Novelist Alan Furst

DATE March 1, 2001 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Chris Carter discusses his new Fox series "The Lone
Gunmen," which is a spinoff from his series "The X-Files"
BARBARA BOGAEV, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Barbara Bogaev.

"The X-Files," the Fox Network's drama series about FBI agents investigating
paranormal phenomenon and government cover-ups, was something of a cultural
phenomenon in the '90s. You'd think after seven and a half seasons, "X-Files"
creator Chris Carter would have run out of conspiracy theories. But he's
doggedly mining that territory in his new spinoff series "The Lone Gunmen."
It features three popular recurring characters from "The X-Files,"
computer-savvy conspiracy geeks Byers, Frohike and Langly. Carter describes
them as a misguided "Mission: Impossible" team with stagnant social skills.
"The Lone Gunmen" premieres this Sunday at 9 PM on Fox.

Here's a clip from the pilot. In this scene, Byers, Frohike and
Langly--played by Bruce Harwood, Tom Braidwood and Dean Haglund--are
commiserating about their failed attempt to uncover a corporate conspiracy
they planned to expose in their newsletter called The Lone Gunmen.

(Soundbite of "The Lone Gunmen")

Mr. DEAN HAGLUND (As Langly): We're not going to let this suggestion stand.
We're going to stop these corporate goons from doing to the American people
what they did to us last night.

Mr. BRUCE HARWOOD (As Byers): Yeah, right.

Mr. TOM BRAIDWOOD (As Frohike): What's the matter, Byers?

Mr. HARWOOD (As Byers): The matter is we don't have the proof. Without
proof, we're nothing more than conspiracy mongers. Without proof, all we can
do is cry wolf.

Mr. HAGLUND (As Langly): Don't take it personally, man. They strip-searched
all of us.

Mr. HARWOOD (As Byers): Eleven years we've been putting out this paper.
Think about it. Have we really made a difference? Is America a better place
to live because of our efforts? This story would have garnered national
attention. It would have forced Ecomcon(ph) to halt the production of the
Octium chip(ph). It would have protected the civil liberties of millions of
Americans. But without proof--(makes noise).

Mr. HAGLUND (As Langly): Well, we can still speculate, can't we? We'll call
it editorial commentary.

Mr. HARWOOD (As Byers): For whom? Last week's issue had a circulation of
2,824.

(Soundbite of paper been tossed down)

Mr. HARWOOD (As Byers): We're preaching to the converted.

Mr. HAGLUND (As Langy): The readership doesn't matter, man. It's the impact
on the black ops that counts. They read it, too. The guys at the NSA and the
CIA, they tremble every time we put out one of these babies.

BOGAEV: Chris Carter, welcome to FRESH AIR.

Mr. CHRIS CARTER (Creator, "The X-Files"): Thank you for having me.

BOGAEV: What made you think the Lone Gunmen were worthy of a series of their
own?

Mr. CARTER: Well, they're all handsome and dashing, which you know they're
not. They were three guys who became a kind of beloved trio, actually. On
"The X-Files," they were introduced in the first season. They were created by
two guys who were very important to the show early on, Glen Morgan and James
Walton. And they were comic relief. They were guys who were actually more
paranoid than Mulder. They appeared a couple times in the first couple of
seasons of "The X-Files," and then they started to appear somewhat regularly.

And then it got to be season five of "The X-Files," and we were doing "The
X-Files" movie and Mulder and Scully--which means David and Gillian--were off
doing the movie. And we needed to start producing episodes, and so we
decided, in their absence, to produce one starring the Lone Gunmen. And it
went so well that we did a second one. And after that second one, I think all
of us saw the opportunity or potential for these three guys to actually carry
their own show.

BOGAEV: Well, I'm sure everyone has their own special favorite Lone Gunman,
but mine is played by actor Dean Haglund. And "X-Files" fans would recognize
him as the blond with the long hair and the very interesting, exaggerated,
sharp facial features.

Mr. CARTER: Right.

BOGAEV: I think he's just great casting as a hacker. He has that mix of
irreverence and extreme intelligence and eternal immaturity. Is that what
appealed to you when you were casting him way back when?

Mr. CARTER: You know, actually, I was involved sort of tangentially in the
casting, and some things were run by me. But the casting was done by others.
But I think that they--all three of them sort of fit--if you've ever been to a
UFO convention--which I'm not sure how many people have--they fit the kind of
convention stereotype for the kind of fringe dweller who likes to sell tracts
about, you know, all kinds of various government conspiracies and such. And
Dean looks exactly like one of those guys, as does Tom Braidwood, who plays
Frohike, and our character who plays Byers.

BOGAEV: I think the comedy in this new series is so much broader. There's
even a little physical--a lot of physical comedy, actually.

Mr. CARTER: Right. Right.

BOGAEV: I like the opening sequence to Bond, Jimmy Bond. It's, I suppose,
a comic homage to "The Matrix"...

Mr. CARTER: Yes.

BOGAEV: ...that amazing fight scene in which Keanu Reeves is running on the
ceiling, right?

Mr. CARTER: I think there will be a lot of sending up of that kind of
material with "The Lone Gunmen."

BOGAEV: Well, it made me think of "Get Smart" a little bit.

Mr. CARTER: Right.

BOGAEV: Are you mining your TV past for this program?

Mr. CARTER: Oh, yeah. I mean, all of us have these shows that we grew up
with, which include "Get Smart," which I think is a little more broad and
campy than, really, what we're attempting to do. But I don't think you're
going to see anybody with a phone shoe or a shoe phone.

BOGAEV: Oh, darn.

Mr. CARTER: Yeah. I think the other shows that we were really interested in
were "Man from U.N.C.L.E.," "Mission: Impossible," "Wild, Wild West," all
these shows that we loved as kids. And this is a chance to do it with these
three sort of techy geeks. And we just see it as a chance to do a send-up of
the usual sort of crime-fighting fare.

BOGAEV: Now conspiracy is such a big part of "The X-Files." We should remind
people who somehow don't know the premise of the show, that the premise of
"The X-Files" is that there are two FBI secret agents, Fox Mulder and Dana
Scully--played by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson...

Mr. CARTER: Right.

BOGAEV: ...and they investigate cases that come under the heading of the
paranormal. Now Duchovny and Anderson became so central to the success of the
series. How hard was it to cast them? You must have been involved in that
casting.

Mr. CARTER: Yes, I was. It was a very, very nerve-racking time in my life.
I had this pilot which I thought was good, and it needed just the right
casting. And we saw hundreds of actors, and one was David, and that was a
pretty easy choice. I think David--everyone saw how good David Duchovny would
be as Fox Mulder. No one knew exactly how good he'd be because I think he's
blown everyone away since then.

BOGAEV: It's funny with Duchovny. He speaks kind of slowly, or he can. And
he, at first glance, wouldn't strike me as the incisive intelligence you would
want for that character. But he's perfect.

Mr. CARTER: It was--yeah. What's funny about David--and I think you hit it
on the head--is that when he came in, he spoke slowly and he speaks in a
deliberate way. And at first, I wasn't sure how smart he was. And then I
would come to learn later on how whip smart he is and, you know, how
well-educated he was. I didn't know any of these things. And so that was a
very pleasant surprise.

Gillian was a different story. It wasn't quite so easy to cast her.

BOGAEV: Why not?

Mr. CARTER: As with David, we saw many, many actresses for the part, many
good actresses. And so I took in more of those actresses into the network.
And Gillian was always my first choice. She had just come from--she had moved
from New York. She looked rather disheveled. She did not look at all like
the Gillian Anderson you see today. She was a kind of a ragamuffin. But she
had an intensity to her and a serious note to her. And she was young, and yet
she could still play, I believed, this--believably she could play a person who
had graduated from medical school, who could have practiced as a doctor, but
who chose to go into the FBI. She had a tremendous amount of scientific
information to impart in dialogue, which is hard enough in itself, but she did
it believably.

BOGAEV: She has a wonderful combination of sounding very smart and being able
to look very scared.

Mr. CARTER: Yes.

BOGAEV: Those big eyes.

Mr. CARTER: You know, she's got this thing she does, and it's her breathing.
And I always know when she's playing a scene properly when I can see that
breathing pattern that she goes into. It's an intensity that translates
without her having to say much at all.

BOGAEV: It's such a great way to tell a science fiction story to have the
believer and the skeptic united together.

Mr. CARTER: Yeah. Yeah, it was. It ended up being a sort of a stroke of
tremendous good luck and timing.

BOGAEV: Well, what got you thinking along those lines, originally?

Mr. CARTER: It was many things. There was a show on when I was a kid called
"Kolchak The Night Stalker" and it was one of the scariest things I'd
ever seen in my life and I could have watched it every night of the week on
TV. I just loved it. And it was about a guy named Carl Kolchak who was a
newspaper reporter who would come in with these tales--fantastic tales of
vampires and other things and no one would believe him, so here's this
believer that stuck in my head all these years. I knew I wanted to do
something like that show because it was--I thought there was nothing like it
on TV at the time and I was being asked to create a TV show.

And so "Silence of the Lambs" had just come out. And that had an influence on
me because I thought it was so well done. And so here's this sort of
credulous and hardworking and dedicated scientist shackled with a believer. I
thought that was the perfect setup to explore these cases because Kolchak just
didn't have a franchise, and this was a perfect franchise in the end and,
actually, ongoing.

BOGAEV: Let's play a clip from this season. Bring us up to date. Now Mulder
was abducted, allegedly, last season and Agent John Doggett, played by Robert
Patrick--he's the actor who was the bad guy in "Terminator 2"--is a new secret
agent assigned to run the task force looking for Mulder. In this scene, Agent
Doggett is talking for the first time to Agent Scully. He hasn't identified
himself to her yet, and he claims to know Mulder. He's trying to catch Scully
off guard.

(Soundbite from "The X-Files")

Agent SCULLY: I think I know Mulder as much as anybody.

Agent DOGGETT: Yeah, probably so. I always took the rumors with a grain of
salt.

Agent SCULLY: What rumors are those?

Agent DOGGETT: Well, you know. Well, that from the beginning, he never felt
a real trust with you, that you were ambitious.

Agent SCULLY: Where did that come from?

Agent DOGGETT: There are women here at the bureau that he would confide in.
I don't know if you knew that or not.

Agent SCULLY: No. When was this?

Agent DOGGETT: I don't know. It's just talk. So what do you think happened?
Come on now. What's you theory?

Agent SCULLY: What's my theory? My theory is you don't know Mulder at all.
You never did, John Doggett, Kersh's task force leader. You might have
just introduced yourself.

Agent DOGGETT: Well, I was getting around to it.

BOGAEV: A scene from the current season of "The X-Files." My guest is Chris
Carter. He's the creator of "The X-Files," now in its eighth season on Fox.
His new series for the network is "The Lone Gunmen," a spin-off of "The
X-Files." It premieres March 4th.

What does Robert Patrick bring to the show? He just has such a completely
different presence than Duchovny; none of that wry quality. He's that
straight cop.

Mr. CARTER: He is a straight cop and what he brings is a different approach
to "The X-Files." He's a--first of all, he's a knee-jerk skeptic, so he
couldn't be more different than the character of Mulder. He is an insider at
the FBI; well-liked; has buddies. Mulder is, of course--he's been banished
to the basement, along with his--all of his X-files, so when he's put
together with Agent Scully, who's now become something of a reluctant
believer, the dynamic on the show changes completely and now their quest, at
least through, now, over half the season has been to find Agent Mulder,
which, last week, they did, and Agent Mulder's dead.

BOGAEV: Chris Carter is my guest. He's the creator of "The X-Files" and his
new series for the Fox Network is "The Lone Gunmen," a spin-off from "The
X-Files." It premiers March 4th.

Chris Carter, we're gonna take a break and then we'll talk some more.

Mr. CARTER: Great.

BOGAEV: This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BOGAEV: Back with Chris Carter. He's the creator of the Fox series "The
X-Files." His new comedy drama is a spin-off featuring the three conspiracy
theorist computer hackers from "The X-Files." It's called "The Lone Gunmen."

You started out as a journalist before television. You worked for Surfing
magazine for five years.

Mr. CARTER: Right.

BOGAEV: When did you start surfing?

Mr. CARTER: When I was 12.

BOGAEV: And was that the passion of your teen-age years?

Mr. CARTER: It's the passion of my now middle-aged years. I still love it
and, if I had my choice, on most days I'd be out surfing.

BOGAEV: So when you were working for the magazine, what was your job
description, and how much of your time was spent surfing?

Mr. CARTER: You know, it's--what it was is I had graduated from college with
a degree in journalism and here I was surfing. I saw this perfect
opportunity to not have to join the adult world and took this job, which
turned out to be many things--many more things that just, you know, a job at
a surfing magazine. I learned discipline. I wrote a lot there. I learned
the discipline of sitting down in a chair, and that's a big part of being a
writer, but I also learned a lot about putting together something and getting
it out on a monthly basis, so there was--there were a lot of things that, as
a young man, I got a chance to do and learn that you might not have gotten to
as just a regular writer on a newspaper or a larger magazine.

BOGAEV: Well, while you were working at Surfing magazine, were you thinking
of writing for television?

Mr. CARTER: No, actually. That kind of happened by accident, and a lucky
accident that I met the woman who's now my wife who had been a screenwriter
for a while and she encouraged me to write something because I had told her a
story that I had been carrying around with me for a while. And I did, and
that script really sort of opened doors for me very quickly.

BOGAEV: What was that first screenplay?

Mr. CARTER: It was a story...

BOGAEV: Something dark?

Mr. CARTER: Well, I guess in its own way. It was actually something very
close to my heart. Even though I'm too young to have been part of the
Vietnam generation, I watched a lot of kids that were a little older than me
go off to war without any choice and it was a story about three kids from a
lower-middle-class, socioeconomic sort of place go off to war and watch a lot
of kids who had privileges and connections not go off to war, and it was all
centered around baseball.

BOGAEV: And where'd that go, that screenplay?

Mr. CARTER: It's sitting, probably, at the bottom of a box somewhere.
Probably a good thing.

BOGAEV: You eventually worked for Disney. How'd you get there?

Mr. CARTER: It was just a fluke, stroke of luck, too, that Jeffrey Katenzberg
had read something else that I had written--my second script--and one day I
was surfing and the next day, with my hair not even dry, probably, I was
sitting in an office at Disney working as a screenwriter. And that was the
good news and the bad news because I, really, truthfully, didn't know what I
was doing.

BOGAEV: Were you assigned things to write? I think you worked on the
Disney movies of the week, right?

Mr. CARTER: Yeah. Yes. That--I was sitting in this office and all of a
sudden producers would start coming by, even though I was writing--I was hired
to write movies. These television producers would come by and they'd say,
`Would you like to do a Disney Sunday movie of the week?' And I'd say, `Yes'
to every one of them. It was--I couldn't believe it. Here they were, you
know, telling me they were going to, you know, give me writing assignments on
things that were going to get made.

BOGAEV: Well...

Mr. CARTER: It was a great opportunity.

BOGAEV: So there you are writing these family friendly comedies and dramas
for Disney...

Mr. CARTER: Yeah, right.

BOGAEV: ...and meanwhile mulling in secret over the paranormal?

Mr. CARTER: Yeah, kind of. I mean, the truth is when I had--for about the
first five years, maybe more, I was really a writer doing other people's
ideas. People would come to me and I would take their notions or their
sketches and try to turn them into television series, eventually, after I was
doing those Disney Sunday movies. And so I was taking other people's ideas
and no one really wanted to know what I wanted to do. And, ultimately, I
guess I earned that opportunity. And when I was at Fox, that was--when I had
been given an exclusive deal to create a TV series, "The X-Files" was the
first idea I pitched.

BOGAEV: I think one of the more interesting things about "The X-Files" is
that Fox Mulder doesn't so much believe in the paranormal as he wants to
believe in it or in something to explain that dark family history and his lost
sister.

Mr. CARTER: Right.

BOGAEV: And it made me wonder if you're not as interested in the possibility
of the paranormal as much as you are interested in people's desire to believe
in it.

Mr. CARTER: Yeah, that's exactly what I'm interested in. I'm still a
non-believer because nothing's shaken my skepticism, yet, but I'm desperate
for an experience. I would--you know, I'd love to have a paranormal
experience, as I think most of us would. We'd love to all--I think all of us
would love to see a ghost.

BOGAEV: You've never had anything?

Mr. CARTER: You know, I haven't. As much--as hard as I've tried, as much as
I've tried to expose myself to it--and I'm not, you know, ridiculous about it,
but, certainly, you know, when my parents died, I longed to see a ghost. You
know, I think that the idea of reconnecting with someone is powerful and, you
know, I think that many, many people have done what I did, which was try to
summon them.

BOGAEV: Did you try and summon them?

Mr. CARTER: Well, I mean, in my own way. I stared into the darkness. I
never went to a channel or anything that Mulder and Scully would do.

BOGAEV: But you sat, you mean, in a room by yourself and...

Mr. CARTER: Right.

BOGAEV: ...thought.

Mr. CARTER: Usually in bed at night just lying there, waiting, you know,
because so many people I know said they've seen ghosts. There's a person up
the street--who lives up the street from me who actually has a headstone in
her yard who claims she sees the ghost of that woman in her house regularly.
And every time she tells me that story, I get chills. I can't help it. When
I saw the "Sixth Sense," I got chills with ghosts. I think it's a powerful
idea.

BOGAEV: Chris Carter, thanks very much for coming on the show today.

Mr. CARTER: You're welcome.

BOGAEV: Chris Carter's new series, "The Lone Gunmen," premiers this Sunday at
9 PM on Fox.

I'm Barbara Bogaev, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Author Alan Furst discusses his many books about Europe
in the 1930s and 1940s
BARBARA BOGAEV, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Barbara Bogaev.

Writer Alan Furst is obsessed with the years 1938 to 1941. All of Furst's
espionage novels are set in Europe during those years of Nazi horror, fleeing
refugees and shifting political alliances. Not quite thrillers, Furst's
novels deal more with the day-to-day realities and the moral compromises
people make in times of war. Reviewers often compare him to Graham Greene,
Sumerset Maugham and John Le Carre. Furst was a reporter for the
International Herald Tribune and a freelance journalist before he switched to
fiction.

His books include "Night Soldiers," "Dark Star," "The World At Night," and
now his new spy novel, "Kingdom of Shadows." It's about Nicholas Morath,
a Hungarian aristocrat who fought in the First World War. He's an advertising
agent by day and a spy for the Hungarian Resistance by night. I asked Alan
Furst to read from this passage from his new book, "Kingdom of Shadows."

Mr. ALAN FURST (Author): `Maybe it was the war. He was not the same when he
came back. He knew what people could do to each other. It would have been
better not to know that. You lived a different life if you didn't know that.
He had read Eric Maria Remarque's book, "All Quiet On The Western Front,"
three or four times, and certain passages again and again. It read, "Now if
we go back, we will be weary, broken, burnt out, ruthless and without hope.
We will not be able to find our way anymore. Let the months and the years
come. They bring me nothing. They can bring me nothing. I am so alone and
so without hope that I can confront them without fear."

A German book, Morath had a pretty good idea what Hitler was mining in the
hearts of the German veterans, but it was not only about Germany. They had
all--British, French, Russian, German, Hungarian and the rest--been poured
into the grinding machine, where some of them died and some of them died
inside themselves. Who, he wondered, survived? But whoever did, he didn't
know. The point was to get up in the morning, to see what might happen, good
or bad, a red-black wager. But even so, a friend of his used to say, it was
probably a good idea that you couldn't commit suicide by counting to 10 and
saying "Now."'

BOGAEV: Alan Furst reading from his new book, "Kingdom of Shadows." Alan
Furst, welcome to FRESH AIR.

Mr. FURST: Thank you for having me.

BOGAEV: Well, I think the most interesting thing about your spies--and
really, it's true of all spies--is that they have to make decisions in which
the choices are all complicated and compromised morally. There're really no
good choices, and they're all bad. You either work for Stalin to keep Hitler
at bay or you have to bargain with SS officers who want to oust Hitler in
order to advance your cause; all the shifting alliances that come along with a
world at war that there's no way out of that.

Mr. FURST: That's really the essence of these books, what I sometimes think
of as the realpolitik of daily life in a situation that people found
themselves in the late '30s and early '40s.

BOGAEV: Now why have you written about the '30s--specifically, 1938 to
1941--in four books now? What is it about the '30s that your imagination
seems to live there?

Mr. FURST: I can't stop. I can't stop. The thing I like about it is that
in that particular period of years, there were so many substantive political
shifts that people found themselves on the wrong side of the fence without
ever moving. It was the fence that moved. And that occasions a kind of drama
of life, because no one knew what was going to happen next, and everything
continued to change around them, so that right became left and negative became
positive and friend became enemy, and everything changed during that period.
So that when you put characters into that kind of heated situation, you get a
lot of action, you get behavior, you get choices that have to be made, you get
to see what people are really like.

BOGAEV: Well, the bits of anecdotes and stories from this time is really what
grounds your books, makes them so real, especially about refugees. And I'm
thinking of one story about German Jews who make it to New York in 1937.
They're at Ellis Island and a well-dressed man offers to buy their clothes.
Can you tell that story? Is it true?

Mr. FURST: Sure. It is a true story, and the OSS did do that. I believe
they did it a little later than 1937 because they didn't precisely come into
being until around 1942, so I moved the time a little bit. But, basically,
what happened was you can't send a secret agent into Austria wearing a Brooks
Brothers suit. They needed clothing, and the refugees were astonished not
only to be paid for the poor things that they managed to have on their backs
when they came out of Europe, but had their clothing replaced as well. I'm
sure the wiser of them also understood exactly what was going on.

BOGAEV: Some, though, must have thought they were--they'd arrived to
paradise...

Mr. FURST: Yes, that's right.

BOGAEV: A place where people buy your dirty clothes and streets are paved
with gold.

Mr. FURST: Streets were paved with gold, that's right.

BOGAEV: Now did you do oral histories to research these books?

Mr. FURST: Not per se oral histories, but I talked to a lot of people when I
was living in Europe, and everyone has a story. Everyone has a story about
their parents or about an uncle or a relative or someone they knew who lived,
who died, who made it out, who didn't make it out, who made it as far as the
Swiss frontier. And that was very interesting. And I think that all goes
into the books in some form or another. And one of--the thing that really
goes into the books is the fact that, quite literally, everybody has a story
about the period. It's very much alive in Europe, even today.

BOGAEV: Do you have a story--a personal story?

Mr. FURST: No, I don't. No, I don't. I--you know...

BOGAEV: You're the one. That's why you tell them, I guess.

Mr. FURST: Yeah, for some reason, I've taken it upon myself to tell these
stories and to write about these people. And, in fact, of course, they've
written magnificently about themselves. If you read Arthur Kessler(ph); if
you read Joseph Roth, emigres wrote books about being emigres, about the
psychology of it, about the feeling of it, about what became of them. There
are many of them. And many people rose to magnificent writing on the
occasion.

BOGAEV: Joseph Roth is a writer whose funeral you depict in this book.

Mr. FURST: True, as it was, as it happened in the village of Teay(ph), which
is just outside of Paris, on the day that it took place.

BOGAEV: Well, he had a tragic story.

Mr. FURST: Oh, a terrible story. He was born in a shtetl in Galicia;
converted to Catholicism; became a Royalist; fought in the Austro-Hungarian
army; finally had to run in 1933 when Hitler rose to power in Germany, saying
to a friend, as he ran, `One always flees from a burning house.' That was his
line about it. He then went to Paris and proceeded, basically, to drink
himself to death and died of drink, really, in 1939, I believe. I hope I have
that right. He did his drinking in a bar called the Tournot(ph). I have a
photograph of it, actually. And that was his story. And along the way, he
wrote magnificent books about exile. He wrote--his famous book is "The
Radetzky March," which I recommend to everybody. It's a wonderful book about
the period and about the way people were during the period. "Flight Without
End" he wrote; also very good.

BOGAEV: Talking about him, it sounds as if you have a very personal
connection to him.

Mr. FURST: I feel a personal connection to him. I have a drawing of him on
the wall and sometimes I feel like--at least I want to try to finish some of
the books that he never got to write. You get a sense during the World War II
period, which is to say '33 to '44, of unfinished work, of paintings
unpainted, novels unwritten, poems unwritten. And I think that's part of what
got me to start writing these books in the first place.

BOGAEV: I'm talking with novelist Alan Furst. He writes spy novels set in
the Nazi era. His new book is "Kingdom of Shadows."

Alan, we're going to take a short break, and then we'll talk some more.

Mr. FURST: OK.

BOGAEV: This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BOGAEV: If you're just joining us, my guest is spy novelist Alan Furst. His
new book is "Kingdom of Shadows."

I think you started writing spy novels right when they were really considered
dead. Cold War's over.

Mr. FURST: That's me.

BOGAEV: Completely out of fashion.

Mr. FURST: I think so, but, you know, it's a funny thing. I was wondering
what kind of novel you could write about the period. And the thing about spy
novels--that at least some of the characters can be immensely knowing and
totally aware of certain things, of certain information that they would never
know in a different kind of book, so that you can always gloss the political
situation or the diplomatic situation. You can always have characters making
correct predictions about the future or incorrect predictions about the
future. But you can always show what people felt at the time, since people in
that world, by definition, have to be very, very sensitive to that.

BOGAEV: Well, you were a journalist in the beginning of your writing career.
You had also written a couple novels set in contemporary times. What got you
on to espionage?

Mr. FURST: Well, in a way, the difference between an espionage novel and a
murder mystery, which is what I'd written earlier, is that an espionage novel
allows room for such sophistication, comparatively speaking--political
sophistication. It allows for more international point of view. It allows
people to be in different countries. It's just a wider band.

BOGAEV: I think as a reporter for Esquire, you were on assignment to write a
story about a boat trip down the Danube, right?

Mr. FURST: That's...

BOGAEV: And I understand that your wife took you to the airport, and later,
when you came back, she said that the man she dropped off at the airport never
came back.

Mr. FURST: That's true.

BOGAEV: And that shortly after that, you began writing spy novels.

Mr. FURST: That's true. That's true.

BOGAEV: Well, what happened?

Mr. FURST: What happened to me was this: I meant for--on assignment for
Esquire only to go to the Danube delta, which begins in Romania. But at that
time, the Soviet Union controlled that little part of the world and they
insisted that you go to Moscow and spend rubles and then spend rubles to fly
on Aeroflot and then spend some more rubles in a hotel in Sinfropel(ph) and
then spend some more rubles on a passenger freighter that went across the
Black Sea. Well, I, you know--you didn't have a choice, so I did what they
said you had to do and landed in Moscow, September 1st, 1983, right in the
middle of the moment when the Korean airliner had just been shot down. And
people in the streets were shifting their eyes to heaven in expectation of
incoming rockets, which were not incoming and I knew they weren't--not over
this. But...

BOGAEV: Rockets from the Americans.

Mr. FURST: Yes, of course. And there was--I had never been in a totalitarian
country before and there was--at the time, Ronald Reagan was carrying on about
the evil empire, and I think a lot of people shrugged and took it with a grain
of salt, but he was right on the money. That is precisely what it was and it
was evil, but I didn't know how it was evil until I was there. And the way it
was evil--in that it--people lived completely under a police state. Every
act, everything they said to people, every moment of their day was, basically,
controlled or observed, and that's a very difficult way to live life. And
that shows in people. It shows in their faces. It shows in the way they
walk. It shows in the way they move around a city. And I was very, very
sensitive to it.

BOGAEV: What struck you in their eyes and in their faces and in the way they
walked?

Mr. FURST: They were scared. They got up in the morning trying to deal with
a government that basically said to them, `What have you done for me today?
And if it's the right thing, maybe you can have dinner.' That's kind of the
way that state functioned. It still may function that way, but, basically,
they were scared.

BOGAEV: What made you identify so intimately with the people in Moscow? You
don't speak Russian, right?

Mr. FURST: I do not speak a word of Russian. Well, yeah, maybe (foreign
language spoken). That's it. You've heard it. But essentially, one of the
things that hit me was that they were--people that, in a funny sense, I
recognized. They were not unlike people that I had grown up with on the Upper
West Side of Manhattan. They had similar body language. They--the faces were
not dissimilar. And in a strange way, because my family comes from there, I
had come to a place that was not, in any sense, home, but that was home at one
time to my family and you could just barely still make that connection in the
middle '80s.

BOGAEV: So when your wife says that a different person came back from this
trip, what does she mean? What had changed?

Mr. FURST: Well, what had changed was I was very angry at the way these
people were treated. It was unjust, it was unfair. And it stimulated that
part of me that writes novels. And I determined that I would sit down and
write novels about this and that that was the worthwhile thing to write about
and it meant a lot to me. And suddenly, I was a completely different writer
and perhaps somewhat of a different person in that I felt, now, a kind of
mission to say what went on and what went on in the past in these--in this
part of the world, which meant everywhere from France all the way over to
Moscow.

BOGAEV: So that part of you that writes novels is a political part or an
angry, angry part?

Mr. FURST: It's an angry poet. I don't know how to put it any better than
that. It's someone who feels that life probably ought to be lived in a decent
way; that people should have as much happiness as they can get and that when
you add Secret Police and all the apparatus of that kind of state, it just
makes life a great deal more difficult, so I guess, in a way, I was writing
about that. But it shouldn't be thought that I'm a political writer. These
are entertaining books. I want them to be entertaining books. And basically,
they follow a lot of the genre format, and whatever else may be true is
encapsulated and it's there for the reader if the reader wants it.

BOGAEV: While you were writing your first spy novel, "Night Soldiers," you
left the country with your wife and you moved to Paris.

Mr. FURST: Correct.

BOGAEV: What were you looking for in Paris?

Mr. FURST: I noticed that I could live in Paris. That's a funny way to say
it, but in fact, we were living in a place called Bainbridge Island,
Washington. We were somewhat bored living there after a number of years. And
we went, `Let's go and live in Paris. I can do what I do in Paris just as
well.' My wife left behind a career as a landscape designer and then
immediately became a landscape designer in Paris. When I asked her
about--before we left, I said, `How are you going to feel about this?' She
said, `Well, I'll feel terrible not doing what I do anymore and I'll probably
cry.' And she paused for a beat and then said, `But I'll be crying in Paris.'

BOGAEV: Did you figure in an idea about writing that you have to soak up the
aura of a place in order to write novels that are set in Europe?

Mr. FURST: I had lived in Europe before that and I thought that might
happen. But it wasn't so particularly that I simply wanted to live abroad. I
liked living abroad. I had lived abroad earlier, and it did work, however,
just precisely the way you suggest in that you turn certain street corners in
Paris and you're in 1938.

BOGAEV: Do you come upon ideas for your next novel in the course of your
research for one...

Mr. FURST: Absolutely.

BOGAEV: ...and do you have examples of that?

Mr. FURST: Yes, because when you read about one country in one period, by
definition, you're reading about other times and places, and my plots
basically propose themselves by stories told in books that I'm reading.
That's really where they come from. I believe I was working on the French
resistance, when it became clear to me, for example, that the Polish
resistance had a full-fledged intelligence service operating and the Polish
officer--my next book after "Dark Star" was a result of that. And "Kingdom of
Shadows" was based on really an observation of a map that I was using for my
previous book which was called "Red Gold." I noticed that war did not come to
Hungary until 1944, and I thought, `How did they do that?' At first I thought
it was an accident and then I began reading and discovered it was no accident
at all, that the Hungarians had tried desperately to keep away from the
conflagration and they had done it in a very clandestine kind of way. And the
story of what they tried to do is told in "Kingdom of Shadows."

BOGAEV: I'm curious if there's more information coming out from Eastern
Europe and the former Soviet Union that you use in your research?

Mr. FURST: All the time. It's very interesting. They keep writing books
about the period, they keep making revelations about the period. A lot of the
stories from that time just won't die because the truth about them has never
been told. For example, the story about Raul Wallenberg. It's back for
the umpteenth time and told again, and the Russians this time are saying,
`Well, here's the truth. This is absolutely what happened. Now we're going
to tell you, you know, for the final time.' But I bet that isn't true. I'll
bet you more will be told in time. So, yes, I do read those books and I read
them with great interest.

BOGAEV: Do you have a new book in...

Mr. FURST: I'm working on a new book which is about the Black Sea. It's
about Odessa. It starts out in Istanbul. Of course, it will go to Paris,
as all my books do. 'Cause Paris is, in a funny way, the heart of Europe at
that time and it's also the heart of these books. So, yes, I am working on
it. It's about Russian emigres and their particular fate in 1940, 1941, as
again, the boundaries changed and alliances changed.

BOGAEV: Alan Furst, I want to thank you very much for talking with me today
on FRESH AIR.

Mr. FURST: Thank you so much for having me.

BOGAEV: Alan Furst's new book is "Kingdom of Shadows."

Coming up, the work of Persian musician Kayhan Kalhor. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: Kayhan Kaylor's Persian spike fiddle music
BARBARA BOGAEV, host:

Some musicians can cross cultural barriers more easily than others, but as
music critic Milo Miles says, one never knows when an unfamiliar instrument or
a foreign voice will suddenly stop needing translation. Such was the case
with Kayhan Kalhor.

(Soundbite of spike fiddle music)

MILO MILES reporting:

Until last year, I had no particular affinity for the Persian spike fiddle
known as kamancheh. I knew it as a lean-sounding desert country ancestor of
the violin, but it did not have a player attached to it, so to speak. I'd
even heard Iranian Kayhan Kalhor, the most celebrated spike fiddler in the
world, play on two albums with the group Ghazal. They went right by me.
Well done, but only mildly diverting attempts to fuse Persian and Indian
traditions. Then I heard Kalhor's first solo album, "Scattering Stars Like
Dust." It's a long duet between kamancheh and tombak drum, divided into three
parts. First two parts, same response: mildly diverted. Then, bang. Kalhor
hits the third section, and soon, he's combining long and short phrases in a
hypnotic swirl at once, floating above infused with a fast 6-16 drum beat.
Kamancheh is forever transformed in my ears, and suddenly, I can hear Kalhor
singing every time he plays.

(Soundbite of spike fiddle music)

MILES: Kalhor was born in 1963. He was a child prodigy who studied with
various masters and began performing professionally at 13. He obviously has
deep curiosity about styles of music and very open ears. Beside the Ghazal
project, he has combined folk forms, particularly Kurdish, with Persian
classical. And on March 14th through 17th of this year, he will perform with
Yo-Yo Ma and the New York Philharmonic. In fact, his recent collaboration
with the revered singer Mohammad Shajarian, called "Night Silence Desert," is
an intricate mesh of Persian styles from different regions and times.

(Soundbite of "Night Silence Desert")

Mr. MOHAMMAD SHAJARIAN: (Singing in foreign language)

MILES: Kayhan Kalhor's outreach is obvious. And yet becoming attuned to a
musician does not guarantee a way into the music around him. The other
players on "Night Silence Desert" are superb, especially singer Shajarian.
But all of them remain more conceptual to me, more alien than Kalhor. This
has nothing to do with technique, perhaps not even soul. It does involve the
mysterious quality we call expressive. Whatever Kalhor has, it will keep me
following him.

BOGAEV: Milo Miles is a music writer living in Cambridge. Kayhan Kalhor is
part of the Masters of Persian Music Tour winding up in Boston on Saturday.
Kalhor performs with Yo-Yo Ma and the New York Philharmonic March 14th through
March 17th.

(Credits given)

BOGAEV: For Terry Gross, I'm Barbara Bogaev.

(Soundbite of music)
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