This is not to say that Furst’s prose is a smooth and easy read. A certain enigmatic quality, even the occasional feeling of being out of one’s depth, is necessary if a spy novel is not to feel like a boys’ adventure. “ Todavía?’ Still? Siempre!’ Always!” I would have wrongly guessed that todavía” means something like “the whole road,” but that’s beside the point these asides play havoc on a reader’s wish fulfillment. “ pointed with an index finger, and shook it firmly twice … Meaning Naughty boy, see what happens when you curse your betters?” Foreign words come with a helpful translation. In Night Soldiers, for example, someone throws gasoline and a torch inside a café and nails the door shut, whereupon the occupants hurl themselves against it-and the narrator hastens to inform us that “the intention was to burn them to death.” Even the least ambiguous gestures are explained in italics. Furst’s work seems too “on the nose” by comparison. Le Carré treats his readers like experienced fellow agents we spend the first part of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963)scrambling to figure out what on earth he’s talking about.

Reviewers were quick to compare Furst to John le Carré, but the two have little in common. Departing from the standard screw-tightening plot, he sent his Bulgarian hero back and forth across Europe on a series of almost self-contained adventures. It was then, of all times, that Furst wrote Night Soldiers (1988), a spy novel about the Nazi-Soviet conflict. One by one the swastikas disappeared from airport book racks, and by the late 1980s, Follett had taken to writing about cathedrals instead. After enjoying one final smash with Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle (1978), the genre was gradually displaced from best-seller lists by the hi-tech thrillers of Tom Clancy et al.

Readers who have never heard of Alan Furst may be surprised to learn that historical spy fiction is still being written at all.

Alan furst the world at night