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 read very little contemporary anything... I don't think I read what other people read, but then why would I, considering what I do?
I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.
I think I honestly invented my own genre, the historical spy novel.
I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris. That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.
I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.
I've evolved in my writing to tell a more emotional story - my publisher, Random House, has urged that.
Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.
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.
Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way.
Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way.
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.
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.
Women take great care of themselves in France. It's a culture dedicated to making women beautiful and to manners.
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.