Your “What If You Neither Walk Away Nor Run?” Tuesday Evening Open Thread

Just started Alan Furst’s latest, Under Occupation. For the last thirty years, this dude has written espionage novels that all take place in the Europe of the 1930s, with WWII looming over all, or in the early years of the war, when German victory seemed more likely than not. The protagonists are usually Joe Everyman, who get sucked into various schemes and spy stuff, usually through no conscious choice on their part. I think what I like best about them is that the “hero” has a background unfamiliar to us in North America. A French movie director of pot boiler dramas gets involved with the underground and the Communist attempts to politically dominate post-war France (The World at Night and Red Gold), a Polish mapmaker who ends up smuggling the Polish national gold reserve to Romania on a train made up to hide it’s purpose (that is only the first adventure, many more follow) and then becomes the leader of the Polish Intelligence apparatus in occupied Paris (The Polish Officer), a Russian journalist sucked into a plot to expose the fact that Stalin was an Okhrana stoolie in the 1900s and 1910s (Dark Star), an Hungarian count who ends up trying to block the Danube by sinking several large barges in order to block transport of oil to the Fatherland from Romania by way of said river (Blood of Victory), an Italian journalist from Trieste who gets involved in an anti-Mussolini propaganda operation (The Foreign Correspondent), Dutch merchant marine captain who is tasked with carrying out several clandestine missions on behalf of the Brits (Dark Voyage), a Greek police Lieutenant in Salonika who gets involved in an underground railroad smuggling Jews out of Germany through Eastern Europe and Istanbul (Spies of the Balkans); this is not a complete list, it Just goes on, all fucking fascinating and when you read them you feel like you are watching some B&W film noir from the late 40s like The Third Man. Who could come up with all these unique characters? Another cool thing is that the missions these guys and gals get involved with most often don’t succeed, which makes it even more interesting, although he usually gives a coda as to how things worked out for the protagonists in the long run.
To me his first remains his best, a magnum opus about a young Bulgarian kid who is recruited by the NKVD in 1933, attends NKVD school in Moscow, sent to Spain to fight Franco, defects to Paris, gets betrayed and sent to prison, and does a whole bunch of cool shit for the French Resistance during the war, as well as for the OSS. Side by side with the story of an American OSS agent who of course he ends up working with, and there are a whole lot of other subtle story lines that go along with the main plot. That one’s called Night Soldiers, I’ve probably read it more than a dozen times since I bought mine out of the remainder rack in 1990. Fuck, after writing this, I might just go pull it off the bookshelf. It’s been a couple of years.
(YES I AM INTERNET YELLING THIS AT YOU: GO READ ANYTHING BY ALAN FURST THAT HAS BEEN PUBLISHED SINCE 1988). You’ll be glad you did. This guy is fucking awesome.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078NJ2644/?ie=UTF8&%2AVersion%2A=1&%2Aentries%2A=0

They need to make movies out of these books and I don’t understand why they haven’t. The BBC did do a treatment of “The Spies of Warsaw,” with David Tennant as the pre-war French military attache in Warsaw. Panned by many critics, I was cool with it except for Tennant’s Brit accent. Dude, you are supposed to be the FRENCH attache, not the Limey one. Still, me liked it.

The key is the escape hatch in the back.

Man, if we had only thought of that feature when we were underway back in my Navy days. I might have stayed for 30.