The Spies of Warsaw is the 9th volume in a series of historical espionage fiction by Alan Furst. The books are not a series in the same way that Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther books are a series. There are a few characters that appear in more than one of Furst's stories, and The Spies in Warsaw is one of them. Colonel Anton Vyborg of Polish military intelligence is a supporting character in an earlier book, The Polish Officer, and he reappears in a more featured role in The Spies of Warsaw.

Furst's novels are a series in that they treat of the same themes throughout. They are all set in the 1930s during the rise of fascism and the 1940s during the war that fascism gave rise to. The Spies of Warsaw covers the years 1937-1938. (The BBC miniseries based on the novel moves the action up to the start of World War II when Germany invaded Poland on September 1st,1939, and the Soviet Union's invasion from the east a few weeks later. They borrow the conclusion from the starting point of The Polish Officer.

The plot of The Spies of Warsaw is based on the efforts of a French military intelligence officer, Jean-Francois Mercier, who is attached to the French embassy in Poland to collect intelligence on what he believes are German intentions for an invasion of Poland, but more so for their strategy for an invasion of France. No matter how much evidence he lays before his superiors in Paris, with one conspicuous exception, he cannot achieve a change of their mindset with the result that when the "phony war" in the West from September, 1939 comes to an end in the spring of 1940, the French strategy is based on defensive warfare and the impregnable fortifications of the Maginot line which did not extend to the border with Belgium.

Mercier is a decorated veteran of both World War I and the Polish-Soviet war of 1920 during which he fought with Col. Vyborg. He served in the Great War under DeGaulle which it is suggested may be the source of the passive-aggressive reaction to all of the reports he files.

The story begins with the spying activities and debriefing of one of Mercier's agents, on Edvard Uhl, a senior engineer at the Adler Ironworks in Breslau, working on a tank design project for Krupp. Uhl has been recruited via a honeytrap executed by another of Mercier's agents, Hana Musser, aka Countess Sczelenska. He is besotted with her, ready to give up his wife and three children and marry his "countess'. In the meantime, he enjoys his monthly trysts and pays for it all with the money he is paid by Mercier in exchange for blueprints of the new tank designs. He lets slip the fact that he cannot make the next planned meeting because he has been assigned to a team that will be observing tank maneuvers being conducted in the Black Forest, an environment which in not conducive to tank operations. Mercier decides to become an uninvited observer to the Black Forest exercises at great risk to himself and comes away with what he believes is obvious evidence that the Germans intend to do an end run around the Maginot Line when it becomes France's turn to be invaded.

Mercier chances upon a code name for a member of the Black Front a group of early Nazi Party members who became disenchanted with Hitler. This leads him to a contact who was an old friend who had a clerical position in I.N. Six, the office of Hans Guderian, the author of a famous treatise on tank warfare, housed in the headquarters of the German General Staff. Mercier maneuvers himself into contact with the I.N. Sic source, gets the goods, gets a promotion and is stunned to hear that his superiors seemed to discount the legitimacy of the intelligence he has provided, suggesting that it might be a disinformation game being played by the Germans.

And of course, two years later France was overrun by Panzers coming through the Ardennes Forest across the Belgian frontier and Mercier's opponents, in effect, were off to Vichy in the wake of France's collapse and surrender.

Like all of Furst's novels there is the romantic sub-plot featuring Mercier and a League of Nations lawyer named Anna Szarbek. Anna has a live-in boyfriend, Maxim Mostov, a Russian emigre writer who may have a side racket slipping intelligence to a husband wife espionage team at the Soviet embassy. There are a number of "major minor" characters, such as Marek the driver / bodyguard working for Marek, the aforementioned Col. Vyborg, a Dr. Lapp, a German who provides Mercier with a critical contact named Halbach who accompanies Mercier into Germany to recruit the agent within I.N. Six.

There is also a nod the hero of The Polish Officer, Alexander de Milja. In a visit to Vyborg's office Mercier admires a map of Vyborg's country home and its surroundings. Vyborg tells him "The map was drawn by Captain de Milja, in our Geographical Section". Nice touch.

The Spies of Warsaw is a great read and as always despite the multitude of characters and the sidebars to the main plot, it is also a fast read. All of Furst's novels are highly recommended, and this is one of his best. ( )

Good, not great. Rates somewhere between 3.5 & 4 stars. ( )

I really had to work my way through this book. If I hadn't been reading it for a class (history of espionage) I don't think I would have made it through. It's not bad, I don't think the genre works for me. ( )

French attaché runs agents in Poland as war approaches

I got a strong sense of the humanity of many of these characters. Mercier with dog-hair covered furniture in his country house. The German Lutheran couple who prayed over it and decided to offer their services to France as spies. The action and intrigue is arrhythmic enough to be real. ( )