“Epic . . . [The] characters seem utterly affecting and true. The historical data seems absolutely convincing. There’s suspense galore and not a touch of abrasive melodrama. All this goes to put this novel head and shoulders above any other recent fiction of its kind.”
—ALAN CHEUSE, All Things Considered
“[Furst’s] depictions of wartime Europe have the richness and complexity of the fiction of John le Carré and Somerset Maugham. . . . With the authority of solid research and a true fascination for his material, Mr. Furst makes idealism, heroism, and sacrifice believable and real, and what he has written here is a first-rate popular entertainment, terrifically plotted, absorbing on every page, and thoroughly satisfying.”
—DAVID WALTON, The Dallas Morning News
“The Polish Officer is the finest novel I’ve read in years, beautifully written, powerfully imagined, and riveting as pure story, yet so true to the historical facts and to the human realities of the tortured Europe of 1940–41 that it deserves to be regarded as an act of witness as well as an enthralling work of fiction. The book is a triumph with something to remember on every page: a thrilling event, a vivid character, a telling detail, a wise observation.”
—CHARLES MCCARRY, author of The Tears of Autumn
“Brilliantly imagined, vividly drawn, rich with incident and detail . . . among the most exciting and satisfying adventure stories I know. The Polish Officer portrays ordinary men and women caught out on the sharp edge of military intelligence operations in wartime: the partisans, saboteurs, resistance fighters and idealistic volunteers risking their lives in causes that seem lost.”
—ROBERT CHATAIN, Chicago Tribune
“Furst’s scrupulous attention to spycraft and period detail . . . evokes the mood of conquered cities like Warsaw, Paris, and Barcelona. . . . Language this lovely vaults the categories we lazily constrain literature with.”
—MAUREEN CORRIGAN, Fresh Air
“The best spy novel I’ve read in years. Perhaps the reason is that it is so much more than a spy noveclass="underline" it is a moving love story; it is full of carefully observed and utterly unromanticized tradecraft; and the reader will learn more about the actual business of intelligence from this novel than from nearly all other ‘spy novelists’ combined. This is a riveting ‘pure’ story, rich with character, wonderfully exact. The Polish Officer transcends the spy novel while delivering everything any fan of le Carré could ask for.”
—ROBIN WINKS, The Boston Globe
“A splendid tale. The Polish Officer is a classic spy story replete with the moral ambiguities found in a world at war. I recommend it for its profound sense of history, its suspense and the quiet heroism of its characters.”
—CHARLES P. THOBAE, Houston Chronicle
“Alan Furst’s The Polish Officer . . . is one of the great novels of espionage. . . . The real protagonist is Europe itself, which comes to stunning life in Furst’s brilliant prose.”
—MARK JOHNSON, San Jose Mercury News
“Some books you read. Others you live. They seep into your dreams and haunt your waking hours until eventually they seem the stuff of memory and experience. Such are the novels of Alan Furst, who uses the shadowy world of espionage to illuminate history and politics with a gripping immediacy. . . . The Polish Officer stands on its own, an atmospheric, intelligent novel of intrigue that is also a rousing historical novel.”
—NANCY PATE, The Orlando Sentinel
“[Alan Furst’s] novels can be classed as espionage thrillers, but they are much more than that. In The Polish Officer, Furst presents his finest achievement yet: a subtle work of great quality and imaginative reach, written in some of the most delicate and understated prose it has been my pleasure to read in many a day.”
—VINCENT BANVILLE, The Irish Times
“[The Polish Officer] is a novel and a damned fine one at that. . . . [T]he book is extremely well written, beautifully paced, suspenseful throughout and psychologically acute. Furst knows; knows people, knows Europe, knows war. And he knows how to put us smack in the middle of it all.”
—ANTHONY BRANDT, Men’s Journal
“Furst has shown that he can produce an espionage tale that sloughs off the coil of genre. But his new book—hugely ambitious and masterfully written—ups the ante. . . . The author understands, with astounding breadth of vision . . . what WWII was all about. . . . A truly splendid novel of the wartime experience.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Alan Furst is widely recognized as the master of the atmospheric spy novel. He is the author of Night Soldiers, Dark Star, The Polish Officer, The World at Night, Red Gold, and Kingdom of Shadows. Born in New York, he has lived for long periods in France, especially Paris. He now lives on Long Island, New York.
THE POLISH OFFICER
In Poland, on the night of 11 September 1939, Wehrmacht scout and commando units—elements of Kuechler’s Third Army Corps—moved silently around the defenses of Novy Dvor, crossed the Vistula over the partly demolished Jablonka Bridge, and attempted to capture the Warsaw Telephone Exchange at the northern edge of the city. Meeting unexpected, and stubborn, resistance, they retreated along Sowacki Street and established positions on the roof and in the lobby of the Hotel Franconia, called for dive-bomber attacks on the exchange building, and settled in to wait for the light of dawn.
Mr. Felix Malek, proprietor of the Franconia, put on his best blue suit, and, accompanied by a room-service waiter, personally served cognac to the German soldiers at their mortar and machine-gun positions. He then descended to the wine cellar, opened the concealed door to an underground passage originally dug during the Prussian attack of 1795, hurried down Sowacki Street to the telephone exchange, and asked to see “the gentleman in charge.”
He was taken up a marble staircase to the director’s office on the fifth floor and there, beneath a somber portrait of the director—pincenez and brushed whiskers—presented to the officer in command, a captain. The captain was an excellent listener, and the questions he asked inspired Mr. Malek to talk for a long time. Arms, unit size, insignia, the location of positions—he was surprised at how much he knew.
When he was done, they gave him tea. He asked if he might remain at the exchange, it would be an honor to fight the Germans. No, they said, perhaps another day. So Mr. Malek made his way through the night to his sister’s apartment in the Ochota district. “And what,” she asked, “were they like?”
Mr. Malek thought a moment. “Educated,” he said. “Quite the better class of people.”
Mr. Malek had not been thirty years an innkeeper for nothing: the defenders of the Warsaw Telephone Exchange, hastily recruited amidst the chaos of the German invasion, were officers of Polish Military Intelligence, known, in imitation of the French custom, as the Deuxième Bureau. The Breda machine gun at the casement window was served by a lieutenant from the cryptographic service, a pair of spectacles folded carefully in his breast pocket. The spidery fellow reloading ammunition belts was, in vocational life, a connoisseur of the senior civil service of the U.S.S.R., while the commander of the machine gun, feet propped on the tripod, was Lieutenant Karlinski, heavy and pink, who in normal times concerned himself with the analysis of Baltic shipping.