Because Ideas Matter...
The faculty and staff of Butler University's College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences presents
Recommended Readings
The Spies of Warsaw
by Alan Furst, Random House, 2008
Reviewed by Jon Porter
Warsaw. Autumn, 1937. Edvard Uhl, a
plodding, middle-aged German engineer, is meeting his Polish
mistress, the enigmatic, impoverished Countess Sczelenska - who is,
of course, neither a Countess nor even a Pole - at the Hotel
Europejski. Tomorrow, in exchange for a thousand zloty in a seedy
bar, Uhl will deliver the blueprints for the Wehrmacht's
latest tank. The Spies of Warsaw (Random House, 2008) is
the tenth installment in Alan Furst's series of historical
espionage thrillers set before and during the Second World War. A
prequel of sorts to his elegant The Polish Officer,
The Spies of Warsaw follows the aristocratic Colonel
Jean-François Mercier, hero of the Great War of 1914-1918, military
academy classmate of de Gaulle, and military attaché at the French
embassy in Warsaw, as he works in the shadow world of espionage
while Poland waits for war. As Mercier's work unfolds, we meet
Colonel Vyborg of the Polish Intelligence Service; Anna Szarbek,
the mysterious and beautiful Franco-Polish lawyer for the League of
Nations; the Rosens, the Jewish "Old Bolshevik" spies recalled to
Moscow to await an executioner's bullet; the patriotic Dr Rapp, the
senior Abwehr officer in Warsaw, who politely enquires if
Mercier's interests involve the Germany he loves, or the Nazi Party
he privately loathes; and SS counterintelligence Major August Voss,
whose self-appointed mission in Warsaw appalls even his own brother
SS officers. And there is the perhaps obligatory meal at the
Brasserie Heininger in Paris, eaten at the coveted table fourteen,
beneath the mirror with a bullet hole in its lower corner.
- Jon Porter is and instructor of in the Global and Historical
Studies program at Butler University.