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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the bestselling master espionage writer, hailed by Vince Flynn as "the best in the business," comes a riveting novel about the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris.
1941. The City of Light is dark and silent at night. But in Paris and in the farmhouses, barns, and churches of the French countryside, small groups of ordinary men and women are determined to take down the occupying forces of Adolf Hitler. Mathieu, a leader of the French Resistance, leads one such cell, helping downed British airmen escape back to England.
Alan Furst's suspenseful, fast-paced thriller captures this dangerous time as no one ever has before. He brings Paris and occupied France to life, along with courageous citizens who outmaneuver collaborators, informers, blackmailers, and spies, risking everything to fulfill perilous clandestine missions. Aiding Mathieu as part of his covert network are Lisette, a seventeen-year-old student and courier; Max de Lyon, an arms dealer turned nightclub owner; Chantal, a woman of class and confidence; Daniel, a Jewish teacher fueled by reven≥ Joëlle, who falls in love with Mathieu; and Annemarie, a willful aristocrat with deep roots in France, and a desire to act.
As the German military police heighten surveillance, Mathieu and his team face a new threat, dispatched by the Reich to destroy them all.
Shot through with the author's trademark fine writing, breathtaking suspense, and intense scenes of seduction and passion, Alan Furst's A Hero of France is at once one of the finest novels written about the French Resistance and the most gripping novel yet by the living master of the spy thriller.
Praise for Alan Furst
"Furst never stops astounding me." --Tom Hanks
"Suspenseful and sophisticated . . . No espionage author, it seems, is better at summoning the shifting moods and emotional atmosphere of Europe before the start of World War II than Alan Furst." --The Wall Street Journal
"Though set in a specific place and time, Furst's books are like Chopin's nocturnes: timeless, transcendent, universal. One does not so much read them as fall under their spell." --Los Angeles Times
"[Furst] remains at the top of his game." --The New York Times
"A grandmaster of the historical espionage genre." --The Boston Globe
Author Notes
Furst received a B.A. from Oberlin College in 1962 and an M.A. from Penn State in 1967. Before becoming a full-time novelist, Furst worked in advertising and wrote magazine articles, most notably for Esquire, and as a columnist for the International Herald Tribune His early novels (1976-1983) achieved limited success. However, the 1988 publication of Night Soldiers inspired by a 1984 trip to Eastern Europe on assignment for Esquire revitalized his career. It was the first of his highly original novels about espionage in Europe before and during the Second World War. Born in New York on February 20, 1941, he lived for long periods in France, especially Paris where he was awarded a Fulbright teaching fellowship. In 2011, the Tulsa Library Trust in Tulsa, Oklahoma selected Furst to receive its Helmerich Award, a literary prize given annually to honor a distinguished author's body of work He also made The New York Times Best Seller List in 2012 with his title The Mission to Paris and Midnight in Europe in 2014. Furst again made the New York Times Bestseller in 2016 with his novel a Hero of France.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A master of the historical spy novel, Furst scores again with his 14th suspense story (after Midnight in Europe). This excellent spy thriller is set in Paris, March to August 1941, with the French Resistance movement covertly opposing the German occupation of the City of Light, early in World War II. Mathieu runs a Resistance cell that helps downed British airmen escape to Spain, always operating under the threat of exposure, betrayal, and arrest. Mathieu and the men and women of his cell are watchful and careful with their trust, for the Vichy police and the German Gestapo are sneaky, efficient, and brutal. The cell is small and well-organized, aided by an ethnology professor, a shady nightclub owner, a regal society matron, a Jewish schoolteacher, a female aristocrat, and a teenage girl. Their clandestine operations are very successful, attracting the unwelcome attention of a mysterious British spy, "a citizen of the shadows," a French communist agent, a blackmailing underworld thug, and the most dangerous adversary of all, a German police inspector, Otto Broehm, sent specifically to Paris to destroy Mathieu's cell. The inspector is a thorough planner, creating a clever, careful scheme to penetrate Mathieu's cell. Mathieu must navigate or neutralize all these threats, resulting in a tense, well-crafted tale of courage, sacrifice, and wartime espionage. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Furst has typically set his acclaimed espionage novels in the years just prior to WWII. This time, though, he moves the clock forward, to the war itself, as he did in his masterful The World at Night (1996). It's March 1941, and the French Resistance is being born in the efforts of an intrepid group of Parisians dedicated to rescuing downed British fliers. Mathieu is the leader of a cell having great success at saving the fliers so much so that his efforts have not gone unnoticed by both the British, who want to turn the incipient movement into a strike force capable of sabotage, and by the Germans, who want to squelch it before it spreads. Mathieu fears the British incursion but realizes he is trapped; as a colleague notes, You own a business, which has prospered, now someone wants to buy it. Way of the world. With the Nazis closing in, Mathieu accepts British help in a more aggressive plan that threatens to expose his operation. Furst builds suspense superbly, as always, but he also takes time to flesh out Mathieu's rich supporting cast and to do what he does best of all: portray the fabric of Parisian life, especially the city's defining characteristic, its cafés once where love affairs beganandended, now where resistance contacts are made and nurtured. Ah, but the love affairs continue, as with Mathieu and his neighbor Joëlle, and nobody does passion behind blackout curtains better than Furst. This deliriously atmospheric novel reads with the sharp clarity of a poem, or perhaps a Piaf song, romantic and deeply melancholic but soaked in danger. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Furst's readers remain ravenous for another return trip to wartime Paris, and they won't need much prompting to book passage for this one.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ON JUNE 17, 1940, Marshal Philippe Pétain issued orders to the French Army to cease fighting, signaling the capitulation of his country to the forces of the Third Reich. In short order, the German presence rapidly extended into every aspect of French life. France's Jews began to be rounded up in the notorious rafles, sent first to prison camps within France and ultimately to the east. Leftists were also put under surveillance, and frequently arrested and deported. It's against this backdrop that Alan Furst has placed the 15th of his highly acclaimed thrillers set in Europe during the 1930s and '40s. "A Hero of France," which follows five months in the life of a particular Resistance cell, begins in March 1941, nine months into the German occupation. The hero of the novel's title, code-named Mathieu, is escorting a downed R.A.F. airman from the countryside to Paris so that he can be smuggled back to England. Furst, who is known for his detailed research into both cat-and-mouse sides of occupied Europe, shows not just Mathieu and his comrades but also all kinds of Germans, including the police and the Gestapo. And he shows us the French punks who are ready recruits for the occupiers, not out of any particular ideology but because of the restless savagery young men on the margins often exhibit. Mathieu's cell includes a teenage girl who acts as a courier on her bicycle and two aristocratic women, Chantal and Annemarie. Aiding their efforts is Max de Lyon, the owner of a nightclub that caters to German officers, a Polish Jew who hides resistants in his club and puts Mathieu in touch with merchant marine toughs who spirit people out of the country for a fee. De Lyon even blackmails a German officer into aiding the escape of an endangered member of the cell. Mathieu's great gift is his ability to gauge another person's character. "It's one of the things I do," he tells de Lyon, "make decisions about people, can they be trusted. I am good at it. And I'd better be, because I can be wrong only once." As the novel progresses, most of the ordinary people Mathieu and his companions encounter are quietly anti-German, eager and willing to lend a hand. Early on, gendarmes stop the train on which Mathieu and the R.A.F. man are traveling. When they slip away to a nearby locomotive, the engineer unquestioningly helps them. Later, a pair of tramps rescue one of Mathieu's couriers after he has been shot, carrying him to a convent where the nuns "will help anyone who asks .... As for the Boche, well ... don't worry about the Boche." A woman who deals in religious artifacts readily agrees to serve as a Resistance post office: "She smiled and shrugged. What will be will be." FROM THE NOVEL, it seems as if a majority of the French are similarly inclined. In reality, although the numbers are hard to come by, very few were active resistants. It wasn't until 1943, when Germany began conscripting Frenchmen for military and factory or farm work, that larger numbers engaged in active rebellion. Although the Germans routinely executed civilians to discourage resistance, we are spared such retaliation in "A Hero of France," even after Mathieu and a companion kill two German soldiers. Life under Nazi rule was severely circumscribed. Curfews in Paris were strictly enforced, and special permits were required to cross from German-controlled France into Vichy, the nominally free region of the country under Pétain's collaborationist government. In the secret diary he kept throughout the occupation, Jean Guéhenno describes the near impossibility of getting such a travel permit. And in "Dora Bruder," Patrick Modiano's book about a Jewish teenager who disappeared during the war, the author makes us feel the claustrophobia of a city under constant surveillance. Furst's descriptions of occupied Paris are certainly sinister ("Eyes searching the darkness, he had to move slowly, pausing at doorways where he could hide if necessary, hurrying to cross a narrow street, and listening intently for the telltale sounds of the police patrols"), but his is a Paris where the people never seem to give up hope, where their love for France and for their beloved city inspires them to take defiant risks. Furst's novels are immensely popular, perhaps because, despite their European setting, they can be read in the tradition of the American western. Like Shane, Furst's heroes tend to be loners - Marlboro men, we used to call them in the days of cigarette ads. They take on the burden of an entire city or country. And while they may work with a group, as Mathieu does, they carry the responsibility of that group on their own shoulders. Like other Furst heroes, Mathieu has a woman in his life, Joëlle. Yet he doesn't tell her about his secret activities. Mathieu, Furst explains, "didn't want her to be in love with him because it was possible that some night he wouldn't come home and she would never see him again and he knew what that would do to a woman who loved you." We all hope in our secret selves that we would be risk-takers like Mathieu, that we would stand with truth and justice in dire times, that we wouldn't keep our heads down, looking the other way when the police wagons passed by. And if we might not be Mathieu, then we'd at least hope to be like that railway engineer, giving the resistance fighter and his airman a ride into Paris, even if we knew we could be shot for it in the morning. SARA PARETSKY'S most recent novel is "Brush Back."
Kirkus Review
A Resistance leader in Nazi-occupied France attempts to keep his lines of escape open in this lyrical spy novel. This is Furst's (Midnight in Europe, 2014, etc.) 14th novel about espionage in World War II Europe, and his mastery of both the era and his craft is so complete that the book proceeds with a nonchalant ease. The anecdotal plot follows the Resistance leader Mathieu from early spring through late summer 1941, with a brief coda set in '44. It's a significant period in the war: Britain is stepping up its bombing raids; routes of escape are narrowing; Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union is about to bring French Communists into the Resistance. Mathieu goes about the business of securing funds, managing message drops, hiding downed British and Polish pilots, and finding ways to smuggle them back to England so they can continue fighting. All of that is engrossing and told in Furst's compressed poetic style. But the romantic heart of the book lies in the way it extols what, under the Occupation, remains of the sensual pleasures of life, the pleasures that are presented to us as the very opposite of what the Nazis stand for. For Mathieu, that's the love affair he's enjoying with a neighbor, the dog at his residential hotel who has adopted him, the occasional bit of meat or cheese he can get on the black market. This daydream of life under the Occupation is something rare: a suspense novel that offers the pleasures of relaxation. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
It is 1941, and Paris is occupied by the -Nazis. The Allied forces are engaged in nightly bombing raids over Germany and sometimes are required to land in France when their aircraft can't make it back over the English Channel. Enter Mathieu and his small Resistance cell; their job is to find the downed airmen and help them escape back to England. Each success brings the group closer to possible discovery by the Germans, and when Mathieu teams up with the British, the perilous new missions further endanger his network, especially when an unfamiliar threat arises that may destroy them all. VERDICT Furst (Mission to Paris) is recognized among the greatest contemporary spy novelists, and his newest does not disappoint. While lacking the tight, cohesive plotting of his strongest works, this title retains the trademarks that bring fans back: realistic characters, meticulous historical knowledge, and superb storytelling. [See Prepub Alert, 12/14/15.]-Laura Hiatt, Fort Collins, CO © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
chapter 1 You must not meet their eyes . . . Occupied Paris, the tenth day of March, 1941. At eight-twenty in the evening, the man known to his Resistance cell as Mathieu waited in a doorway where he could watch the entry of the Métro station on the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. He tried to look beyond the entry, at the tree-lined boulevard, but there wasn't much to be seen, only shapes in the night--the streetlamps had been painted blue and the windows of apartment buildings draped or shuttered in the blackout ordered by the German Occupation Authority. A sad thing, he thought, a dark and silent city. Silent because the Germans had forbidden the use of cars, buses, and taxis. But in that silence, nightingales could be heard singing in the parks, and in that darkness the streets were lit by silvery moonlight when the clouds parted. A night earlier, at the same Métro, Mathieu had noticed a gray bicycle, bound to the trunk of a chestnut tree by a stout chain. Now he saw that it was still there. Bicycles had never been more valuable, and soon enough this one would be stolen if its owner did not retrieve it. Where was he? What had happened to him? In a cell at some police Préfecture? Possibly. But if the Paris police arrested you, friends or family would be notified and someone would have come for the bicycle. Maybe its owner was floating in the Seine--a bad fate but not the worst fate, the worst fate was to be taken by the Gestapo. And if that were so he might never be heard of again: Nacht und Nebel, night and fog, Hitler's very own invention; people disappeared and nobody would ever find out what had become of them. They went out to do an errand and never returned. A sharp lesson for family and friends, punished forever by their imaginations. Now the ground trembled beneath Mathieu's feet and he could hear a rumble from down below as the train pulled into the station. Moments later, the passengers appeared, climbing up the stairway to the boulevard. They were still wearing winter clothes because it was cold in the city, apartments and offices barely heated for want of coal. As the crowd emerged, one woman caught his eye, she was lovely to look at; the face of a fallen angel, and dressed in the latest Paris fashion: she wore ski pants--warmer than a skirt--a ski jacket, and boots. She was lucky to have the boots; some passengers wore clogs, wood-soled shoes, as there was no leather to be had for repair. To Mathieu, the passengers looked tired and worn--they might well have looked like that at the end of a working day before the war but for Mathieu the weariness was different, deeper. Lately one heard the expression Je suis las, it meant I am tired of the way I have to live my life, and this was what Mathieu saw in their faces, in the way they walked. But then, he would think that, he cared for the people of Paris, as though he were a guardian. The woman in the ski jacket returned his look; a glance, nothing flirtatious, rueful perhaps, in other times than these . . . Ah, at last, here was Lisette, seventeen years old, a lycée student. She appeared not to notice him but, as she walked past the doorway, she said, her voice low and confidential, "They have crossed the border. They're in Spain." 12 March. In Senlis, thirty miles north of Paris, RAF sergeant Arthur Gillen was hiding in the cellar of a barbershop. At six-thirty in the evening, Mathieu found him sitting on a blanket--as much of a bed as he had--and whittling a block of wood with a clasp knife. Looking up at Mathieu he said, "Are you the man taking me to Paris?" Mathieu spoke good English but Gillen, with a heavy Manchester accent, was hard to understand. "Yes, that's me," Mathieu said and offered Gillen a cigarette. The RAF man was very grateful. Mathieu, lighting it for him, said, "We have a few minutes to make our train, Arthur, so we better be going." The barber, shaving a customer, gestured to Mathieu as they left the shop. It was a chilly twilight in northern France, with a lead-colored sky and a mean little wind, so the two walked quickly, heads down, as they made their way to the railway station. Gillen was young, surely not yet twenty, and looked to Mathieu like a worker--likely a worker in the Manchester fabric mills. He was small and thin with something of the factory gnome about him, he just needed a stub of cigarette stuck to his lip and a worker's cap. He wore a soiled gray overcoat and was, Mathieu saw, walking with a limp. "Are you hurt, Arthur?" Mathieu said. "Not much. Sprained an ankle when my parachute came down, but I'll be fine. I just want to go home." "Well, we'll try and get you there." With luck, he would get there and then, after a brief furlough, he'd go back to the war, and that was very much the point of Mathieu's work in the Resistance. It would have been nice to think that Mathieu's efforts were inspired by humane instincts, but Europe was not so humane that year. Sgt. Gillen was trained and experienced in a demanding job, radioman on a Wellington bomber, and was in fact a weapon. And Britain needed any weapon--especially pilots but aircrew were almost as valuable--it could get its hands on because it was losing the war. When the railway station came into view, Mathieu said, "No more talking, Arthur, we don't want anybody to hear you speaking English." The station platform passport control was, as usual, perfunctory--local police glanced at the passengers' identity documents and waved them on toward the waiting train. There were fewer trains now--French coal was used to make German homes cozy and snug--and they were all overcrowded; the compartments filled, the aisles packed with cold, tired travelers shifting from one foot to the other; with the train crawling at this pace they would never get home. Then, twenty miles from Paris, the locomotive was shunted to a different track, one that swerved away from the passenger line. A businessman next to Mathieu said, "What the hell are they doing now?" A man standing nearby said, "There's no depot here, this is a track used by freight trains, leads to a water tower and a coaling station." A few sighs of despair and a muttered curse or two could be heard in the aisle--now what? Very slowly, the Senlis local passed lines of freight cars on two tracks to its left. On the right-hand side, a weedy field bordered by partly thawed mounds of soot-blackened snow. At last, with a hiss of steam from the locomotive, they stopped by a water tower. "They must need water," the businessman said. "Couldn't they get it in Senlis?" When a conductor appeared from the next car everybody turned toward him, waiting for what they sensed would not be good news. "Mesdames and messieurs, all passengers must leave the train." As Mathieu and Gillen got out, they saw a nightmare: in the white glare of floodlights, a surprise control; gendarmes--French military police in khaki uniforms--were everywhere, there were two of them by the steps that led to the ground, herding the passengers toward a concrete slab beneath the water tower, where four tables manned by gendarme officers awaited them, the control guarded by gendarmes carrying submachine guns. As the passengers formed a ragged line, getting their documents ready for inspection, the businessman said, "They are looking for somebody, a fugitive." Mathieu pressed the inside of Gillen's arm, holding him back, trying to get as far away from the tables as possible. Gillen would be asked questions, there was no way he could answer them. For fifteen minutes, the lines moved slowly; stopping, taking a step or two, and stopping again. Then, something went wrong at the tables. A well-dressed older woman, harassed beyond patience, was screaming at the officers. A moment later, two of the gendarmes took her by the elbows, arresting her, which drew growls of muted protest from the passengers. She refused to move and, when they lifted her off the ground, she kicked her feet--one of her shoes flew away--and shrieked. From the crowd of passengers, a gasp. "Now," Mathieu said and, with Gillen following, dropped to the ground and, expecting a police whistle or a bullet in the back, rolled beneath the coach, crawled over the rails, and, with Gillen beside him, crouched behind the high wheel of the local train. Then they climbed over a coupling to reach the next track, where a locomotive was taking on coal. By the cab of the engine, two railwaymen, one in an engineer's cap, were talking and having a cigarette. When Mathieu approached them, the engineer said, "What's going on over there?" "Surprise control. We have to get away from here or we're dead." The engineer paused for a close look at the two, then said, "On the run? Is it you they're looking for?" "No, but my friend can't be questioned." "What'd you do? Hold up a bank?" "Defied the Boche." "Hmm, they could do with a little defiance. Well, you can ride down to Paris with us but we can't stop on the way, we're going to the La Chapelle freightyards." The engineer led them to one of the freight cars and rolled the door back. "We'll let you out in Paris. In an hour, maybe, we have to go slow, we had to paint the locomotive's windows blue because of the blackout, so we can't see much. And don't disturb the freight in here, it's going to Germany on another train. Oh yes, and good for you, whatever the hell it is that you're doing." Sitting with his back against a pile of wooden crates, Mathieu, who had been a tank captain in 1940, smelled Cosmoline, the grease used to protect weapons when they left the armory. Mathieu shook his head. "Look at this, Sergeant, a shipment of arms made in French factories, headed for the Wehrmacht." Gillen made the sound of spitting. "Maybe some of my mates will take care of them once they're on German railway tracks, could be some ammunition there too, it makes a great show when you hit an arms train." For a time they were silent--the only sound in the darkened freight car the rhythmic clatter of the train's wheels--then Mathieu said, "How did you get to Senlis?" "I landed near a village and found the local priest, that's what we're taught to do if we bail out over France. Fine old man, Père Anselme, looked like a prophet in the movies, you know, white hair, face like a statue. I'd been in the woods for two days, I was wet through and banged up, shaking like a lost dog. He fed me, gave me some brandy, got in contact with the right people, and took me to the barbershop." "You were shot down over France?" "Well, hit in Germany, came down in France. We were on a night bombing run, after the railyards at Essen, and dropped incendiaries and regular bombs, there were fires below us when we banked in a turn and headed back toward the RAF airfield at Croydon. A good amount of flak that night but I've seen worse." He paused, then went on. "And then, as we headed west, the portside engine caught fire, probably hit by ack-ack, and failed, and when the pilot tried to restart it he couldn't. The Wellington can fly on one engine but we faced a headwind over France and, with loss of power, we began to lose altitude. Lower and lower we went and then something, not one of their eighty-eight cannon, maybe it was quad-mounted fifty-calibre machine guns, which are very fast and put out a lot of rounds. Whatever it was raked us, nose to tail, we saw tracer bullets pass through the cabin. "In the Wellington, the radio operator and the navigator sit in a raised position above and behind the pilot, and that saved our lives. The pilot . . . the pilot had his head back over the seat with his eyes open, and there was blood on the cabin wall. There's only one pilot in that bomber and when he was killed there was nobody at the controls and the plane's nose dropped down and we began to dive. By now there was smoke in the cabin and on the intercom we could hear the tail gunner shouting, "Get out! Get out!" We never saw him again, and when we called the bombardier there was only static. The navigator and I jumped from the midship door and I saw his parachute open, but we drifted away from each other and came down in the woods. That's when I hurt my ankle, I landed on a tree root. As loud as I dared, I called out the navigator's name but nobody answered. I was still in the air when the Wellington came down, there was an explosion west of me and I saw the flash reflected off the clouds. You know the rest, I walked through the woods all night, because I knew the police were going to show up as soon as they could get there." A minute passed, then Mathieu said, "I'm sorry about your comrades, Arthur. The worst part of war is when you lose friends." Gillen nodded but said nothing--what was there to say? It was after ten when the train stopped and the door of the freight car was slid aside. What awaited them was darkness--no streetlamps or lit apartment windows, a sky overcast with dense clouds, so no starlight or moonlight. Mathieu could make out objects only a few feet away from him--after that, whatever was out there was swallowed up by the night. The La Chapelle freightyards were three blocks wide and some thirty feet below street level, with a dozen tracks appearing from one tunnel, then, a few blocks later, crisscrossing past switching equipment and disappearing into another tunnel that led to the Gare Saint-Lazare. When Mathieu and Gillen jumped to the ground, the engineer was waiting for them. "That's your way out of here," the engineer said, pointing. "Just about directly across from where we are now, there's a steel ladder set into the wall that leads to the street above--it's about thirty feet high. Now is the time to get away--there are German inspectors who show up here in the morning. Be quiet about it, you'll have to watch out for the railway police, who patrol the yards all night long." As the locomotive moved off, Mathieu watched as its light eventually disappeared. Excerpted from A Hero of France by Alan Furst All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
