Autumn 1939. In Paris, American motion picture actor Frederic Stahl is drawn into a clandestine world of foreign correspondents, exiled Spanish Republicans, and spies of every sort. As a celebrity from neutral America -- who can travel across the continent freely -- Stahl could be very useful indeed. Arriving in Paris on the eve of the Munich Appeasement in 1938, Hollywood star Frederic Stahl is unwittingly entangled in the region's shifting political...

The writer I.A. Serebin is more than he seems. A veteran of the Bolshevik Revolution and director of the Paris-based union for Russian émigrés, he is a man who despises fascism as only a poet can. When a chance encounter aboard a Bulgarian freighter draws him to a party of exiled aristocrats, he soon must weigh a new prospect. How does one go about disrupting the flow of Rumanian oil to Germany

"Paris, 1941. The City of Light, occupied by the Nazis, is dark and silent at night. Streetlamps are painted blue and apartment windows draped or shuttered in the blackout ordered by the Germans. But when the clouds part, the silvery moonlight defies authority, and so does a leader of the French Resistance, known as Mathieu. In Paris and in the farmhouses, barns, and churches of the French countryside, small groups of ordinary men and women are determined...

In September 1939, as German forces ravage Poland, Captain Alexander de Milja, a Polish intelligence officer with the resistance underground, risks his life in the treacherous world of global espionage to help his country.

In 1941, Eric DeHaan, the captain of the Noordendam, a Dutch tramp freighter, is recruited by the Dutch Naval Intelligence Section for dangerous secret missions that take the ship and its crew behind enemy lines in Europe and North Africa.

In 1939 Paris, the murder of an Italian political émigré OVRA, Mussolini's secret police, brings new danger to his successor, Carlo Weisz, who finds himself the target of OVRA, MI6, Stalin's NKVD, and Hitler's Gestapo.

In 1940 occupied Paris, French film producer and bon vivant Jean Casson undertakes a dangerous mission against Germany in the world of espionage, an assignment that could cost him everything--even his life.

Author Alan Furst has written several historical fiction novels. In Dark Star, Andre Szara, a Polish journalist who becomes a spy for the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, is ordered to complete many tasks of espionage in Paris. Through Szara's character, the beginnings of World War II are revealed. George Guidall's gripping narration complements this suspenseful tale.

Excerpts from novels by twentieth century authors featuring professional intelligence officers, diplomats, political police, agents provocateurs, secret operatives, resistance fighters and assassins.