Serebin to mess up Germany’s plans to help themselves to Romania’s oil. In Blood of Victory, British Intelligence recruits a world-weary Russian journalist named I. The point of the books is to answer one question: Who’s going to get the best of the crazy Serbs and Albanians and the rest of the region’s eccentrics? Furst never loses sight of the objective. But no matter how much readers may care about romance and murder, Furst treats these as mostly background noise. Risky love affairs occur on the peripheries of Furst plots, and puzzles over random crimes promise interesting diversions. It’s virtually the only subject on every character’s lips. Unlike Ambler, Furst wouldn’t dream of allowing his readers to pay anything except the closest attention to the meaning of the Balkan fighting. At least two of the novels, Blood of Victory (2002) and the new Spies of the Balkans, deal with the Balkans, a part of the world that might have defeated a less determined author. Over the course of 11 densely researched books, Furst has been tracking European history from 1933 to 1945, from Hitler’s rise in power to his suicide. The contemporary American author of bestselling thrillers, Alan Furst, takes the opposite approach. For readers more engaged in the mystery - most of us - there was little danger of the war’s larger events intruding on our pleasure. In such books as The Mask of Dimitrios, he placed a small and personal mystery story on centre stage while around the edges, just off stage, the fight for the unruly and unpredictable Balkans proceeded at its own pace. Each nationality has little use for every other nationality, and it’s a given that everybody shades the truth about everything.Įric Ambler, who set some of his wonderfully atmospheric World War II thrillers in the region, handled the Balkan narrative problem with an adroit piece of plot construction. Borders keep changing and so do alliances. The politics and the geography are slippery. The assassination, which came as the last straw in numerous European rivalries, led a few weeks later to the opening shots in the World War I.įor thriller writers, the Balkans have never been easy to get a handle on. Princip rushed into the street and shot Franz Ferdinand dead. On June 28, 1914, a tubercular Serbian teenager from Bosnia named Gavrilo Princip was eating a sandwich in a Sarajevo delicatessen when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire drove by in an open motorcade. In 1898, when he was asked what would bring about warfare in modern Europe, he answered, “Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” Otto von Bismarck, the smartest German politician of the 19th century, certainly thought so. Most historians appear to think that citizens of the Balkans have always been a little crazed.

Spies of the balkans