Alan Furst
It is 1938 and the
Hollywood actor Frederic Stahl has been sent to Paris, on loan from Warner
Brothers to star in a French film. After attending a social event Stahl soon
realizes that Paris is not as it was when he lived there as a young man. It
appears that a lot of German money is being spread around to influential
Parisians who can then create pro-German sentiments through social connections
and newspaper articles in papers such as
La Presse.
Stahl also comes to
the conclusion that his presence in Paris is not as it seems, and a visit to
the American embassy convinces him that there is an ulterior motive for his being
sent to Paris. Members of the Ribbentropburo
(Germany’s political warfare department) are anxious to meet Stahl to try to
convince him to visit Berlin in the hope that his doing so will appear as
pro-German sentiment from an American. But someone in the White House in
Washington is funding a fact-gathering mission that eventually includes Stahl,
and when his life is threatened he agrees to act as a liaison to gather
information for the allies.
Mission to Paris is the twelfth novel in Alan Furst’s Night Soldiers series. Although the books can be read out of
sequence, two of them—The World at Night
and Red Gold—are connected by their
main character and location. All of Furst’s historical spy novels are set
throughout Europe prior to and during World War II.
Although they are
fiction, many are based on factual occurrences and real people. Furst’s detailed
knowledge of geographic locations is evident in his descriptions of
waterfronts, rivers, mountain ranges, and
inner cities. One location and event is repeated in all of his books, and readers
will be pleasantly surprised when they reach this place in his novels.
I have read eight of
the novels and find that they leave me breathless waiting for the next chapter
to begin, sometimes with my heart pounding as I race along with his characters
through their perilous journeys. They are the best historical spy novels I have
read in many years, even outpacing Graham Greene.
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