Why there are no James Bonds in Alan Furst's books

[Jerry Peterson]

After 10 books writer Alan Furst set in the 1933-1942 time period in Europe, he discovered he was writing spy novels.

But you won’t find a James Bond or a Jason Bourne in one of them.

Furst prefers characters who struggle with huge moral questions, just as his readers would if they were there in that period just as the Germans were about to invade their country, their city.

“Those are the people who are going to say, well, what would I do – and no kidding, what would I do? What would I really do?” Furst said in a recent NPR interview.

“It’s always nice to think that you would be a hero. On the other hand, that might have something to do with what’s going to happen to your wife, what’s going to happen to your children, what’s going to happen to your parents. It’s not a clean business. You know a lot of books, which are in one way or another action books, the hero has none of these concerns, nor would the heroine have any of these concerns. They’re loners completely. There is no Mrs. James Bond. There is no Mother Bond for him to worry about. And there is no little Junior Bond playing on the soccer team. I prefer to have the people who play the lead roles in my book to have lives, just like the readers have lives.”

That holds true in Furst’s newest book, Spies in the Balkans.