Django in Alan Furst's "Night Soldiers"

billyshakes

So I'm reading Alan Furst's 1988 spy novel, "Night Soldiers", set partly in 1930s Spain. I also happen to have just started learning Spanish.

Thus, I was excited when I got to a section that is a radio announcer announcing the start of his show:

"Hay veinte horas, y la hora para el jazz hot. La selección primera.....

Oh, cool, I thought...now I know the word for hot jazz, as I flipped the page on my kindle...

"..."In a Sentimental Mood," con Louis Vola tocando el violón, trum-trum-trum,..."

Hey, I know him! Cool...

"...Marcel Bianchi y Pierre Ferret en guitarras,"

Them too!

"Django Reinhardt en la guitarra sola, y, entonces, el grande Stephane Grappelli tocando el violín. Gusta bien, todo el mundo, gusta bien."

Quite a happy surprise!

Russell Letson

Furst is very good at period details--in fact, just a good writer, period. I've read Night Soldiers, but I don't recall the Django reference.

billyshakes

I'm only about a third of the way through the book, but I'm enjoying it well enough. I stopped the other night immediately after I read the part I posted above. When I resumed reading again last night, there was a narrative part where one of the characters reflects on the music she is hearing. Through her, Furst starts describing the spare arrangement of the tune vs. a big band arrangement. He speaks about the tempo with respect to how dancers would feel it (too fast for foxtrot, to slow for Charleston). Then he goes into the soloing styles of Django vs. Grappelli. He ends the paragraph with this sentence:

The two men were, Faye thought, opposites bound together, tenderness and cold passion. She wondered if they liked each other.

Maybe this is indicative of the level of detail Furst puts into his books and research? But the intense level of scrutiny and assessment spoke more to me of an author who appreciated jazz (and Django in particular) and was writing his impressions of their music writ large. These few paragraphs are a complete departure from the narrative plot and I can't believe they will feature as a crucial plot point in the future. Nevertheless, Furst did take the time to write Django into the book. I found several interviews where he said he got the idea for his historical spy novels by listenting to an old Django recording that transported him to the past. Maybe he's a Djangophile, lurking here on the board for years? Or maybe he'll find this thread at some point in the future? Either way, it'd be neat if he joined the conversation.

Russell Letson

Before he was a novelist, Furst was a journalist and particularly in love with Paris, which figures in most of his books. In fact, I think every one of the "Night Soldiers" books include a scene in or reference to a particular Parisian bistro where there's a bullet hole in the mirror over one of the booths and various accounts of how it got there.

It's worth keeping an eye out for the UK miniseries adaptation of The Spies of Warsaw, with David Tennant.