


What Dark Star does really well is to portray the inner workings of the Soviet intelligence organs down to its most repetitive and monotone aspects. Inner Workings of the Soviet Intelligence Luck shines on him when he finds an agent who can provide him with priceless information from Berlin. He now works for the Soviet intelligence service NKVD as a fully blown-out spymaster operating in Paris. Andre is a man hardened by time as he survived not only the pogroms of Poland but also the civil wars of Russia. It also visits the critical cities of Moscow, Berlin, and Prague which were the logistic centers of the war.Īt the heart of the story, stands one man by the name of Andre Szara. It takes place during the pre-Second World War era and also includes Paris as one of its main locations. Second in our article, we have another one of the most popular Alan Furst books which is also the first step taken by the author to make Night Soldiers a long-breathed series. This book manages to tell a story this big on the scale of just one personal story and this makes it one of the best Alan Furst books. Both parties were driven by an unrelenting desire to take over Europe and their struggle affected not only them but also every single person on the continent. Night soldiers does an exceptional job of representing the struggle taking place between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Khristo is deported to Spain to play the Soviet’s cards in the Spanish civil war taking place but he deserts Spain after receiving the news that he will be a lamb to slaughter as a part of Stalin’s rampage. He is the brother of Khristo Stoianev who is a member of the Soviet secret intelligence service NKVD. The events of the story take place after the murder of a young man by local Bulgarian fascists in nineteen-thirty-four. There are also clear indications throughout the book of how the author’s trip to Eastern Europe exactly inspired him. The nineteen-eighty-eight publication date of the book marks the date of the author discovering his talent for writing historical spy fiction. We will foreseeably start our article with the first place holder among all of the best selling Alan Furst books, Night Soldiers.

Best espionage books series#
He decided to make it a series and has been writing for it exclusively since. It went on to be his first success and turned his writing style on its head. He was inspired to write an espionage novel after an Esquire-fonded assignment to Eastern Europe and he published the book Night Soldiers. The author wrote four standalone novels from nineteen-seventy-six to nineteen-eighty-eight which were all met with little to no success. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College and completed his education with the master’s degree he received from Penn State in nineteen-sixty-seven. He grew up in a culturally rich environment as his family has ancestral ties to Russia, Latvia, and Poland. He was born in nineteen-forty-one in New York City and grew up in Manhattan, the Upper West Side to be specific. He likes to work with different settings and characters as an author and this is made clear by none of his works -with two exceptions which I will share with you in a little bit- sharing a common plot. His work usually takes place before or during the Second World War and he is praised for his accurate representation of the world in that time period, notably Eastern Europe. Besides writing novels, he also worked as a copywriter and magazine writer as well as a columnist before his debut. He has also stated the names of the household names Arthur Koestler and Joseph Roth as major sources of inspiration for his works. Said to be the heir to the legacy of iconic names like Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, Alan Furst is a United States-born Jewish writer who has mainly focused on historical spy novels.
