I think this book would work better for people who like novels such as Ian McEwan's The Innocent (another "novel about espionage" more than a "spy novel") or who are not as easily fazed by erotic aspects in their books. show less

The year is 1937 and German-born engineer, Edvard Uhl, finds himself caught up in smuggling German industrial plans relating to armament and arms. Like joining a gang, Edvard is drawn deeper and deeper into the fold. The tightening entanglement causes Uhl to become more and more paranoid about being exposed. But how to get out? This is how The Spies of Warsaw begins but it is not about Edvard. He is just a pawn; one little cog in the world of espionage. The real protagonist is Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, military attaché to the French Embassy. War is eminent and the stakes couldn’t be higher in the struggle for intel. Mercier, familiar with war as a decorated 1914 veteran, must make his moves carefully. One never knows who is show more counterintelligence and who is an ally. Who is a betrayer? In the midst of the political drama, Furst gives Mercier a love interest. Anna’s role is not to lighten the story but to add another layer of tension and mystery. While the book only covers seven months before World War II, the shadowy sense of place is heavy across Poland, Germany, and France.
As an aside, I particularly liked the train scenes: travelers waiting on the platform with the falling snow and paranoia circling in equal amounts. show less

Great news has arrived for those fans of Alan Furst who thought he mailed in his last work, The Foreign Correspondent: A Novel. The master of the historical spy novel is back at the top of his game in The Spies of Warsaw. Furst centers his story in Warsaw, the scene of some his best writing and the return is triumphal. The typical Furst protagonist is the ordinary man of above-average principles, thrust by accident of history into the dangerous interstices of inter-war Europe. This time, however, our man is one Jean-Francois Mercier, decorated hero of the Great War and wounded veteran of the Polish victory in the 1920 Battle of Warsaw - the Miracle at the Vistula - and new military attaché at the French embassy and a professional show more spook.

Mercier runs an agent who works as engineer in an armaments company Germany, but who also develops a taste for Warsaw honey and promptly falls into the honey trap. By indirect route that leads to a one-sided vendetta against Mercier of which he is the unknowing target. Mercier falls in lust early in the book, but later finds himself fully in love while he continues to troll for secrets and potential agents. His work leads him into several adventures in which the risks of failure range from embarrassing to deadly.

Furst brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of pre-war days - the end of happiness and hope. Mercier's attempts for even a brief mental respite from the looming NAZI threat are futile; the reminders everywhere. His description of the formal dining room at a Warsaw party in the city's finest hotel puts the reader in the room: the "sheen of the damask tablecloth, the heavy silver, and the gold-rimmed china glowed in the light of a dozen candelabra".

Details to delight. A trip to Paris includes the now-obligatory Furstian visit to Brasserie Heininger and a peak at the infamous bullet hole in the mirror of Table 14. We learn that Mercier is a fan of Georges Simenon and Stendhal.

Mercier struggles to help France resist the NAZI's in the coming war that palpably hangs over Europe and every page in the book. As he learns, however, there are those in France who view Soviet Russia as the true enemy and Nazi Germany as potential allies. Moreover, intelligence that questions accepted wisdom, in this case of Marshal Petain and the ruling clique in the military, is seldom welcome. The books powerful ending leaves the reader angry and impotent. Highest recommendation. show less

This is it? I guess you really have to be into Nazi porn. The appeal of these Furst books must just be atmosphere. It's well written. The plot, such as it is, is tissue thin: a French major and spy chief stationed in Warsaw discovers the Germans are building and testing artillery that will easily overcome France's defenses. The major's discoveries are ignored, he gets his woman and so WW2--in Europe, that is--could have been avoided. That's it.

I've just been in Asia too long and know too much (and really not that much) about French imperial history in Asia to ever find an aristocratic French military officer a hero figure. And one aligned with the insatiable DeGaulle. What's one million Vietnamese starved to death in 1945 alone as long show more as the empire is saved? This book is taking place in the late 1930s--a decade of terrible famine in Vietnam, a brutal crackdown on a widespread rebellion, decimation of the VNQDD national party, slavery in rubber plantations, French colons sending postcards of piles of guillotined heads. I think anyone familiar with the French history in Africa would read it with the same eye-roll.

Moreover at times, our major thinks fleetingly of alternative postings in warmer climes. I think he had previously been in Beirut, the Levant. (It's an airport novel, the details slip away quickly.) But some of us then think of what the warmer climes under French rule were like. Ah, say, South Pacific islands under the French. Vietnamese plantation laborers, working off their head taxes for decades on end and their kids don't get any schooling either. That's the life, when the dark skins knew their place. As someone said about the Master and Commander books or movie, or that awful English Patient movie, you can *hint* that there's an alternative point of view

On the positive side is that you get a feel for the mix of nationalities and political allegiances in Warsaw at this time. Notably the Jewish Russian spies who turn sides when they're called home for the purge trials. You get little sense of the extreme politics of France of the period. show less

No one plays "What if?" better than Alan Furst.

What if the Wehrmacht high command had managed to assassinate Hitler in 1937 (Kingdom of Shadows)? What if the British had crippled shipping up the Danube to choke off Hitler's supply of Balkan oil (Blood of Victory)? Better than that, though, Furst wonders aloud how it could have been done. You know the outcome--Furst isn't Harry Turtledove--but you read on anyway, hoping against history for success and an early end to the Nazis.

In his latest, The Spies of Warsaw, Furst wonders what if the French military had taken seriously the potential for German attack through Belgium. The spectacular failure of the Maginot Line was clearly a failure of strategy and imagination, but Furst rightly damns show more it as a failure of arrogance and a determination to read only those parts of intelligence that fit within a preconceived construct of the world. (Sound familiar?)

In Colonel Mercier, we have a typically Furstian character. Patriotic but jaded, resourceful but wary, cognizant of the inevitability of war but bent on preventing (or fighting) the spread of fascism. Mercier is in a unique stage of life for a Furst character: he is a widower. This adds an autumnal quality to The Spies of Warsaw that is entirely appropriate.

My one complaint is that I wish the book had been longer. One cannot expect the length of Blood of Victory or Dark Star (which I just started reading) from Furst every time out, and I realize that the book ends in the most appropriate place--after its climax, everything that follows until June 1940 (when Germany invades France) is inevitable. But the epilogue describing de Gaulle's flight to resistance and Petain's acquiescence seemed on first reading like short shrift. It was distasteful, but that might be what Furst was going for here. show less

Jean-François Mercier is the military attaché at the French embassy in Poland. But in the Europe of 1937, increasingly aware of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany, Mercier's role is less that of paper pusher and attender of political soirées and more of a spy. In a dangerous game of outwitting the enemy, Mercier must constantly watch his step, and his back, as he does his best to strengthen his country's position in the forthcoming, and inevitable, war.

This novel was a bit of a mixed bag. Furst is brilliant at evoking late 1930s Warsaw, and Europe more generally. He deftly crafts small scenes between characters that are tiny illuminations into these individuals and to the subtleties that made up the spy game in the late 1930s. But in show more terms of an overarching plot, the novel didn't always hold together. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing as Mercier was an interesting character to follow but on occasions I wasn't quite sure where the novel was going. And then I found myself anxious towards the end of the novel because the resolution of one of the larger conflicts had not felt like a real resolution, leaving me to await the other shoe which never arrived. Not bad if you enjoy pre-war spy novels, but there are more satisfying spy novels out there show less