Red Gold; A Novel

[8], 258, [6] pages. DJ has slight edge wear and soiling. Alan Furst (born 1941) is 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. While attending general studies courses at Columbia University, he became acquainted with Margaret Mead, for whom he later worked. Before becoming a full-time novelist, Furst worked in advertising and wrote magazine articles, most notably for Esquire, and as a columnist for the International Herald Tribune. The year 1988 saw publication of Night Soldiersâ€"inspired by his 1984 trip to Eastern Europe on assignment for Esquireâ€"which invigorated his career and led to a succession of related titles. His output since 1988 includes a dozen works. He is especially noted for his successful evocations of Eastern European peoples and places during the period from 1933 to 1944. While all his historical espionage novels are loosely connected, only The World at Night and Red Gold share a common plot. Writing in The New York Times, the novelist Justin Cartwright says that Furst, "has adopted a European sensibility." Furst lived for many years in Paris, a city that he calls "the heart of civilization" which figures significantly in all his novels. Paris. Autumn, 1941. In a shabby hotel off the place Clichy, the course of the French resistance is about to change. German tanks are rolling toward Moscow. Stalin has issued a decree: all partisan operatives are to strike behind enemy lines--from Kiev to Brittany. Set in the back streets of Paris and deep in occupied France, Red Gold moves with quiet and pervasive menace as predators from the dark edge of the war--arms dealers, lawyers, spies, and assassins--emerge from the shadows of the Parisian underworld. In their midst is Jean Casson, once a producer of gangster films, now living on a few francs a day and hunted by the Gestapo. As the German occupation tightens, Casson is drawn into an ill-fated mission: running guns to combat units of the French Communist party. Their NKVD contact, a former Comintern operative named Weiss--his seventeenth name--begins to orchestrate a series of attacks against the Germans. Reprisals are brutal. Fear spreads through the city. At last the real resistance has begun. Red Gold masterfully recreates the duplicitous world of the French resistance in the worst days of World War II. Derived from a Kirkus review: More masterful, richly atmospheric WWII spy fiction sends Furst's despairing, dissolute, but delightfully resourceful film producer Jean Casson on yet another existential errand among the fiends and fanatics of the French Resistance. Having spied, loved, and lost in The World at Night, Casson is spending the cold autumn of 1941 hiding out from the Gestapo in a sleazy Paris pensione, spending his dwindling pile of Vichy francs on sex and cigarettes. Fearing that his spiteful landlady may turn him in, he pawns his overcoat, falls in with a gang of makes a fortune selling a sack of stolen sugar, and loses everything at a decadent nightclub when he's robbed and beaten by gendarmes who, instead of tossing him to the Nazis, convey him to his former intelligence commander, DeGrave, now a Vichy bureaucrat. DeGrave wants Casson to dig up a few of his left-leaning filmmaking cronies to provide liaison between a group of Vichy officers, eager to subvert the Nazi occupation, and a fanatical group of Communist terrorist fighters, whose reckless bloodlust is doing more harm than good. Casson, sunk in Gallic funk, accepts becauseâ€"well, heâ€"d rather sleep in a better hotel. The Communists, supervised by a fearsomely intelligent fatalist named Weiss, come across as a mixed ba.