American - Author | February 20, 1941 -
I am there to entertain. I call my work high escape fiction; it's high, it's good - but it's escape, and I have no delusions about that. I have no ambition to be a serious writer, whatever that means.
Alan Furst
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Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.
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Romantic love, or sex, is the only good thing in a life that is being lived in a dark way.
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If I'm a genre writer, I'm at the edge. In the end, they do work like genre fiction. You have a hero, there's a love interest, there's always a chase, there's fighting of some kind. You don't have to do that in a novel. But you do in a genre novel.
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I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.
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I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.
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I'd never been in a police state. I didn't know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.
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My theory is that sometimes writers write books because they want to read them, and they aren't there to be read. And I think that was true of me.
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I would have loved to have another 10 Eric Ambler books.
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I've never lived in Eastern Europe, although both my wife and I have ancestors in Poland and Russia - but I can see the scenes I create.
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Yes, I'm a reasonably good self-taught historian of the 1930s and '40s. I've never wanted to write about another time or place. I wouldn't know what to say about contemporary society.
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I started writing in my 20s. I just wanted to write, but I didn't have anything to write about, so in the beginning, I wrote entertainments - mainly murder mysteries.
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