Alan Furst’s espionage novels have a melancholic tinge, depending, as they so often do, on the debacles of recent history and, on a personal level, on the mechanics of betrayal. His tenth, The Spies of Warsaw (Weidenfeld, £16.99), is set in his trademark period, Auden’s low, dishonest decade, and provides another monochrome glimpse of a continent sliding inexorably towards war. The dashing but damaged war hero, Colonel Jean-François Mercier, is France’s military attaché in Warsaw in 1937. Through a network of venal but scarcely evil informers he gathers scraps of technical material that, properly interpreted, reveal much about Germany’s military plans in the event of war. But Mercier’s real problem is how to convince his superiors in Paris of the danger that Germany poses and, in particular, how to warn them of the plan to bypass the Maginot Line.
The novel’s story amounts to little more than this and and the ending, in a sense, can never be in doubt. But the pleasure here lies in the ambience: as the narrative moves across Europe, Furst draws a wonderfully convincing picture of a continent on the verge of destruction. His characters range from Mercier, a romanticised Charles de Gaulle with a lively sex life, to a Soviet defector, from a sad little German engineer to the overblown demi-mondaine who makes him feel like a stallion. Unlike Furst’s doomed characters, the reader can peer over history’s shoulder and shiver at what lies ahead.
George Pelecanos has a well-deserved reputation for explor- ing some of the darker corners of the American dream both in his crime novels and in his contributions to the TV series, The Wire. His latest book, The Turnaround (Orion, £12.99), is a stand- alone thriller set among the poorer communities of Washington DC. In 1972, three white teenagers, stoned and aggressive, drive into a black neighbourhood and shout insults. But they are trapped, and a brawl ensues with three black youths. One white boy escapes, a second is killed and a third, Alex, is disfigured for life. Of the three black youths, James Monroe is convicted of the killing, his brother Raymond goes free, and the third, Charles Baker, develops into a particularly unpleasant career criminal. Thirty-five years later, Alex and Raymond meet, and some sort of redemption becomes possible when James comes out of jail. Unfortunately Charles Baker has very different plans for them.
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