In September 1938, Warner Bros. star Frederic Stahl crosses the Atlantic by luxury liner to shoot a film in Paris titled “After the War,” just as Germany is about to plunge Europe into a devastating conflict.

With his poise, soft baritone voice and reassuring manner, Stahl is a familiar figure on the screen if not a major star. Although the hero of Alan Furst’s historical spy novel “Mission to Paris,” tends to be typecast, the roles he is suited for have made him an audience favorite.

“He could play the sympathetic lawyer, the kind aristocrat, the saintly husband, the comforting doctor, or the good lover – the knight not the gigolo,” Furst writes. “…Mostly he played a warm man in a cold world. And, if all of his movies were taken together, Frederic Stahl was not someone you know, but somebody you would very much like to know.”

Stahl is not just an actor with understated charisma, he is adept at the more mundane off-camera demands of his odd profession: fending off adoring fans, keeping his good side toward the camera and handling run-of-the-mill celebrity interviews. What he is not prepared for, returning to France eight years after he left to find fame and fortune in America, are the poisonous political intrigues swirling through Paris as it slouches toward war.

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Author Talk June 14 6:30 p.m.
ALAN FURST
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The trouble begins even before he arrives, when his leading role in the film – the story of three French Foreign Legionnaires who try to make it home after World War I – draws the unwanted attention of agents of the Ribbentropburo, the political warfare unit of the Reich’s Foreign Ministry.

The French capital is riddled with German spies. And several scramble to recruit Stahl to join the ranks of French celebrities, politicians, publishers and executives who are handsomely paid by the Reich as what are known in the intelligence world as “agents of influence.” In Washington, they might be called lobbyists.

Their task is to denounce as warmongers those who would rearm France and to preach instead that appeasement of Hitler’s ambitions is the only way to avoid another catastrophic continental war.

Pressed to Legitimize the Regime

One of the strengths of the novel is its description of the Nazi thugocracy’s craving for the respect of the world, even as it persecutes citizens at home and bullies governments abroad.

German agents use flattery, blackmail and threats of violence to recruit Stahl to serve as judge at a Berlin festival of fascist-themed feature films about mountain climbers.

Stahl’s presence at the festival is a trifling matter in the larger scheme of things, but one of great importance to a regime eager to prove its legitimacy to itself as well as others.

He resists cooperating at first. But he finally agrees after a diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Paris suggests that the White House might find it useful to send him to Berlin. The real intrigue begins in the German capital, when the actor meets Olga Orlova, a Russian émigré and a member of the elite circle surrounding Hitler. She may or may not be a Soviet spy. And she has secrets to sell.

As with several of Furst’s other novels, the appeal of “Mission to Paris” hinges on its vivid characters, carefully rendered historical setting and overall atmosphere rather than an intricate plot. Readers of Furst’s spy thrillers are invited to live vicariously, and in Stahl, the adept author has invented a character with a life that most of the rest of the world can only dream about.

A Man of Principals – and Pleasures

Stahl is not a superman like James Bond, tasked with saving the world, or a wounded warrior out of a John Le Carre novel, battling his demons as he seeks a path out of spying’s wilderness of mirrors. But he has strong principles, a fair amount of guts and is smart enough to know when he is onto a good thing.

At one point, dining with his Nazi tormentors at Maxim’s, he finds himself sipping a classic wine, Chateau Margaux 1899. Sadly, this once-in-a-lifetime oenophillic experience is ruined by the brutish company. “Yes, Stahl thought, Chateau Margaux was transcendent – if only he’d been with a lover or with friends, he would have enjoyed it.” The principled but pragmatic actor sternly tells the Germans he never wants to see them again, but only after finishing his exquisite meal.

When he quaffs dark Alsatian beer with a Russian émigré journalist, meanwhile, his enjoyment knows no bounds. He stays in fine hotels, eats at famous restaurants and attends glittering diplomatic soirees. And of course the famous actor enjoys the company of beautiful women, hooking up with a mischievous heiress, Kiki de Saint Ange shortly after arriving in Paris.

In one of the book’s love scenes, she plays his leading lady in an illicit interlude in the back row of a movie theater.

While Stahl dallies with Kiki, he finds himself increasingly attracted to the dark, troubled Renate Steiner, German émigré and costume designer for “After the War.” Exiled from her homeland, abandoned by her husband, she understandably fears getting burned and resists being pulled into Stahl’s glamorous orbit. But in the end, of course, she never has a chance.

Fascination with a Vicious Epoch

What makes the book more than light entertainment are Furst’s considerable literary skills, including his use of the historical material. The story of the rise of Nazi Germany, perhaps the first state to apply industrial management principles to mass murder, has never ceased to fascinate. We may even be in the middle of a revival in interest in that vicious epoch, at least judging by the popularity of Erik Larson’s “In the Garden of the Beasts,” a nonfiction account of the first years of Nazi rule in Berlin.

One of the most disturbing things about both “Garden” and “Mission,” perhaps, is their portraits of two Western societies that have lost faith in liberal democracy. In Garden, the “beasts” are the National Socialist thugs who seize control of a democratic state and proceed to rape it.

The France described in “Mission to Paris” still has its political freedoms, but is bitterly divided and, we know, doomed. Extremism has come to be considered a virtue rather than a vice. Some of the nation’s wealthiest families are bent on overthrowing the government. The left has concluded that democracy no longer works, and the right has decided that their adversaries aren’t just wrong, they’re evil. In some ways, the French no longer seem to care whether their country survives or not.

It’s a disturbing picture, and one that may remind some readers of aspects of America in the second decade of the 21st century.

But Furst’s fans shouldn’t worry. The author of “The Spies of Warsaw,” “The Foreign Correspondent” and other spy novels has spun another yarn, not a political diatribe.

First and foremost, he serves up guilty pleasures – exotic locales, delicious foods, beautiful women, diabolical Nazis ¬– with characteristic gusto. Only after you have enjoyed yourself at Maxim’s and the other great restaurants of Paris, and only on reflection, you might realize that “Mission to Paris” has also given you some food for thought.