Red Gold: A Novel - Hardcover

Furst, Alan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679451862 ISBN 13: 9780679451860

Publisher: Random House, 1999

Synopsis

"In the world of the espionage thriller, Alan Furst is in a class of his own."--William Boyd

Paris. Autumn, 1941. In a shabby hotel off the place Clichy, the course of the French resistance is about to change. German tanks are rolling toward Moscow. Stalin has issued a decree: all partisan operatives are to strike behind enemy lines--from Kiev to Brittany.
        Set in the back streets of Paris and deep in occupied France, Red Gold moves with quiet and pervasive menace as predators from the dark edge of the war--arms dealers, lawyers, spies, and assassins--emerge from the shadows of the Parisian underworld.
        In their midst is Jean Casson, once a producer of gangster films, now living on a few francs a day and hunted by the Gestapo. As the German occupation tightens, Casson is drawn into an ill-fated mission: running guns to combat units of the French Communist party. Their NKVD contact, a former Comintern operative named Weiss--his seventeenth name--begins to orchestrate a series of attacks against the Germans. Reprisals are brutal. Fear spreads through the city. At last the real resistance has begun.
        Red Gold masterfully recreates the duplicitous world of the French resistance in the worst days of World War II.

About this title

Review:

If you enjoy mysteries set against the rich background of World War II Europe (Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy and the fine French series by J. Robert Janes are prime examples), you should also know about Alan Furst. He began by writing such excellent, original books as Dark Star and Night Soldiers, all set in Eastern Europe. The locale then moved to Paris for The World at Night, where we first met the enigmatic film producer and reluctant Resistance hero Jean Casson.

Casson returns in fascinating form in Red Gold, washing up broke and depressed in his home city, now totally ground down by its German occupiers. Recruited by a sympathetic cop, Casson joins a group of officers working undercover inside the Vichy government to help de Gaulle. Casson's job is to convince justifiably skeptical French communists to cooperate; to do so he must organize a complicated, extremely dangerous transfer of weapons. There's nothing glamorous about the work or its result, but Furst is such a persuasive writer that we come to realize what a success it is for Casson just to stay alive. This innovative and gripping novel eloquently transports us back to a different era and a different world. --Dick Adler

From the Publisher:

Advance Praise for Alan Furst's RED GOLD

"Furst has established himself as a modern master of WWII espionage: not since the doors were still open at Rick's Cafe American has the pungent smoke from Gauloise cigarettes filled a room with such a heady mix of trench-coated intrigue and romance by searchlight... What makes Casson so appealing, and this novel so entertaining, is the way Furst refuses to let his hero off the hook... What more could you ask of World War II espionage: all the romance, all the drama, but none of the mushy idealism as Casson, unlike Bogie, would get on the plane with Ingrid Bergman."
-- Booklist (starred)

"From the atmosphere established in the first sentence to the knock on the door at the denouement, Furst again proves himself the master of his chosen terrain -- behind the lines of Nazi occupation in France during World War II... Furst, who deserves the comparisons he's earned to Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, seems to be settling into a franchise."

-- Publisher's Weekly (starred)

"Masterful, richly atmospheric... Witty, inventive, distinctively French film-noir espionage, told with the terse brutality and jaundiced romanticism of Chandler and Hammet at their peak."

-- Kirkus Review (starred)

"Gripping... I got hooked on espionage novels after reading Eric Ambler's entertaining thrillers set in the years between the wars. Furst has been described as another Ambler, and deservedly so. RED GOLD transports the reader back to a crowded Paris, darkened by the menacing ambience of World War II."
-- USA Today

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0679451862
• ISBN 13: 9780679451860
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288