海角大神

The good news for devotees of suspense novelist Alan Furst is that his latest book, A Hero of France, is a lot like his last nine or ten. Nah, why beat around the bush? In every significant way, it鈥檚 exactly like them, starting with another amateurish-but-determined, fortyish-but-virile male protagonist fighting his small, possibly meaningless share of the good fight against Hitler and Mussolini.

In his current incarnation, he鈥檚 a French Resistant known by the code name Mathieu, who鈥檚 involved in the tedious but risky business of setting up escape routes for downed British fliers in the gloomy early days of World War II. Naturally, the German occupiers would like to put a stop to this. But it鈥檚 hardly an earth-shaking threat to the Third Reich鈥檚 crunch-crunching jackboots.

Even under the Occupation, however, life has its sensual side. Any Furst hero鈥檚 attractiveness to women is a given, on a level that makes guessing the pope鈥檚 religious affiliation seem tricky, and lovers, ex-lovers, and potential lovers float around Mathieu like dragonflies. They鈥檙e differentiated mainly by their level of sophistication 鈥� either guilelessly beddable or worldly and amusing 鈥� and by their creator鈥檚 happiness in describing their vintage wardrobes and hairstyles.

When he isn鈥檛 playing Vogue鈥榮 correspondent in Occupied Europe, Furst likes to moonlight for Bon App茅tit. Like his previous avatars, Mathieu accepts women鈥檚 interest as his due. But good meals make him ardent 鈥� and he knows where to find them, too. The ideal last line of any Furst novel would be 鈥淎fter the war was over, [Fill in the Blank] prospered as a Fodor鈥檚 tour guide.鈥�

Sorry to be sarcastic, but that鈥檚 how it goes when a onetime fan gets fed up. When I delightedly read my first Furst 鈥� 1996鈥檚 "The World at Night," as I recall 鈥� I figured I鈥檇 never be bored on an airline again if he only managed to stay productive. But he has stayed productive, and his reprises of the same scenario have gone from stimulating to predictable to damn near stupefying. By now, picking up a new Furst is like reliving "Groundhog Day" with random bits of dialogue from "Casablanca" tossed in.

As always, the storyline is a shuffle of haphazard incidents and oft-thwarted plans that gradually ratchet up the danger quotient without ever resolving themselves into a detectably purposeful narrative. There are tense journeys and seedy hotel rooms and gruffly plucky co-conspirators lifted wholesale from Hollywood鈥檚 1940s character-actor stable. (One reason Furst鈥檚 novels don鈥檛 get turned into movies is that doing so would be redundant.) There are cartloads of evocative weather in a seemingly permanently twilit European capital, map helpfully provided. Luckily, this time it鈥檚 Paris, a city guaranteed to bring out this author鈥檚 violin side the way a well with somebody trapped in it gets Lassie鈥檚 tail thumping.

Every well-wrought but somehow otiose ingredient is so familiar that Furst鈥檚 publishers are a mite forlornly touting "A Hero of France" as his first thriller in some time that鈥檚 set during the actual, y鈥檏now, war years, after multiple books so stuck on revisiting its various 1930s preludes that some readers wondered if we鈥檇 ever see 1940 again. No matter how long he keeps at this, however, I鈥檓 fairly sure we鈥檒l never see 1945. A Furst thriller set during the period when the good guys were actually winning would wreak havoc on his passion for defiant European underdogs whose despair is only held at bay by a new love interest or a timely steak-frites dinner.

Each time around, it gets harder to deny that much of his output is well, rubbish. I don鈥檛 mean candid rubbish, which has its uses. This is the rococo kind that lulls people into thinking they鈥檙e getting an easy-reading approximation of something vaguely akin to literature. And worse, a glimpse of How It Really Was in those stressful days of Continental swastika-and-mouse games. In fact, Furst is peddling awfully moldy fantasies of the romance of it all. Those fantasies unmistakably entrance him, which is how come you can鈥檛 call him a hack. But he owes his reputation to disguising them with artfully oblique writing and a patina of quasi-documentary verisimilitude.

If nothing else, his sheer persistence is fascinating. He鈥檚 obviously in a position where he could vary his M.O. if he cared to. (Say, how about some Cold War nostalgia for a change? Some of us miss the Cold War plenty, Mac.) Yet he鈥檚 gone on obstinately repackaging the identical dark-skies-over-Europe saga, with only minute variations, for over twenty years. That鈥檚 either a genuine fixation at work or evidence of serious anxiety about killing the golden goose. Most likely, it鈥檚 a combination of the two. But next to Furst, an old-time spy novelist like Eric Ambler 鈥� one of his acknowledged models 鈥� was a positive riot of unpredictable variety.

Like all of his work, "A Hero of France" has many nice touches. Furst is never inelegant; that鈥檚 one more of his vices. There鈥檚 a good portrait of a well-off Parisian dilettante who鈥檚 scared out of his wits by Resistance work but determined to see it through, provoking one of Mathieu鈥檚 best lines: 鈥淩emember, Chantal, he鈥檚 French 鈥� not so much afraid of dying as afraid of doing something wrong.鈥�

Yet except for her nationality, the aforementioned Chantal 鈥� Furst鈥檚 latest droll, resourceful woman of the world 鈥� is all but undistinguishable from Olga Karlova, the Russian-born actress who had the same job in 2012鈥檚 "Mission to Paris." Chantal isn鈥檛 the only character to inspire a sense of d茅j脿 lu. From Mathieu on down, even when we haven鈥檛 literally met them before 鈥� the mysterious S. Korb makes his fourth or fifth appearance in a Furst novel here, acting pointlessly cagy, as usual 鈥� we feel like we have.

Familiar in a different way is Mathieu鈥檚 main antagonist, doughty Hamburg policeman turned Feldgendarmie operative Otto Broehm. He鈥檚 familiar because Furst seems to have borrowed Bernie Gunther from Philip Kerr鈥檚 "Berlin Noir" trilogy while Kerr wasn鈥檛 looking. Typically, Broehm is built up as a formidable antagonist 鈥� 鈥渢he Inspector Maigret, the Hercule Poirot, of the Hamburg police鈥� 鈥� and introduced in enough detail to make us think his personality and C.V. will be relevant to whatever happens next. Then his one rather unimaginative operation against Mathieu doesn鈥檛 work out so well, and he heads back to Hamburg, or maybe Kerr鈥檚 bottom drawer.

While Furst is often praised for this sort of effect 鈥� the random chess pieces who wander on and off the board without making much difference come crunch time, the superficially 鈥渞ealistic鈥� denial of well-constructed payoffs 鈥� it鈥檚 long since become one more of his trademark mannerisms. At some point, you start to wonder: if these people and their activities are so inconsequential, why are we spending time with them? For that matter, why is Furst? The idea of a plotless thriller may seem true to many Europeans鈥� experience at the time 鈥� or clever, anyhow. But it鈥檚 also possible that he just isn鈥檛 very good at inventing satisfying plots and has figured out how to make this weakness a strength.

By now, he鈥檚 also got nothing new to tell us about the era, which wasn鈥檛 always the case. Both "Night Soldiers" and "Dark Star," the paired novels that turned historical espionage into Furst鈥檚 specialty, were impressive reconstructions of 1930s intrigue from the provocative perspective of agents recruited by Stalin鈥檚 NKVD. Laying bare the paradoxes of one totalitarian regime at odds with its right-wing secret sharers, those early books had real surprise and a sense of moral complexity; they weren鈥檛 just regurgitations of old movies and vintage magazines, retooled to look stylish and grimly authentic at once. Furst is still good at period details 鈥� that鈥檚 his best gimmick 鈥� but they might as well be refrigerator magnets for all they add up to in terms of insight. He鈥檚 living in his own private Disneyland.

That isn鈥檛 entirely his fault, however. It鈥檚 not so much that his craftsmanship is on the skids as that his books are much more recognizably trivial now that they鈥檙e bereft of the sort of cultural context that adds illusory gravitas by association. When people like me were discovering his work in the 1990s, the World War II era was enjoying its last sunset glow of renewed popular interest before vanishing from living memory entirely. From Tom Brokaw鈥檚 "The Greatest Generation" to Steven Spielberg鈥檚 "Saving Private Ryan," the whole phenomenon was a nostalgia O.D. in which romance and realism grew hopelessly intermingled and deglamorization became the new form of glamour.

Furst undoubtedly benefited from that vogue. But his small-scale, bittersweet approach also felt like a useful corrective to everybody else鈥檚 bombast and hyperbole. Similarly, his preference for French or Balkan protagonists was a welcome antidote to Spielberg et al.鈥檚 chauvinistic flag waving, although by now it seems more like misdirection 鈥� that is, a way of preventing his readers from instantly superimposing Humphrey Bogart鈥檚 face on his latest Mathieu. Now that Furst鈥檚 subject matter is out of fashion except among hopeless suckers for Gauloises and trench coats, it鈥檚 become easier to see how much fashionability was key to his appeal all along.

True, his work is also a reminder that any historical past we haven鈥檛 known firsthand is bound to turn into Disneyland sooner or later. Even so, it鈥檚 striking how Furst steers clear of dramatizing his chosen epoch鈥檚 genuine atrocities: the deportations, the camps, the helpless victimhood that was far more common than opportunities for stalwart derring-do. Though violent death is a constant menace in Furst鈥檚 world, very seldom does it become a reality, and almost never for his heroes. That鈥檚 enough all by itself to prove he鈥檚 peddling fairy tales, and I鈥檝e gone from enjoying them enormously to feeling like I just don鈥檛 want to hum 鈥淲hen You Wish upon a Swastika鈥� anymore.