I found it in Alan Furst. About a year ago, I discovered his work and bought several novels. He has several mysterious and appealing novels. I even recently picked up on in audio CD.

For my first foray, I read The Polish Correspondent. The titular character is Alexander de Milja, an aristocrat who becomes an excellent spy as he traverses Europe in the wake of Hitler’s invasion of Poland. First, he oversees the smuggling of Polish gold reserves aboard a nondescript passenger train, which de Milja himself selected. The journey culminates in a shoot out with bandits and a mad dash to Romania. But, tellingly, the heroes are as much the Polish commoners aboard the train as they are de Milja. This appears to be a Furst theme.

De Milja later settles in Paris — often the centerpiece of Furst’s tales, I gather — to conduct espionage for the Poles and the English. The likable officer quickly becomes exceptional as a spy and handler. So good, in fact, he out survives his own operatives, like the memorable teenage radio operator whose demise from chomping down on a cyanide capsule matches the bomb with which she kills her SS nemesis. The scene is a wonderful, understated bit of black humor that Furst excels at.

De Milja also has love affairs — alluring, middle-aged European women who keep Alexander at a distance emotionally so that the inevitable partings ache, but only a little.

Finally, the Polish officer is assigned to the Eastern front, a veritable hell on earth. It’s a mission he enters knowing he won’t survive. But, then, de Milja learns to master life as a partisan, too. He completes his futile mission in rescuing a Pole, who later dies. Finally, it’s time for a desperate and cold escape with a Jewish woman whom he saves. Here, de Milja shows again his likable qualities as he sacrifices much to save her (and himself).

De Milja’s a wonderful protagonist — likable, smart, properly cynical when he must be. He’s a very Euro-styled James Bond in a much harsher milieu. But the minor characters surrounding him are just as likable and richly written.

If the novel suffers at all, it’s from its episodic structure. It works nearly as a collection of novellas rather than a novel structure. The train escape, taken alone, is a fine short work. The drama of the final book builds to a climactic prison escape, but then flattens out as de Milja and the Jewish woman flee. As such, the novel survives as a reflection on the troubling nature of war and espionage. While there are exciting scenes, the book is not a thriller. Furst takes his time in parts. In others, he’s wry and sometimes implies the dirty work of war and spying, making the reader understand the remains of violence in a confectioners shop, for one example. 

Furst’s writing is rich and detailed, but not overwrought. He captures rich, European details — early war Paris comes alive in his prose. He has a legion of delightful and tragic minor characters, themselves also rich and quintessentially European. All is contained within a novel with a subtler structure than the usual spy thriller. The end result is superb, but will not deliver a quick fix or adrenaline rush.

The Polish Officer: A

In an echo of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tales, Chabon casts two very different sword-swinging wise-crackers. Both are Jews from disparate backgrounds. Amram is a hulking African who wields a Varangian axe and a command of languages far and wide (he’s served the emperor of Byzantium). His counterpart is Zelikman, a lanky Frank physician with a gloomly disposition. Both are wildly clever and ably skilled. Chabon makes both endearing, but Zelikman usually steals the scenes with his obnoxious hat and anti-hero antics.

Chabon writes one hell of an adventure tale. Each chapter is a fun twist and a healthy dose of cliff-hanging. The tale is almost effortless in its tidyness, yet somehow manages not to be predictable. After swindling some townsfolk, the pair get caught up escorting a prince who is not everything he appears to be, and yet is more. By the end of the  tale, they’ve jaunted about the foothills of the Caucasus, allied themselves with elephants against Rus invaders, fought — and then recruited — Muslim knights, and ushered in a coup.

The banter is fun, the action exciting, and Chabon sneaks beneath it all some commentary on Jewishness (and Islam) quite relevant to today. His prose in the book is baroque and obscure, deliberately so. It’s a nod, I think, to the idiosyncracies of many admirable pulp adventure writers. It’s at once a joke and tribute, and it also manages to keep the text’s voice lively and smart. It works.

Wonderfully, the book includes a brief afterword cum apologia by Chabon explaining his forays into the lands of adventure writing. He more famously treads in, as he calls it, late-century naturalism a la Wonder Boys. He also explains his only slightly tongue-in-cheek working title for the book, “Jews with Swords.” The afterword is well worth a read for anyone on either side of that absurd divide between serious fiction and everything else.

Gentlemen of the Road: A-

The Club Dumas is a mystery thriller with shades of the noir detective. In this case, protagonist Lucas Corso is a book detective. He’s a mercenary hired by rich — and usually corrupt — book collectors to buy, sell, trade and find rare books. I found Corso fascinating. (My wife, who read the book with me, found him deplorable. Ce la guerre!) He’s a weasel of a man, exceptionally clever, and lonely. He occupies his time drinking gin and romanticizing his Napoleonic ancestor. Oh yes, and books — very expensive, very rare books.

The story begins with a book collector’s suspicious suicide. Corso gets hired to verify the dead man’s possession – a rare manuscript written by Alexandre Dumas. It’s a chapter from The Three Musketeers. Subsequently, he’s hired by an obsessive collector of the occult to discover which of three extant editions of The Book of Nine Doors is a forgery.

Thus begins a twin strand of narrative where Corso races to find eccentric book collectors and examine their occult tomes while he’s pursued by a modern-day Milady and Rochefort (Dumas’ famous villains) as a strange conspiracy re-enacts The Three Musketeers with him at the center. The eccentrics wind up dead, and Corso demonstrates his cleverness.

Along the way he finds the girl. The alluring woman gives Corso fictional names and careless excuses. She’s slightly infuriating to read. Corso asks her questions I wanted to know, and she’s just aloof. There are many hints that she’s supernatural – a guardian angel maybe, or even the Devil. Through her shining, green-eyed seduction we learn that Corso once loved and lost. It explains his emptiness and callousness. And, in the end, explains why the green-eyed girl is so fond of him. She is, it turns out, rather diabolical.

Throughout the book, Corso works to unravel the pictorial mystery within The Book of Nine Doors. The book contains nine engravings, and the novel actually shows the images. This teases out one of the most captivating mysteries of the book. I desperately wanted Corso to unravel this occult puzzle. And, he does. But, the result is disappointing.

Pérez-Reverte gives us a lesson in narrative; I’m still not sure I needed it. At times, the characters actually imagine that their absurd situations are so dreadful that perhaps they’re merely fictional characters in a book. Of course, they are. The author’s teasinge. This itself, I don’t mind. He’s not the first to dabble in post-modernism. But, Pérez-Reverte has another, grander trick up his sleeve. To spoil it for readers, his trick is a lesson in how we perceive narrative. Those twin strands of narrative are ruses. They’re not intertwined. Corso – and therefore readers like me – have impressed upon these twin strands interconnectivity.

And what is the result? Corso, for all his cleverness, learns that he’s lost his soul long ago. He’s Faustian. And, in the end, he knows it. He’s smitten with the girl, and she’s pulling the strings behind it all, wrecking selfish interests for her own amusement. Let’s just say the devils in the details.

Like I said, I’m not sure I needed the lesson in constructing narrative. Fortunately, I the lesson entertained the hell out of me. It had all the wonderful trappings of that Umberto Eco style occult mystery (Eco himself actually has a cameo in the story!) in a tidy detective fiction package. It’s a good read with some frayed ends.

The Club Dumas: B-

I also tore through Private Wars, the next novel in the Tara Chace series.

Here, Tara Chace is out of the service with a baby. This is serious business given the thriller ending of the previous book. Meanwhile, Paul Crocker, her chain-smoking, hard ass boss deals with bureaucratic hell. His own boss is out to get him, and Tara’s replacement sends an operation into chaos. These first several chapters make for the most interesting reading in this more uneven book. In particular, Crocker’s at his most compelling here as Crocker plays politics and juggles his own home life some. He tends to be the best character in the series.

The rest of the thriller is set in Uzbekistan, where a dying dictator’s daughter and son squabble over who will assume control of the country. The daughter is a Machiavellian nymphomaniac whose lover is a secret police sadist. Turns out, this guy’s the real villain. So, the story pits Chace against him as she tries to smuggle the brother out of the country and maybe figure out where some rocket launchers are along the way.

The story is about Tara’s comeback to special operations and Paul Crocker’s desperation to avoid a lousy demotion. Again, Rucka is willing to do awful things to his protagonist. The effect is a build-up to Tara’s torture and near rape at the hands of the secret police antagonist. It’s tense, but it’s a no-brainer figure out Rucka won’t go that far. No rape is imminent, and her rescue is minutes away.

This willingness to torture Tara (figuratively and literally) is what makes Rucka’s writing so great. Here, it almost works as well as the previous novel. But, not quite. The plot becomes to uneven, particuarly at the fast-forward moment following Tara’s rescue. Rucka actually interrupts the narrative chapters with a psychological profile about Chace, who has post-traumatic stress disorder (who wouldn’t!) and a bloody obvious need for revenge. While a bit of interesting verisimilitude, the suspense suffers.

Of course, Tara enacts her revenge, and regains her hard edge as Britain’s finest “Minder” (Rucka’s slang for special agent). Best of all, she sneaks in one surprise decision at the close of the story that turns out to be the clearest sign that Tara Chace really is back, motherhood and all.

Private Wars: B-

The very brief review intrigued me.  I actually managed to remember the name of the book. It took me several weeks, but I tracked down Queen & Country: The Definitive Edition volume 1 at my local comic store. I was hooked.

I found volume 2 later on, and read it with the same enthusiasm. Tense writing, tought issues, modern relevance, and a complicated woman hero that was more interesting to read about than just the lady James Bond I first figured her to be. I still await volume 3. But, in the mean time, I caught on that author Greg Rucka penned two Queen & Country novels as well. I chewed through that 1,000 or so pages faster than any reading I’ve done in a while.

A Gentleman’s Game is the first novel, which squeezes in somewhere between other mission “arcs” in the comic book volumes. It’s easily the best Tara Chace story I’ve read (I later caught on that Rucka is more novelist than graphic novelist; fortunately he’s no slouch either way). It’s a story revolving around Tara Chace’s need to feel useful, perhaps seek some revenge on Islamic fundamentalist terrorists active in the UK and beyond. And, it also has Chace chasing after a genuine love interest in her former colleague.

Rucka does an admirable job shifting perspective among Chace, her hard ass boss Paul Crocker, and an English born Muslim terrorist antagonist. Rucka’s not shy about putting his protagonists in ugly territory, trusting that the reader will stick around. similarly, his work at making a messy character in the terrorist both utterly disgusting and fascinating. He manages to make a fanatic — and the terrorist truly is that — interesting. We get the inside voice on the terrorist’s resolve, but we’re not foolish enough to buy his madness and see it for the manipulative evil that he performs.

The book’s a thriller, and fills that role well. While I saw the dramatic ending coming in those final chapters, the pacing and excitement throughout makes for a great read with enough carefully considered real-world relevance to avoid the escapism route.

A Gentleman’s Game: A

Up next, Private Wars, the second Tara Chace novel, and a bit more about the woman character.

A couple weeks ago I found No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy for sale at Half Price Books. I’d eyed it since picking up Blood Meridien and, later, The Road, which is on my reading list posted previously.

Let’s just get this out of the way. Cormac McCarthy is a sunnuvabitch of a writer. This book is not for the faint hearted. My wife would probably throw it across the room and yell at me for making her read this despressing as hell mess.

I loved it.

It’s a book that teases your sympathies. It begins with Llewellyn Moss, a Texas veteran of Vietnam who lives in a trailer and spends his time hunting. He finds a drug deal gone wrong in the desert countryside. Dead drug dealers abound, as do dangerous firearms, heroin, and a bundle of millions of dollars. Moss takes the money and runs, knowing full well he just kicked off a bloodbath, and he’s likely to see some of his own blood spilled. He does, and much worse.

McCarthy paints scenery with a kind of language that his southern Texas denizens would appreciate. How he captures such vivid beauty and horror with what at first blush looks like broken grammar and colloquial ignorance is a mystery. His prose is Faulkner-esque. It captures the music of a people that his own narrator describes as “common as dirt.”

In the works I’ve seen from McCarthy, this is his trademark. He writes this sparse prose devoid of much punctuation. Few apostrophes. No quotation marks, so the dialogue blends in with the prose. Hell, he writes sentences that would get his old grammar school teacher to break out the brass ruler on his knuckles. No verbs. A sentence, at once barren and colorful. (Take that, grammar school teacher!)

He also does a trick of shifting perspectives. He begins a new perspective with a pronoun, often “he.” The effect is that we’re piecing together this mess of a moving crime scene story, and I think it makes the reader pay more attention, to sit up and consider not only who’s doing what, but especially how they compare to one another.

At times, my tired eyes had to re-read a sentence, perk up my mind’s ears and hear the colloquial phrase. But, it’s all there. Every mean as hell piece.

At its core, this is a story with a painful resolution. For me, at least, the story wasn’t about what I presumed. I waited for something, some kind of justice to the awful killing spree of Anton Chigurh, the hitman after Moss.

It never comes. Which means that whatever I thought I was paying attention to was misguided. McCarthy sucker punched me with Moss. He had me hooked the moment Moss was stupid and decent enough to go back out to the dying drug dealer with a jug of water. And, same for that girl he got killed. Cocksure and all, I still love Llewellyn Moss.

But it’s the sheriff. That’s were the story is, it turns out. And, the story is a kind of apocalypse for the Western. It’s the sheriff’s last round, and he knows he’s done. He is. I feel sorry for that old boy, as they’d say in Texas.

He’s no Llewellyn Moss, but I can’t say I blame him. Neither am I.

No Country for Old Men: A