Alan Furst’s Quiet Heroes

Photo by Shonna Valeska for NPR

Alan Furst is a master of quiet tension. Not for him the rushing climax bound to end in a blaze of guns. His books set before and during World War II have the feel of reality. Few people are Hollywood heroes.

Kingdom of Shadows has Nicholas Morath, an upper class Hungarian living and working as a businessman in Paris, undertaking missions in 1938 and 1939 to try to avert the looming war.

Constantine “Costa” Zannis, a Greek police officer in Spies in the Balkans, helps Jews escape from Germany. I said in review:

He is simply a good man doing his best to help the persecuted in a cruel world ….. At the same time he is a brave man willing to take real risks. As a Greek whose family and friends fought for independence from Turkey but a generation earlier I believe he identifies with the plight of the Jews.

Dark Voyage involves a tramp steamer on missions for British intelligence. In my review I concluded:

[Dutch Captain Eric] DeHaan and the crew are the ordinary people of war. Once again I felt as if I was reading one of John Le Carre’s spy novels. There is no glitz or glamour.

In The Polish Officer Captain Alexander de Milja, a Polish army cartographer, takes Polish government gold out of Warsaw as Poland is conquered. He subsequently spends time in Paris and London. He sums up why France did not have resistance movements to equal Eastern Europe:

Because he’d learned a terrible truth about the Germans: unless you were a Jew they wouldn’t bother you if you didn’t bother them.

Last year I read and reviewed Hitler’s Empire – How the Nazis Ruled Europe by Mark Mazower in which the author set out how there was limited resistance in Western Europe. In my review I said:

Opposition to the Germans was muted except in the East where Nazi oppression left the Poles and Russians with little to lose by armed resistance. In Western Europe it took the brutal drives for workers being sent to the Reich to provoke real resistance. Even then attacks were limited.

My last post was a review of Red Gold in which former film producer Jean Casson gradually becomes part of the French Resistance as he acts as a liaison between French Intelligence officials and the French Communist Party.

Furst is a master at creating such men as Morath, Zannis, deHaan, Milja and Casson. They will never lead their nation in politics or war or business. They will do their best for their country despite the danger. They know neither fame nor reward await them. They do not seek glory.

                                                                                                           
I have met men and women who resisted tyranny. I wrote a post about real life families in the Netherlands and Denmark who acted against the Nazis occupying their nations. A Dutch teenage girl altered identity cards to change the age of young men to prevent deportation. A Danish family hid a Jewish girl from Germany. None set out to be resisters. Yet when they were called upon they took up the challenge.

Those Danish and Dutch people are heroes like Furst’s heroes. Morath, Zannis, deHaan, Milja and Casson could be us. We can identify with them hoping we would have had the courage to resist. Furst convinces us not all ordinary people were part of the silent majority described by Mazower.

Furst’s characters, as with my real life examples, do not always resist by wielding weapons. A frequent theme sees them helping other people, especially Jews, facing Nazi persecution.

I find Furst’s characters intriguing and inspiring for, despite facing daunting odds, they have not drifted into apathy.

While I admire John Le Carre’s books his bleak endings are hard to read. I appreciate that Furst, while not predictable, does not always write a dark finish to his books.

Furst’s books encourage us not to give up hope in our fellow men and women.

Red Gold by Alan Furst (1999)

Red Gold by Alan Furst (1999) – By the fall of 1941 the Nazi occupation of France is well established. French citizens are adjusting to life as a conquered people. Most try to live quietly, some have become collaborators, a few have begun the Resistance.

Jean Casson is a former film producer from an upper class family without money. He had a chance to escape to England but, as the ship was leaving France, he returned to look for a young actress with whom he was in love. He could not find her and returned to Paris where he lives under an assumed name, Jean Marin, and has drifted down into desperate poverty where he has barely enough money to survive a few days and must sell his overcoat for a few more francs.

At the same time the Soviet Union has sent agents into Paris. Prior to the war they had supported the French Communist Party as it sought to gain power. Now, with Russia reeling from the German attack, they have been instructed to become partisans fighting Germans a continent away from Moscow.

A nondescript middle aged man, Weiss, is the local Soviet representative. While they have little with which to resist the Germans they undertake operations. The reprisals the Nazis exact upon the French population are of no concern to the committed Communists. The fate of the U.S.S.R. is in the balance and they will take action against the enemy.

Casson, who is on the run for having escaped from the Gestapo, is arrested by the French police. He gives up the pretence of his fake identity. The end has come for him. To his surprise he has been arrested so a member of the French intelligence services, Captain Degrave, from Vichy can speak with him. Casson had served under Degrave during the 1940 invasion in a film unit.

Degrave wants Casson to act as a liaison in contacting the French Communists about working together to resist the Nazis. Casson has been chosen because:

“It must be somebody neutral, apolitical, not a socialist, not a conservative. Somebody who has not fought in the political wars. You have certainly had contact with party members in the film industry – incidental, without problems. They will know who you are, they will know you haven’t worked against them.”

Thus a fragile alliance is launched that is equally being formed on an international scale. England has been the enemy of the U.S.S.R. since its creation but they have become allies to fight Nazi Germany.

Can Casson, a decent man, but far from a wily diplomat be the man to be the intermediary in this coalition of enemies?

The Communists are wary. The intelligence officers represented by Degrave have not only been their enemy in peacetime France they are openly working for the collaborators of the Vichy regime.

Casson is not of heroic demeanour, stature, background or eloquence but he is committed to France. He has been in her Army during two wars against Germany.

Casson, through Degrave, meets Helene another lonely soul trying to survive in France with the additional burden of being Jewish. They each long for a relationship.

Furst does not write highly paced thrill a page books. There is a gradual building of suspense that will have you wanting to know what happens to Casson. In my next post I will discuss the quintet of Furst books I have read. (Dec. 1/13)

*****

My previous reads of Furst are (2002) - Kingdom of Shadows; (2004) - The Polish Officer; (2010) - Spies in the Balkans; (2012) - Dark Voyage. I have only reviewed the last two books.

Gender Reading Analysis

In my reading of mysteries I do not look to the gender of the author to guide my book selection. I read what I think will be interesting. If I am reading for the annual Canadian Book Challenge or the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme I will be influenced by the origin of the author and the letter of the alphabet respectively.

On this quiet winter evening I did decide to check on my reading by gender for the past 12 months. I dislike yearly polls or lists that are for 11 months usually excluding December. For this post I went through the mysteries I have read and reviewed through the past year including December of 2012.

Overall I read 47 mysteries and thrillers. Of that total 13 were by woman authors or 25% of my mystery reading.

I did a breakdown between Canadian books and the Rest of the World.

For Canada 5 of the 13 mysteries or 38% were by female writers.

The Rest of the World had 8 of 34 books or 23%.

The numbers and percentages were lower than I expected. I had thought I was reading more women authors.

I realize my numbers, as a reflection of my reading, can certainly be skewed by the small sample size. Another evening I may go through 5 years of reading to come up with a more representative sample size.

While there is abundant information that a significant majority of the readers of mysteries are women I did not find reliable online information on the percentage of published mysteries being written by women. In Barbara Fister’s 2011 paper, Sisters in Crime atthe Quarter Century: Advocacy, Community, and Change she refers to an analysis of the books submitted for the Edgar Awards being about 50% written by women.

 

In The New Republic in February of 2011 there was an article, A Literary Glass Ceiling, by Ruth Franklin which, after showing the disproportionate number of male professional book reviewers, stated with regard to publishing:

But let’s slow down for a moment. There’s some essential data missing from these moan-inducing statistics. What’s the gender breakdown in books published last year? It’s crucial to both of the categories VIDA explores, because freelance book reviewers, who make up the majority of the reviewing population, tend to be authors themselves. If more men than women are publishing books, then it stands to reason that more books by men are getting reviewed and more men are reviewing books. So TNR’s Eliza Gray, Laura Stampler, and I crunched some numbers. Our sample was small and did not pretend to be comprehensive, and it may not represent a cross-section of the industry, because we did not include genre books and others with primarily commercial appeal. But it gave us a snapshot. And what we found helps explain VIDA’s mystery.

We looked at fall 2010 catalogs from 13 publishing houses, big and small. Discarding the books that were unlikely to get reviewed—self-help, cooking, art—we tallied up how many were by men and how many were by women. Only one of the houses we investigated—the boutique Penguin imprint Riverhead—came close to parity, with 55 percent of its books by men and 45 percent by women. Random House came in second, with 37 percent by women. It was downhill from there, with three publishers scoring around 30 percent—Norton, Little Brown, and Harper—and the rest 25 percent and below, including the elite literary houses Knopf (23 percent) and FSG (21 percent). Harvard University Press, the sole academic press we considered, came in at just 15 percent.

Franklin concluded by saying 33% of the book reviews she had written in 2010 were of books by women.

A Cold White Sun by Vicki Delany

A Cold White Sun by Vicki Delany – Trafalgar, British Columbia schoolteacher, Cathy Lindsay, is out for an early morning walk with the family dog, Spot, on the first day of the spring school vacation. As she briskly strides down the path on the edge of the mountain near her home she is struck down by a single shot fired from a shotgun behind her. Constable Molly (Moonlight) Smith answers the call and finds Lindsay dead in the snow.

There is no obvious suspect. Lindsay does not have any apparent enemies. Life at home with husband, Gord, was tolerable. Colleagues generally like and respect her. She is neither a community activist nor politically active nor involved in any protest movements. There is no activity in which she is engaged that created animosity.

For Smith, Sergeant John Winters and the other members of the police department it means a long hard investigation looking into the details of Lindsay’s life. They will have to search for a piece of evidence to lead them to the killer.

In her personal life Smith has been reflecting on her relationship with boyfriend, Constable Adam Tocek of the local RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) detachment. They have been living comfortably together. Has the time come to make it permanent or is it time to move on?

Smith is adjusting to the new relationship of her mother, Lucky Smith, with the town’s Chief Constable, Paul Keller. Smith’s father has died a few years ago and she realizes her gregarious mother is bound to establish a new relationship but she finds herself not ready for her mother to have a sexual relationship.

Trafalgar is a small community. As the police probe information comes from personal connections as much as from formal interviews.

The police learn that Lindsay was very interested in math teacher, Mark Hamilton. Publicly he has shown no interest her. Of interest to the police is his military background. Before becoming a teacher he had been a soldier in the Canadian army and served in Afghanistan. Could there have been a personal as well as a professional relationship?

The police examination of Lindsay’s family is painful. Gord is confused and disorientated by the death of his wife. Daughter, Jocelyn, normally a bubbly 10 year old is devastated by the death of her Mom. Son, Bradley, a sullen teenager cannot figure out what to feel about his Mom being gone. On an ordinary late winter morning their lives have changed completely and they cannot understand why.

Frustration grows as the police struggle to find leads. Lindsay has had an average life.

Delany skillfully portrays the family lives of the police and other characters. It is not a mystery in which the characters lead solitary lives. Her characters deal with the daily challenge of family relationships.

Delany does equally well in evoking the central B.C. setting of the book. The weather and geography are essential parts of the book.

In the combination of family and mystery I was reminded of the Joanne Kilbourn series of Gail Bowen. I am drawn to reading mysteries in which the characters have real families in clearly defined settings.

The end is startling. I did not see it coming.

The sixth Smith and Winters mystery is the first I have read. I will be reading more of the series. (Nov. 23/13)

A Great Grey Cup Sunday

Grey Cup

In my last post I set out my induction into the Football Reporters of Canada wing of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame last Sunday morning.

In late afternoon I took the media bus to Taylor Field where the Grey Cup game, the championship of the Canadian Football League, was being contested between the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Hamilton Tiger Cats.

Saskatchewan has hosted three Grey Cup games but this was the first time the home team, the Roughriders, had played for the Cup in their own Stadium.

My thoughts on the game are set out in the column I wrote which can be found on the Melfort Journal website at http://www.melfortjournal.com/2013/11/25/surreal-sunday.

The level of excitement in Saskatchewan over the Rider victory has never been matched in our history.

It has become a tradition, better described as a superstition, for professional football players not to touch the Grey Cup unless they have won the Championship. (The same tradition applies in hockey for the Stanley Cup.)

After winning the Cup it is a happy tradition for the winning team to drink from the Cup and the Riders were certainly following that tradition in their dressing room after the game.

As with most Canadian sports fans I believe having a cup for the winner is much better than the sculptures used as trophies by the NFL and Major League Baseball. Drinking from a Cup is far more a celebration than getting your photo taken holding the trophy.

The winter will not be as long in Saskatchewan with the Riders winning the Cup.

My Induction into the FRC Wing of Canadian Football Hall of Fame



Holding my Induction Plaque

Today has been a special day for me. This morning I was inducted into the Football Reporters of Canada wing of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame.

For 36 years I have been covering the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League (CFL) for the Melfort Journal. During those years I have been writing a column for the Journal called "On Sports".

Each year my wife, Sharon, and I have been driving from Melfort to Regina for each Rider home game. Prior to my sons graduating from high school they would be with us.

It is a 300 km drive to Regina. The 600 km round trips have totalled 180,000 km since 1978.

In my acceptance speech I said the 6 hour drives in the van have given me a lot of time to think about football and life.

In my speech I discussed how and why I came to write a sports column:

"When I grew up on the farm at Meskanaw the CFL was a distant league. I had no access to a daily paper. Few games were on T.V. I listened to games on the radio.

I have always loved words. I enjoy reading, speaking and writing. I like organizing words to inform, to explain, to persuade. I realized early in my life that my greatest skill was the ability to use words.

I have equally loved sports through my life. Whether playing sports, not well I admit, or organizing or coaching or teaching or refereeing or watching I have a passion for sports.

I have wanted to know "why" as early in my life as I can remember.

Writing a column has let me write words about sport and ask why since 1978."

It was an honour I never expected. I am the first journalist from a weekly newspaper to be inducted.

I have not been posting this week as I have been caught up in the activities of Grey Cup Week in Regina. (The Grey Cup is the equivalent of the Super Bowl.)

The Saskatchewan Riders are both playing and hosting the game. Our whole province has never been more excited.

I will put up my next post about the game.

Today has already been a great day for me.

Thoughts on a Dan Brown Quartet

Over the past 10 years I have read four of Dan Brown’s books – Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol and Inferno.

I can recall the Sleuth of Baker Street bookstore recommending Angels and Demons. My review of the book included:

It is an exceptional thriller that weaves together particle physics, medieval art and architecture, God's existence, science's explanations of life, ambigrams and the history of the Catholic Church.

I purchased The Da Vinci Code as soon as it was published.

Shortly after I read The Da Vinci Code I summed up the book:

It is a dizzying journey into 2,000 years of Christian and non-Christian symbols with the extravagant symbolism of Da Vinci at the core of the book.

It tied for my favourite fiction of 2003.

Some years earlier I had read Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. Even before the book was mentioned by Brown in The Da Vinci Code I could tell that Brown was following a comparable thesis that Jesus had not died on the Cross and had actually fathered children.

I subsequently read the trial judgment in the author’s claim against Brown for plagiarism. I thought the case weak before it was tried and the trial judge crushed their claim. As common with books with historical themes they had drawn extensively on previous authors. Claiming to be a work of history also doomed their claim for Brown could freely draw upon its premises.

(It became the most unusual of judgments when it was revealed the judge had placed a coded message within the judgment through random italicized letters.)

Six years later I read The Lost Symbol. I concluded:

It is a good not great thriller. I expect the Mason hierarchy will be as unhappy as Catholic leaders if readers believe everything in the book is true.

For Inferno I said:

The book is a breathtaking chase while Langdon determines the meaning of symbols in word, art and sculpture as a looming catastrophe faces the world.

I have admired in Brown’s books how he assembles and integrates historical information in his books.

I thought that Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code worked best out of the quartet as they had the grandest sweep of history. While I found their characterization of Catholicism unfair they each covered a compelling historic theme. In particular, in The Da Vinci Code, seeking to trace through centuries of history symbols purporting to show the descendants of Jesus left me eagerly turning the pages.

I do not know what themes Brown could have come up with for the successor novels but neither the Masons in The Lost Symbol nor Dante in the Inferno could match either Angels & Demons or The Da Vinci Code.

I found The Lost Symbol the weakest of the four books. While Brown remained credible Langdon having to decode the symbols relating to the pyramid in Washington that leads to the Ancient Mysteries actually stretched reality more than Jesus purportedly surviving crucifixion.  

I was glad to see Professor Langdon return to Europe for Inferno. Brown’s combination of history and symbols works better for me in a European setting where Brown can draw on far more centuries of symbols. I do acknowledge that it was hard to be objective in reviewing The Lost Symbol when I had found The Da Vinci Code brilliant.

I thought Inferno had the best ending of the quartet. As I do not want to write spoilers I will not venture into the conclusion of the book. It had a subtlety not often encountered in thriller fiction.

Ultimately, Brown wrote his blockbuster too early in his writing career. His subsequent books pale in comparison with The Da Vinci Code. I hope he can prove me wrong but I think The Da Vinci Code will always dominate memories of Brown as a writer.

Inferno by Dan Brown

52. – 741.) Inferno by Dan Brown – An unknown man calling himself the Shade climbs high in a Florentine building. Speaking in poetic phrases he seeks to protect a masterpiece:

It grows even now … waiting … simmering beneath the bloodred waters of the lagoon that reflect no stars.

As pursuers close upon him the Shade leaps to his death praying he will not be remembered as “a monstrous sinner, but as the glorious savior”.

His masterpiece is to restrain a burgeoning world population about to exceed the earth’s capacity to sustain its people.

Harvard Professor Robert Langdon awakes in a foreign hospital bed with confused images of a silver haired woman echoing in his mind. As he struggles back to reality a young beautiful woman, Dr. Sienna Brooks, explains to him that his head has been grazed by a bullet. He is shaken when he learns it is two days later than his last memory. His mind is further sent spinning when, looking out the window, he realizes he is in Florence, Italy. How did he get there from America? What happened in the lost days?

Before he can assemble his thoughts an attack is made upon the hospital room. A doctor is slain. Langdon barely escapes with Brooks. They go to her apartment where Langdon tries to grasp what has taken place.

At the same time members of the Consortium, a business devoted to facilitating the needs of the very wealthy are viewing a disturbing video from the Shade about Dante’s hell while showing a shimmering bag suspended in water.

Back in Florence a tube sewn into Langdon’s suit coat contains a form of projector that displays Botticelli’s famed painting, Map of Hell, portraying Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell. Upon the image have been put letters but they do not form a known word. Langdon starts drawing on his knowledge of symbols and cryptography to decipher the letters.

Langdon learns Brooks is a genius, an actress as a child who has become a doctor. When he finds her flowing blond hair is a wig and she is bald he confronts another mystery

Tracked down to Brooks apartment by black clad security forces Brooks and Langdon race away to determine the meaning of the letters amidst Florence’s greatest architectural achievements.

At the heart of the mystery is Dante’s Divine Comedy. Over 700 years after it was written the powerful images of his poetry and the images they inspired continue to make The Divine Comedy a powerful work of art.

The book is a breathtaking chase while Langdon determines the meaning of symbols in word, art and sculpture as a looming catastrophe faces the world.

The end was far more complex and subtle than I had expected. It was a genuine surprise to me. I was glad I read the book. My next post will have some thoughts on the quartet of Brown books I have read – Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Sympbol and Inferno. (Nov. 16/13)