Helen MacInnes, “Assignment in Brittany”

Oh, so retro! These Helen MacInnes thrillers were everywhere when I was a teenager — she might even be comparable to the Lee Child of the era, which says a lot about cultural changes in the last 50 years. I never read them because they moved pretty slowly and because the proportion of romance to action was low for the teenage me. But Assignment in Brittany was a laundry-room acquisition and it fit the bill perfectly when I was laid low by a migraine. (That’s the good kind of illness, when you feel too sick to do anything but lie in bed and read!)

Love that cover art.

Plot: an English military intelligence guy named Hearne parachutes into rural Brittany in 1941 to spy on German troop movements. He adopts the identity of a wounded Dunkirk evacuee, Bertrand Corlay, who is his physical double. Hearne speaks perfect French, etc. etc. and gets a complete briefing so the substitution while suspenseful is not the main motor of the plot. So far, the novel reminded me of a minor but wonderful Daphne DuMaurier called The Scapegoat: English guy drops into rural French setting and discovers that the French guy he’s pretending to be is a real jerk. The spying plot proceeds with slow, methodical detail which I quite relished, but which certainly dated the book as an entertainment. Though the biggest shock came when our hero Hearne is looking at his double Corlay’s bookshelf and says to himself, “Books are half of the man.” At which point I could not help thinking, “Not anymore, pal.”

Of course Helen MacInnes was a moonlighting librarian, married to an academic, so she would consider books an index to character. I knew that her husband was the Columbia University classicist Gilbert Highet, but I did not know until I checked Wikipedia that he had been in MI6. Nor that Assignment in Brittany “was required reading for Allied intelligence agents who were being sent to work with the French resistance against the Nazis.” Actually now that I think of it, MacInnes‘ books seem to cover a lot of the same territory as Alan Furst’s — but she’s earnestly informative, while he’s performing all those smoky, romantic riffs on the same themes.

It turns out that MacInnes‘ books are being reissued this spring in a spiffy new uniform edition. I wonder if their sincere pedantic quality and their relatively stately pace will appeal to contemporary readers. On the other hand, I can’t wait for Decision at Delphi, Message from Malaga, and the like.

William Boyd, “Waiting for Sunrise”

Oh, the tyranny of the public library’s reserve system! Having read William Boyd’s Any Human Heart just a couple of weeks ago, I should probably not have embarked on another Boyd novel so soon but Waiting for Sunrise is popular in the New York Public Library’s branches, so I snagged it when I could. And now I’m thinking … meh.

Vienna 1913, sexual dysfunction — guess who makes a cameo appearance?

Haven’t I read this book? Or won’t I read it again shortly, when the NYPL delivers Alan Furst’s Mission to Paris to my local branch? Oh, I know, different wars, different countries, but two books about actor/spies in European locations…. There’s going to be substantial similarity. Especially when Boyd seems to have intentionally written An Espionage Novel. Full of plot twists and double-crossing and sinister women in widow’s weeds. Don’t get me wrong, Waiting for Sunrise was entertaining and well-executed. And I adored the name of the hero: Lysander Rief. But despite Boyd’s professionalism, despite a structure that included Lysander’s autobiographical jottings (prompted by his psychoanalysis in Vienna in 1913), this protagonist feels hollow. And, yes, I’m aware of the knowingness, the faint authorial distance signaled by po-mo devices like inserted poetry or dialogue delivered in script format… for the actors, get it? Yes, Lysander’s poetry moves from pseudo-Tennyson in 1913 to pseudo-moderno in 1916. That shows we’ve left the 19th century for good.

Listen, this is a perfectly entertaining spy novel and better-written than most. So if you think you’ll enjoy the Vienna/London/Switzerland travel itinerary, the details of Lysander’s self-transformations, the breezily frank sex and the stylishly inconclusive finish, go to it. And by the way, Joseph Kanon’s got a new book out, too. We won’t lack for entertainment this summer.

Alan Furst, “Spies of the Balkans”

I had a disconcerting moment early in my reading of Spies of the Balkans. “‘The Nazis,’” says a character, “‘are vicious and criminal but, thank God, they are also venal. The ideology, for many of them, is only skin-deep — they like power, and they love money.’” Oh, darn, I thought, I’ve already read this one. But I was pretty sure I’d remember an Alan Furst novel set in Greece. And Book Group of One only lists The Spies of Warsaw so evidently this was a first reading. All became clear when I met our hero’s dog Melissa, a massive, faithful sheepdog from the Greek mountains. I would have remembered her.

Not so much Costas Zannis, the protagonist du jour. They tend to be pretty interchangeable in Furst’s books. This time he’s a kind of super-policeman, with a vague role handling sensitive cases in Salonika, Greece. That’s contemporary Thessaloniki, in north-eastern Greece, surrounded by contemporary Albania, Macedonia, and Bulgaria. So Costas’ world is cosmopolitan. He has business contacts in Turkey and on the European continent, many of which involve handling large amounts of cash. He ends up — because he’s an honorable kind of guy, and because a woman he has a crush on asks him to do it — helping get Jews into neutral Turkey. Naturally this puts him in disfavor with the Nazis, who, at the end of the book, are bombing Salonika.

If I were looking for an unfamiliar experience I could have read many other books but Spies of the Balkans is reliably an Alan Furst product, full of atmosphere and ruefully courageous characters and a few Nazi monsters. It’s written with Furst’s trademark elegance and eye for detail, as when Costas is lunching with a Turkish contact whom he doesn’t entirely trust.

Madame Urglu smiled. “Such finesse,” she said. “Our Teutonic friends.” She retrieved a mussel from her stew, open perhaps a third of the way, stared at it for a moment, then set it beside her bowl. “But at least they’re not in Greece.”

I liked that delicate connection between the Germans and rotten shellfish, packaged into a moment that puts the reader at the table. In the end, there was enough novelty in Spies of the Balkans to keep me entertained. And  I’d really like to see the dog reappear in the next book.

Andrew Taylor, “Bleeding Heart Square”

It’s a really good day when you find a new writer who publishes clever, literate murder mysteries. It’s an especially good day when this writer has been at it for a while and there’s a backlog of titles for you to work through. And it’s a terrific day when the writer is Andrew Taylor, and your introduction to him is Bleeding Heart Square.

Bleeding Heart Square hardcover

His U.S. publisher, Hyperion, is issuing some of this previous books along with this one, and they all have beautiful covers with architectural photographs, vaguely sinister, dark-toned — not unlike the covers of the Alan Furst books. Say what you will, these designers know just how to signal the contents of these novels. Bleeding Heart Square is set in 1934 London, as economic conditions reduce the options of many Britons, and the Fascist party starts to stir up all kinds of ugly trouble. But Taylor, clever man, maps this situation onto a 19th-century framework. Did you remember that Bleeding Heart Yard is the setting of a big chunk of Little Dorrit? (It’s OK, I had to check, and I just read the darn thing.) Furthermore certain characters in Bleeding Heart Square — the alcoholic gentleman ne’er-do-well, the physically imposing and menacing landlord — share DNA with Dickens’ characters.

But Taylor’s not slavish, and the mystery part eventually overruns the Dickensian scaffolding. Lydia Langstone, 28 and pretty, has left her boorish rich husband (soon to join the British Union of Fascists) because he bullies her. She flees to her estranged father, Captain Ingleby-Lewis, who lives in a squalid boarding house in Bleeding Heart Square. Taylor is especially good on the nitty-gritty reality here: Lydia left home with “Virginia Woolf’s A Room of Ones’ Own but she had forgotten her toothbrush.”

There’s a murder, there are sinister clues (literal bleeding hearts are regularly sent to the frightening landlord, Serridge). There’s a downtrodden police investigator (more Dickens) and a fresh-faced journalist who falls for Lydia. Several sections take place in the country but it’s more Stella Gibbons than Angela Thirkell. No laughs, though.

Still, all the literary allusions bring a level of playfulness to the plotting. Which, by the way, is excellent. Twists and turns all the way, right to the end. A really artful piece of work.

Alan Furst, “The Spies of Warsaw”

So maybe it’s not a formula. Maybe it’s a recipe, which implies, to me at least (cook rather than chemist), more latitude. Ingredients include likable melancholy hero, redoubtable Nazi villain(s), a modest dose of spycraft, several discreet but circumstantial sex scenes, lousy Central European weather, and a scene at the Brasserie Heininger. It’s time to drop the last — kind of like the sun-dried tomatoes of spy fiction, a good idea for a while but we’ve seen enough. Now Furst has to produce so much exposition to get his characters in position at the Brasserie (to see the bullet-hole in the mirror from a gun battle many books back) that it’s tiresome.

He writes well, and atmosphere’s always been the strong suit. I can never tell from the title or the cover if I’ve read any given volume; covers tend to feature fog and titles to include dark or shadows. Easy enough to confuse. In this go-round the hero, Jean-Francois Mercier, is an aristocratic WWI veteran whose old leg wound requires him to carry an ebony stick with which in one scene he cracks a thug across the face. Nice: the accessory that provides both vulnerability and defense. Mercier is stationed in Warsaw and the McGuffin, if I followed the plot, is access to the German invasion plans for France. (We’re in 1937-8.) The part I remember best, though, is the section set in his ancestral house in rural France, all cool damp winter mist and well-trained hunting dogs.

Which is not really as it should be. Pleasant as it was to spend mental time in Furstworld, I was primed for a little more suspense and action. The ebony stick got deployed only in a subplot involving some resentful Nazi underlings — a subplot that didn’t seem ever to resolve. The height of tension in the main spying plot point of the novel was a series of tense border crossings.  OK, the narrator gets anxious when the mean kontrol guy with the German shepherd thumbs his counterfeit documents and examines the valise with the false bottom, but it’s not exactly nail-biting, is it?

Furst also signals a sequel involving Mercier and his Polish girlfriend, much the way Thomas Perry signals a sequel in Runner.  Is this now required of thrillers?