The Foreign Correspondent: A Novel

From Alan Furst, whom the New York Times calls "America's preeminent spy novelist," comes an epic story of romantic love, love of country, and love of freedom — the story of a secret war fought in elegant hotel bars and first-class railway cars, in the mountains of Spain and the backstreets of Berlin. It is an inspiring, thrilling saga of everyday people forced by their hearts' passion to fight in the war against tyranny.

By 1938, hundreds of Italian intellectuals, lawyers and journalists, university professors and scientists had escaped Mussolini's fascist government and taken refuge in Paris. There, amid the struggles of émigré life, they founded an Italian resistance, with an underground press that smuggled news and encouragement back to Italy. Fighting fascism with typewriters, they produced 512 clandestine newspapers. The Foreign Correspondent is their story.

Paris, a winter night in 1938: a murder/suicide at a discreet lovers' hotel. But this is no romantic tragedy — it is the work of the OVRA, Mussolini's fascist secret police, and is meant to eliminate the editor of Liberazione, a clandestine émigré newspaper. Carlo Weisz, who has fled from Trieste and secured a job as a foreign correspondent with the Reuters bureau, becomes the new editor. Weisz is, at that moment, in Spain, reporting on the last campaign of the Spanish civil war. But as soon as he returns to Paris, he is pursued by the French Sûreté, by agents of the OVRA, and by officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service. In the desperate politics of Europe on the edge of war, a foreign correspondent is a pawn, worth surveillance, or blackmail, or murder.

The Foreign Correspondent is the story of Carlo Weisz and a handful of antifascists: the army officer known as "Colonel Ferrara," who fights for a lost cause in Spain; Arturo Salamone, the shrewd leader of a resistance group in Paris; and Christa von Schirren, the woman who becomes the love of Weisz's life, herself involved in a doomed resistance underground in Berlin.

The Foreign Correspondent is Alan Furst at his absolute best — taut and powerful, enigmatic and romantic, with sharp, seductive writing that takes the reader through darkness and intrigue to a spectacular denouement.

"The fall of 1938 is giving way to bleak winter, and, as always with Alan Furst, the Continent's murderous fascists are up to no good. Hitler has taken the Sudetenland. The shattered glass of Kristallnacht has been swept away. Mussolini struts on the balconies of Rome. In six months, the Pact of Steel will be signed. France and Britain do nothing.

Life in Europe, in other words, is grim.... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) And in his new novel, 'The Foreign Correspondent,' his ninth set in the gray dawn of World War II, Furst again proves himself a master at exposing how each taut nerve frays in anticipation of the conflicts to come. His cast is a hardy group of emigres, Italian anti-fascists who have fled to Paris to escape Il Duce's thugs. They meet in drafty cafes and the backrooms of bars, publishing a clandestine newspaper called Liberazione that is shipped, covertly, back into Italy. Theirs is one of more than 500 such papers published in Paris at the time. Like the stories of Graham Greene and John le Carre before him, Furst's yarn spins best in history's forgotten corners.

He begins with murder. The editor of Liberazione is shot dead, along with his mistress. The motives are murky. The killers belong to a shadowy division of the Italian secret police, the OVRA. The crime is made to look like a lovers' quarrel, but few will believe that. 'It was for them that this event had been staged,' Furst writes, 'the ones who would know immediately that this was politics, not passion.'

Carlo Weisz, an Italian emigre who works as a foreign correspondent for Reuters, is nominated to take over the paper. Cue the theme of noir's unwilling anti-hero. Weisz is in the mountains of Spain, covering the last throes of the Republican resistance against Franco, and he is pure Furst: world-weary, just past 40, a man whose friends, if he can call them that, are waiters, bartenders and spies.

Weisz's politics have left him with only the simplest of pleasures: a good cafe, the memory of a Tuscan breeze and women, who move in and out of his days like the tide. 'She was playful,' Furst writes of the receptionist in Weisz's building, 'but she'd let him know that her black dress could, at some point, be removed, and that beneath it lay a lovely treat for a good boy like him.' Weisz's heart, though, is spoken for: a long-ago lover, Christa van Schirren, a memory now, married and living in Berlin.

As he takes up the reins of the little Italian paper, this scratched-together existence begins to come apart. The OVRA targets him. Brooding inspectors and elegant spies alternately court and threaten him, sweeping him up in their political machinations. He is ordered to the Interior Ministry. 'Massive, and gray,' writes Furst, 'here lived the little gods in little rooms, the gods of emigre fate, who could have you put on a train, back to wherever it was, back to whatever awaited you.' Weisz realizes his place: He is a pawn. His lover is in danger in Germany. Should he stay and fight or trust his instincts and slip away?

As he was in such best-sellers as 'Blood of Victory' and 'Dark Voyage,' Furst is a maestro of minimalism. Humor is never free of sarcasm. 'Costly, this business we're in,' Weisz tells a colleague when he learns one of their friends has been killed. Emotions, meanwhile, are felt off the page, never on it. After years apart, Weisz waits for Christa in the Hotel Adlon bar. The doors swing open. 'Not so long after that, maybe fifteen minutes,' writes Furst, 'a waiter approached the table, collected a large tip, half a cognac, and half a champagne cocktail.'

Which isn't to say Furst's book lacks drama. There are no gun battles or car chases, and no one drinks a martini, shaken or stirred. Instead, the story hangs on the anticipation of the unknown. As Europe teeters on the brink of catastrophe, so, too, does Weisz. Every step could be his last. A car carrying illegal newspapers gets stuck in the snow. He thinks he's being followed into the metro. His arms sweat during interrogation. There is a knock at the door. Europe — Weisz and his friends know — will soon burn.

Justin Ewers is a senior editor of U.S. News & World Report." Reviewed by Justin Ewers, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"Furst serves another delicious helping of Paris suspended in a brief moment of time when everyone waited for something to happen, good or bad: 'Il faut en fenir' (There must be an end to this). Fortunately, for Furst readers, not quite yet." Booklist (Starred Review)

"At ease again in the time and territory he has carved out for himself in such fine fashion, Furst sets the stage here with a murder....Who knows why this stuff is so deeply satisfying? But it most surely is." Kirkus Reviews

"Furst is virtuosic at setting scenes....Furst's characters live in a gray world, confronted by monsters — and these monsters are winning. Strongly recommended." Library Journal

"The same spare, jazz-like prose that sets the pace in Furst's most recent novels also drives The Foreign Correspondent. But Weisz and his story will feel a bit too familiar to those for whom Furst's best — Night Soldiers, Kingdom of Shadows, The World at Night — were genuine discoveries." USA Today

"Gone are the far-flung journeys to Ruthenia and Bessarabia; gone, too, are the intricate storylines with dozens of meandering threads, whose very unruliness traces the chaos of life in wartime. In their place comes a pleasing coherence of plot..." The Wall Street Journal

"The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst is all rainy Parisian streets and low-key espionage with nary a sense of real danger....Like a wire-service dispatch, it gets the job done and little more. (Grade: B)" Entertainment Weekly

"Part of what's captivating about this book is its apparent simplicity....So expertly tailored you can't see the stitching, The Foreign Correspondent lingers in the mind long after the last page is turned." Dallas-Ft. Worth Star Telegram

"Furst's novels are uniformly of a high standard of writing, craftsmanship and painstaking research, but for some reason The Foreign Correspondent is not as gripping as most of the earlier entries." Denver Post

"The Foreign Correspondent...makes glancing contact with some of the most wonderfully devious such figures from his earlier novels." New York Times

From Alan Furst, whom The New York Times calls “Americas preeminent spy novelist,” comes an epic story of romantic love, love of country, and love of freedom-the story of a secret war fought in elegant hotel bars and first-class railway cars, in the mountains of Spain and the backstreets of Berlin. It is an inspiring, thrilling saga of everyday people forced by their hearts passion to fight in the war against tyranny.

By 1938, hundreds of Italian intellectuals, lawyers and journalists, university professors and scientists had escaped Mussolinis fascist government and taken refuge in Paris. There, amid the struggles of émigré life, they founded an Italian resistance, with an underground press that smuggled news and encouragement back to Italy. Fighting fascism with typewriters, they produced 512 clandestine newspapers. The Foreign Correspondent is their story.

Paris, a winter night in 1938: a murder/suicide at a discreet lovers hotel. But this is no romantic traged-it is the work of the OVRA, Mussolinis fascist secret police, and is meant to eliminate the editor of Liberazione, a clandestine émigré newspaper. Carlo Weisz, who has fled from Trieste and secured a job as a foreign correspondent with the Reuters bureau, becomes the new editor.

Weisz is, at that moment, in Spain, reporting on the last campaign of the Spanish civil war. But as soon as he returns to Paris, he is pursued by the French Sûreté, by agents of the OVRA, and by officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service. In the desperate politics of Europe on the edge of war, a foreign correspondent is a pawn, worth surveillance, or blackmail, or murder.

The Foreign Correspondent is the story of Carlo Weisz and a handful of antifascists: the army officer known as “Colonel Ferrara,” who fights for a lost cause in Spain; Arturo Salamone, the shrewd leader of a resistance group in Paris; and Christa von Schirren, the woman who becomes the love of Weiszs life, herself involved in a doomed resistance underground in Berlin.

The Foreign Correspondent is Alan Furst at his absolute best-taut and powerful, enigmatic and romantic, with sharp, seductive writing that takes the reader through darkness and intrigue to a spectacular denouement.

From the Hardcover edition.

Alan Furst is widely recognized as the master of the historical spy novel. He is the author of Night Soldiers, Dark Star, The Polish Officer, The World at Night, Red Gold, Kingdom of Shadows, Blood of Victory, and Dark Voyage. Born in New York, he has lived for long periods in France, especially Paris. He now lives on Long Island, New York. Visit the author's website at www.alanfurst.net.