Alan Furst has written 11 novels set in the beginning years of World War II.

Eleven novels.

Most of us who write series work a period for a couple years, a couple books, and move on. We let our characters age because either we’ve mined out the stories of that period or we’ve become bored with the period.

Says Furst he doesn’t write anything after 1942 because then the story becomes how can we survive until the end of this war? But in the period before, the story is, my God, we’re going to lose, what shall we do? That, to Furst, is far more interesting.

“What I like to say about this period is that you didn’t have a lot of choices. You could be a hero. You could be a coward. You could be a villain or you could be a victim. Pick,” he told NPR’s Steve Inskeep in a recent interview.

To come up with new story ideas for this period, Furst reads.

“I read a lot of books by foreign correspondents,” he told Inskeep. “They would have a three-year stint in Budapest or a two-year stint in Bucharest. And when they finally got back to London or Chicago or whatever it was, they would always write a book. The book was always called Flames Over Europe. They always told people exactly what was going to happen and they were never believed.”

So the ideas are there in the books for Furst to run with. An example –

“This one guy in Bucharest went out one night and met a young woman,” Furst said. “And they went off to her apartment to spend the night. And when he got home the next morning, he discovered there was a black hole in the middle of his mattress and that during the night somebody had fired a pistol up through the ceiling . . . where the bullet went through his bed.”

True story.

“You know, the human spirit was at its worst and at its best. Don’t ask me why. It just was. And this period, 1933 to 1942, I’ve begun to think of it as an enormous room with a thousand corners. There are so many stories and so many places, all of them so different. So it’s always up to me to find another great story.”

In 11 books – Spies of the Balkans the latest is – Furst has done that.

Tomorrow: Why there are no James Bonds in Alan Furst’s books

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