When Alan Furst, master of shadowy World War II intrigues, mentions the mysterious "Zone 7," he isn't referring to a secret Gestapo operation. He's talking plant life. "Zone 7 is the horticulture zone we're in here," says Mr. Furst, 71, as he walks around the lush grounds of his modest home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., a wealthy enclave in the east end of Long Island.
The zone's moderate temperatures allow him to write in an unheated, converted wooden garage behind the house, moving indoors to an upstairs study at first frost. Here he composed most of "Mission to Paris," the latest of his 12 critically lauded spy novels, most of them set in that anxious, pregnant period when Europe knew the Second World War was brewing but wasn't sure when and how it would arrive. "Mission," due June 12, is about an American film star who arrives in Europe in 1938 to shoot a movie, but winds up enmeshed in a dangerous intelligence operation. Below, an edited transcript of an interview with the author.
A scene in your new book describes the Kristallnacht terror of 1938, but only in glimpses. Why?
I want the reader to experience it like most people experienced it at the time. Most people didn't actually see it happening, but they could hear it, they could smell it; they knew something terrible was going on. Also, I've become averse to graphic depictions of violence. It was a much more brutal period than people really understand. Unimaginably bad things, unspeakable things happened. I have a very serious censorship office inside my head; it censors things that I could tell you that you would never forget, and I don't want to be the person to stick that in your brain.
You similarly write about sex without being explicit. What's your technique?
I try to write sex in a way that is familiar to my readers; not standing up in a hall or on a kitchen counter; I don't think my readers do that. That's for the movies. But sex is an important element in the books because it was important to people's lives. Sex was the one thing that made people feel human during a terrible period.
Why do you write about the prewar era rather than the Cold War, the usual milieu for spy novels?
What you get in the Cold War is "the wilderness of mirrors" where you have to figure out what's good and what's evil. That's good for John le Carré, but not me. For me you know who was good and who was bad; you don't have to explain anything to people. I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
Do you interview people who lived then as part of your research?
No. Never. My feeling is that if they tell me their story and I don't use it, in some way I'm communicating to them that their story isn't sufficient. I just depend on personal accounts and journalists of the time, which are a damn good source. Also, I watch newsreels and see a lot of movies from the period. It's interesting to see how different people were. They're all thin, for one thing—nobody had a lot to eat. Plus, the music of the era. You can't hear Glenn Miller and not feel what it was like to be alive then; it washes over some evocative part of the brain.
Your "Mission" protagonist meets a Russian film star who was both a member of Hitler's inner circle and a Russian spy. Is she based on a real person?
Olga Chekhova was a Czarist aristocrat who married [Russian writer Anton] Chekhov's son. She was a confidante of Hitler who almost certainly was a spy. She went back to Russia several times during the '30s and was allowed to return to Germany, which didn't happen to many people. After the war she went back to Russia and survived. That didn't happen to many people either.
Do you ever see yourself writing a nonfiction history?
No. But there is a part of me that wants to write about other periods, in particular about the Battle of Lepanto between the Turks and Venetians. It was a big naval battle in which Cervantes lost his left arm.
Your novels are constructed very cinematically. Why do you think Hollywood hasn't turned one into a film?
I don't know. I wish I did. Now at least I can say that the BBC is making a miniseries based on [Mr. Furst's 2008 novel] "Spies of Warsaw." They're shooting it now.
You've gone on record saying your first novel, "Your Day in the Barrel," wasn't any good. Why is that?
I started out when I was 29—too young to write novels. I was broke. I was on unemployment insurance. I was supposed to be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a typewriter and a lot of paper. I did it as a potboiler, and it was, though it didn't boil the pot very long. I used to call the publisher and ask how it was selling. I was told it was selling better than one other book on their list. What book? "It's a cookbook—it's called 'First You Take a Leek.' " I wrote three mysteries and then a contemporary spy novel that was unbelievably derivative—completely based on "The Conversation," the movie with Gene Hackman. Amazingly, the character in the book looks exactly like…Gene Hackman.
You have an odd-looking word processor. Why not write on a computer?
This is an IBM Lexmark Wheelwriter. It's a very different activity to hit the "g" key and have the "g" appear on the paper after the key has been hit. I like it so much I have a bunch of them. I stockpile them for parts. I do have to clean them with Q-tips and alcohol, where all you do with a computer is run a rag over it.
Do you sit down to write only when the spirit moves you?
Six days a week I'm out here at 7:30. I've got to do my two pages a day. For me that's about 700 words. Hemingway said do 1,000 or 500 words a day—whatever he said, he's always right—and stop only when you know what comes next. It works for me. When my two pages are done, I'm done.