A spymaster for our time …

… Alan Furst’s World of Spies | City Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Furst gets Russia right, or plausibly so. Westerners struggle to write convincing historical fiction involving Russia. Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer (1966) comes to mind as a rare exception, but most other attempts strike a cacophony of false notes, making such books hard to enjoy. Furst knows his subject, however. He understands, for example, that Stalin’s NKVD was more than a service for the collection of foreign intelligence—it was a lethal, clandestine army that sought to bring all of Europe under Soviet influence or domination.