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
Good people don't spend their time being good. Good people want to spend their time mowing the lawn and playing with the dog. But bad people spend all their time being bad. It is all they think about.
I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.
You can't make accommodations in crucial situations and be heroic.
I read very little contemporary anything.
I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.
I invented the historical spy novel.
My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.
You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
I don't just want my books to be about the '30s and '40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as '40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.
I'm not really a mass market writer.
If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.
It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book. When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I'm gonna do 320, that's 160 days.