Furst has written 14 historical espionage novels, generally set in Eastern Europe, Russia or the Balkans, set towards the end of the 1930s and going on into the early years of the Second World War.
This, the eighth in the series, marks a notable change of location by being set, not in the hotels, cafés and bars of continental Europe, but aboard an old tramp steamer chuntering along the coast of North Africa. Although it is frequently in port, with cafés and intrigue, the predominantly maritime setting is unique in Furst’s oeuvre, and makes for an interesting and stimulating change.
The plot
Eric DeHaan is 41, the weathered captain of the tramp freighter Noordendam, of the Netherlands Hyperion Line, plying its trade around the Mediterranean. While docked in Tangiers in April 1941, he is called to a meeting in a local restaurant, to find the owner of the Line – Wim Terhouven – along with Marius Hoek, the woman artist Juffrouw Wilhelm, and Commander Hendryck Leiden of the Royal Dutch navy all waiting for him. Without much in the way of choice he is drafted into the Royal Dutch Navy (based in London since the Nazis invaded Holland in May 1940) with the rank of Lieutenant Commander (p.15).
So now he is working for the Allied cause. His contact for missions will be Wilhelm who, as an artist, is given more freedom than many men. Back on board ship we begin to get to know the large and varied crew (of about 40):
- Johannes Ratter, patch over the eye he lost in an accident (p.24)
- Stas Kovacz the Polish engineer, stooped and bearlike (p.62)
- Mr Ali, the gentlemanly wireless operator
- ‘Patapouf’, the plump assistant cook (p.63)
- Van Dyck, the bosun, in charge of loading the cargo, strongest man DeHaan’s ever met (p.102)
- Able Seaman Amado
- Kees
- Ruysdal
- Vandermeer
DeHaan is ordered to repaint the ship and reflag it to impersonate a Spanish steamer of the same size, the Santa Rosa. Safer for cruising round the Spanish end of the Med. Able Seaman Amado will, when necessary, pretend to be captain. (This is the cue for a fascinating account of how the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War caused fights on Spanish ships around the world, including the one Amado was lucky to escape from, pp.39-40.)
Wilhelm passes on instructions for the ship to sail to Rio de Oro bay, where they pick up a detachment of British commandos, commanded by one Major Sims, trim and tense (p.43). The mission is to ferry the commandos to Cape Bon, where they will go ashore and attack the ship-spotting base there, which seems to be using some kind of new technology which can track and monitor passing ships, even in the thickest fog. Something to do with infra-red, which DeHaan has never heard of.
They drop the commandos, return to the ship and some time later hear bangs and bullets. Obviously a firefight. When they see a flashing torch from the shore DeHaan and his crew go back in small boats to pick up the survivors. He has to trek quite a way through desert, stony gulches and wadis to find the battered survivor of the firefight – Major Sims is missing presumed dead, and there are several badly wounded. There’s another confused firefight on the trek back to the shore in which the plump cook ‘Patapouf’ is killed. But the commandos have captured some of the German equipment, are gotten safely back aboard ship, and it steams to the safety of British-held Alexandria.
2. In Admiralty Service
In Alexandria DeHaan is ordered to report to a caricature British officer, all red face and handlebar moustache, who insists on being called ‘Dickie’ (p.92). Then on to another Brit officer who shows him a cable from the Hyperion Line. From now on he is under direct British control. They are loaded to the brim with munitions, with two Hurricane fighter planes on deck and provided with a (Jewish) doctor, Dr Shtern (p.103), before being lined up in a small convoy of freighters escorted by a destroyer, HMS Covington, off towards Crete, which has just been attacked by the Germans in a daring airborne invasion (started 20 May 1941).
The Noordendam experiences engine trouble – fixed by the tough Polish engineer – but meaning they are left behind by the others. When they join them and dock in the only port not in German hands, Sphakia, they’ve barely begun unloading when they’re attacked by German Ju87s, Stukas. The first three planes are destroyed by the destroyer’s heavy cannon, but then DeHaan finds himself on his knees in the ruined bridge, bleeding, covered in glass and half deaf. There was a direct hit on the freighter next to them which has wrecked the bridge of the Noordendam.
Cut to five days later and DeHaan, still alive, is back in Alexandria. They unloaded at Crete and sailed back, wrecked but still seaworthy. Next thing we know DeHaan is in Algeciras, Spain, where he’s been ordered to meet another British officer, Commander Hallowes. The next mission is to sail to the Baltic with a cargo of radio antennas, masts and equipment, designed to help set up a listening station up there. Precise details will be sent him by courier.
June 1. Back in Tangier DeHaan hooks up with Hoek, who is his local contact. Then with Yacoub, a local fixer, an Arab nationalist. And finally the courier, a young nervous Brit who hands over typed instructions on the mission: sail to Lisbon, collect cargo, sail to coast of Sweden, rendezvous with Allied ship.
3. Ports of call
Maria Bromen is a Russian journalist (like several previous Furst characters). She’d interviewed DeHaan years earlier in Rotterdam. Now she learns he’s in Tangier and arranges a meeting where she begs him to take her on board ship to freedom. She has travelled this far south incognito, on the run from Russian agents, presumably the NKVD, because she refused to play ball with them. Because DeHaan has a heart of gold, he agrees, getting Van Dyck to navigate the ship’s cutter into the more derelict docks of Tangier and then tracking her down to a set of sheds in a horrible wasteland, to collect her.
The voyage from Tangier to Lisbon is uneventful, livened up by the screening of a knackered version of a Jimmy Cagney movie the first mate picked up in the souk. At Lisbon, DeHaan gives Maria money and watches her walk down the gangplank, regretfully, and out of his life. Good luck. Then he goes to see the ship’s agent, a nervous Portuguese who is fronting for the mission and not happy about it. The agent hands over the fake papers which officially claim the ship is carrying sardines, and then scuttles off.
On the way back to the ship, DeHaan is called over by a Brit in a car, calling himself Mr Brown. Now, throughout the previous 200 pages we have periodically caught up with the movements of one S. Kolb and learned that he is a British agent who has been spirited at great trouble out of Germany and down here to Lisbon. Now Brown informs DeHaan that the British want him to take Kolb on the trip to the Baltic. It is hinted that DeHaan has no choice, so he agrees.
The crew load the crates, full of aerials, as well as guns and Lord knows what, and off they steam north along the coast of Portugal and France. Two incidents: a fire starts in one of the holds, oily rags apparently igniting the cab of one of the lorries. DeHaan spots it and he and the crew manage to put it out before the whole thing explodes, but the officers angrily discuss the possibility of sabotage and many suspect the odd little man Kolb. Throw him overboard, they say. And, close to the coast of Sweden, they witness a full blown air raid with searchlights, ack ack guns and swooping dive bombers attacking a naval base. But sail by it unscathed.
4. Baltic harbours
The last 70 pages of the novel. Will they make it to the rendezvous safely? Will they manage to get rid of the contraband cargo? Is Kolb some kind of spy who’ll sabotage everything? Will the ship make it safely to Ireland, its next destination? What will become of DeHaan and Broman’s love affair? It’s all set up quite nicely to keep the reader hooked. The sea. The black night. The suspense:
The Noordendam ran dark now. And silent – bell system turned off, crew ordered to be quiet, engine rumbling at dead-slow speed on a flat sea. A mile off the port beam, one fishing village, a few dim lights in the haze, then nothing, only night on a deserted coast. (p.240)
They do rendezvous successfully, with a smelly old fishing boat, the Ulla, its skipper co-operating with a Scottish commando and a man DeHaan chats to, a British scientist, the one who is going to erect the aerials and create an Allied listening post, here on the barren, deserted south Sweden coast. After repeat trips back and forth, all the cargo is unloaded and the empty Noordendam turns and sets sail for Malmö, there to pick up a legitimate cargo.
Until they are intercepted by a German patrol boat, M-56, searchlight and heavy duty cannon. The efficient keen Nazi captain, sub-Lieutenant Schumpel (p.256) insists on coming aboard and quickly sees through all their subterfuges, realising the terrified Amado is not the captain, that the ship is not the Spanish Santa Anna, not believing DeHaan’s story about smuggling booze, suspecting something much more incriminating. So he orders them to sail towards the nearest German port, closely shadowed by the gunship, and with himself and 6 or 7 Nazi soldiers distributed through the crew room, radio room and engine room to supervise.
These closing forty pages rise to the tension of a genuine action thriller. Without DeHaan’s prompting, his crew take on the Nazis – the cabin boy and a sailor jumping the Nazi commander and stabbing him to death, while the bosun knocks another goon out. In the radio room they capture the terrified stripling put in charge of the radio. In the engine room they find the chief engineer has already killed one German and tied up the other.
After reviewing the options (ram the German boat? – No, it would dodge and fire enough shells to sink them) DeHaan and his officers decide to ‘make smoke’, closing the air flaps on the furnaces to generate clouds of thick black smoke. At the same time they begin to veer away from the German-ordered course, and radio garbled messages to the Germans that they have engine trouble – the ship is on fire – going to fetch the commandant – abandon ship – and almost make it out of range of the gunboat when it finally starts firing shells.
The third one hits the stern, but above the water line. Impossible to steam West, that’s what the M-56 and cruising spotter planes will expect. Has to be East, towards Latvia and Russia. In the early hours of 22 June 1941 they approach the port of Liepaja. They are ushered in by Russian patrol boats, then met by a harassed official, partly expecting to be arrested, maybe spend the war in a camp.
What they don’t know is that at midnight Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Now a tramp steamer which has been helping the British is a heroic ally of the Soviet people. Relieved, DeHaan and crew then learn they are being dragooned into a convoy of all available shipping evacuating people from the port. A ramshackle collection including a ballet company, various police officers, soldiers and so on, along with a grand piano and miscellaneous military equipment, cram the Noordendam‘s decks.
The accompanying destroyers blow their hooters and, as they hear and can even see fighting erupting around the harbour, the convoy steams out to sea, heading north past the Gulf of Riga, then East towards Kronstandt. Through mine fields where they lose some boats. Then are attacked by German bombers, strings of them. Finally a chain of bombs explodes aboard the Noordendam, crippling the engines and severing the steering equipment. As the rest of the convoy steers East, the ragbag of soldiers and civilians packed into the Noordendam collect the dead and cover them, treat the wounded, and watch the ship drift helplessly north towards the shore of Finland. Eventually it crashes gently into rocks on a low, unmarked island off the coast.
And here, eerily and mysteriously and abruptly, the novel ends. By this stage I think we are meant to find the ship itself has become a legend. Furst has subtly built up the picture of it as a floating world, a universe to itself, with a crew gathered from all the nations – Arabs, Greeks, German communists, Spanish survivors, Polish anti-fascists, the sturdy DeHaan himself.
Like these later Furst novels it doesn’t end tragically, as the harsh WW2 milieu suggests – it ends dreamily, vaguely, romantically. It ends like a Shakespeare romance, on a note of wistful mystery, confirming the way in which – despite the occasional shootouts and deaths, these novels are essentially romances.
They searched for her, some time later, once the war in that part of the world had quietened down…They asked the people who lived along that rockbound coast, fishermen mostly, if they’d seen her, and some said they had, while others just shook their heads or shrugged. But, in the end, they found nothing, and she was never seen again. (Last sentences, p.309)
Sensual sex
I associate these later Furst novels with slinky, sensual, stockings-slipping-off sex as much as clandestine meetings in exotic capitals and intense firefights. The last two novels in particular seem to have acquired a formulaic rhythm: puzzling encounters with ‘agents’ and/or violent action > comfortingly sensual sex.
Throughout the text are sprinkled DeHaan’s memories of his brief affair with Arlette in Paris. Smelling hashish in a Tangier back street transports reminds him of the time he and Arletta tried the drug and ended up making passionate love, ‘ferocious and wildly chaotic’ (p.6).
On the way to drop the commandos, DeHaan remembers more Arlette:
At a crucial moment on their first night together, what his hand found pulsed, and the heat of it surprised, then inspired him. (p.49)
Immediately following the hair-raising raid on Cap Bon, the text jumps to DeHaan in bed with Demetria, a woman he picks up at a party back at Alexandria:
Freed of her daily life, and a stiff linen suit, her underwear buried somewhere in the rumpled sheets of the hotel bed, she lay back in her flesh, luxuriant, legs comfortably apart – the colour the French called rose de dessous casually revealed, and smoked with great pleasure. (p.85)
The odd character, Kolb, whose narrative periodically intersperses the main, ship-board one, spends his first few sections hanging round in a safe room in Hamburg, waiting for news of how he’s going to be exfiltrated. His only contact with the outside world is a large German woman, Fräulein Lena. He imagines her big body only held in place by an elaborate arrangement of corsets and stays. Finally he makes his move, on her next visit plying her with sticky apricot brandy, and discovering that:
God, she was as lonely as he was, soon enough strutting round the room in those very corsets – pink, however, not black – that had set his imagination alight. And, he did not have to dismantle them, as he’d feared, she did that herself while he watched with hungry eyes. And soon enough, he was to learn that secret depravities did lurk – the same ones shared by humanity the world over but never mind, they were new and pink that night, and slowly and thoroughly explored. (p.125)
From the moment DeHaan takes the Russian journalist Maria Bromen on board (she sleeps in the first mate’s cabin, while the latter doubles up with another officer) he lusts after her. When he says goodbye at Lisbon part of him is torn. So when she returns at Lisbon and is taken back on board, it isn’t long until she asks to borrow a book to read, and they find themselves standing very close together in his tiny cabin.
For a time they stood apart, arms by their sides, then he settled his hands on her hips and she moved towards him, just enough so that he could feel the tips of her breasts beneath the sweater. (p.222)
She asks him to turn off the light. He turns to find her stripped down to her panties. They both jump into bed. Etc. After that there are many scenes with one of them in bed and the other looking soulfully out the porthole at the grey ocean, worrying about the future in these troubled times; exactly as Marie-Galante or Serebin stood at windows looking out over Paris or Istanbul or Bucharest worrying about the troubled future.
This scene, emblematic of wistful regrets, recurs again and again, giving the novels their special mood of sensual nostalgia.
Datestamps, telegraphese and subtitles
Many of the sections start with the date, like a journal entry, sometimes with the exact time, like a ship’s log – a standard thriller procedure. More specific to Furst is the habit of omitting verbs from sentences or clauses, to make them feel more punchy and immediate – a kind of telegraphese. And, where the narrative voice or dialogue is often clipped and elliptical, Furst will often give the interpretive thoughts of one of the characters – generally the main protagonist, in this case Captain DeHaan – in italics. All three habits are exemplified in this clip:
6 June, 0820. Hotel Alhadar.
Hard to find, in an alley off an alley, grim and dirty and cheap. The desk clerk sat behind a wire cage, worry beads in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and beneath his tasseled fez, a mean eye – who the hell are you? (p.173)
Repeats
Furst enjoys repeating the same characters or settings over different novels.
- The Café Heininger is the setting for a famous shootout in the first book and is mentioned in every one of the succeeding novels. Here DeHaan remembers it as the setting for his last night in Paris with his beloved Arlette (pp.137-139)
- When Maria Sambon tells DeHaan some of her backstory, she mentions trying to write short stories, in the manner of Babel, no, more like Serebin (p.224). Ilya Serebin is the fictional hero of the previous novel in the series, Blood of Victory.
The recurrence of some characters in the early, genuinely scary and threatening novels about the KGB and its murderous activities in Eastern Europe (and Civil War Spain) added to the sense of menace, the sense of a web of spies and assassins across Europe who the characters couldn’t escape.
But as the series has become softer and more sensual, with a lot more descriptions of fine food and ladies in stockings, the recurrence of minor characters has begun to have the opposite effect, and made the series seem more cartoony, somehow profoundly unserious. The recurrence of the Café Heininger has become an in-joke, like something in an episode of The Simpsons.
Credit
Dark Voyage by Alan Furst was published in 2004 by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. All quotes and references are to the 2005 Phoenix paperback edition.
Related links
- Dark Voyage on Amazon
- Alan Furst Wikipedia article
- Alan Furst’s website
- Personal Tour: Alan Furst’s Paris
The Night Soldiers novels
1988 Night Soldiers – An epic narrative which starts with a cohort of recruits to the NKVD spy school of 1934 and then follows their fortunes across Europe, to the Spain of the Civil War, to Paris, to Prague and Switzerland, to the gulags of Siberia and the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto, in a Europe beset by espionage, conspiracy, treachery and murder.
1991 Dark Star – The story of Russian Jew André Szara, foreign correspondent for Pravda, who finds himself recruited into the NKVD and entering a maze of conspiracies, based in Paris but taking him to Prague, Berlin and onto Poland – in the early parts of which he struggles to survive in the shark-infested world of espionage, to conduct a love affair with a young German woman, and to help organise a network smuggling German Jews to Palestine; then later, as Poland is invaded by Nazi Germany, finds himself on the run across Europe. (390 pages)
1995 The Polish Officer – A long, exhausting chronicle of the many adventures of Captain Alexander de Milja, Polish intelligence officer who carries out assignments in Nazi-occupied Poland and then Nazi-occupied Paris and then, finally, in freezing wintertime Poland during the German attack on Russia.
1996 The World at Night – A year in the life of French movie producer Jean Casson, commencing on the day the Germans invade in June 1940, following his ineffectual mobilisation into a film unit which almost immediately falls back from the front line, his flight, and return to normality in occupied Paris where he finds himself unwittingly caught between the conflicting claims of the Resistance, British Intelligence and the Gestapo. (304 pages)
1999 Red Gold – Sequel to the World At Night, continuing the adventures of ex-film producer Jean Casson in the underworld of occupied Paris and in various Resistance missions across France. (284 pages)
2000 Kingdom of Shadows – Hungarian exile in Paris, Nicholas Morath, undertakes various undercover missions to Eastern Europe at the bidding of his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi, a kind of freelance espionage controller in the Hungarian Legation. Once more there is championship sex, fine restaurants and dinner parties in the civilised West, set against shootouts in forests, beatings by the Romanian police, and fire-fights with Sudeten Germans, in the murky East.
2003 Blood of Victory – Russian émigré writer, Ilya Serebin, gets recruited into a conspiracy to prevent the Nazis getting their hands on Romania’s oil, though it takes a while to realise who’s running the plot – Count Polanyi – and on whose behalf – Britain’s – and what it will consist of – sinking tugs carrying huge turbines at a shallow stretch of the river Danube, thus blocking it to oil traffic. (298 pages)
2004 Dark Voyage – In fact numerous voyages made by the tramp steamer Noordendam and its captain Eric DeHaan, after it is co-opted to carry out covert missions for the Allied cause, covering a period from 30 April to 23 June 1941. Atmospheric and evocative, the best of the last three or four. (309 pages)
2006 The Foreign Correspondent
2008 The Spies of Warsaw
2010 Spies of the Balkans
2012 Mission to Paris
2014 Midnight in Europe
2016 A Hero in France
Books & Boots 