In a perfect world the trench coat-clad, fedora-topped author of the best-selling historical spy novels set in the run up to and including the Second World War, would have penetrated a thick Bay Area fog to join me for a cocktail and conversation–But it was an uncharacteristically hot pre-summer day in Marin County (suburban San Francisco.)

In a perfect world the trench coat-clad, fedora-topped author of the best-selling historical spy novels set in the run up to and including the Second World War, would have penetrated a thick Bay Area fog to join me for a cocktail and conversation–But it was an uncharacteristically hot pre-summer day in Marin County (suburban San Francisco.)

In The World at Night, Night Soldiers and The Foreign Correspondent  his evocations of Paris, even when inventing places achieve levels of verisimilitude that make you believe they actually exist.

TG: When did you first go to, Paris?
AF: I first went to Paris in the sixties. I didn’t have any money, especially and went with a girlfriend I’d been living with. We  worked at two jobs, saved all of our money and eventually got to Paris.

TG: Was that first experience one of those remarkable things?
AF: It was incredible-love at first sight!

TG: Was there something specific that resonated?
AF: It was a whole thing. The first night we went to a restaurant on the rue Bonaparte called Café des Beaux-Arts. It used to be very popular with people from Columbia (the school-not the country.) It was fabulous-not like anything I’d ever done before.And I just loved everything about it.

TG: Did you speak French at the time?.
AF: I had high school French and no shame-which is not a bad combination so I was happy to talk to people. I remember my first experience. We flew to London on a Columbia University Icelandic Airlines charter flight and T-then we took the train to Paris and I was afraid of getting into the First Class section of the train and getting thrown off.

So there was a French train conductor who like all French train conductors at the time looked alike- 5’3”, fat with black mustaches and I approached him and I said ”First Class” and he looked over my shoulder and through my forehead and I said it again and again and finally I said “Première Classe”  and he said:  “Ah, oui Monsieur” and away we went. That was the lesson: This is France, talk French.

TG: You’ve spent extended periods of time in Paris since then. When did you decide to go back and spend real time there?
AF: We were tired of Bainbridge Island (Washington.) I felt it would be a good thing to do at the time and Karen agreed with me. We burned our papers, gave away our clothes, sold our house and sold everything else. A friend of ours drove us to the airport in my wife’s pick-up which we hadn’t sold but did to her on the way to the airport. I wanted to write my novel there. I’d written four books but now I wanted to write a novel. I wrote it in Paris and what I wanted was exactly right–the most conventional, Hemingway sitting in cafés. I’m not very outlandish in Paris-I like what has always been liked-I love it.

TG: Where did you live in Paris at the time?
AF: In the Marais on the rue de Parc Royale in a duplex in an hotel particulier n 1987.

TG: So the Marais hadn’t really been discovered yet?
AF: It had been discovered.  The Guide Vert  said at the time was that it was ‘now home to bourgeois  artists and I thought That’s me!. Not so much what I was but what I wanted to be.. That was the group that moved in after the first wave of artists. You know what colonization is like in a n urban neighborhood. It’s no different in Paris than New York.

TG: Why the Marais?
AF: We were renting a furnished apartment in Karen was reading ads in Le Figaro and she said: “Here’s one at 16 rue de Parc Royale and we looked at each other Laurel & Hardy like and said: “This is rue 16 rue de Parc Royale and went running out the door downstairs to the guardian’s loge and asked if an apartment was being rented and she said yes, Baiiment B. Meanwhile other people were there but they didn’t know where batiment B was but I knew perfectly well where it was. I sped upstairs and ran down the hall to an open door, leaned in and told the real estate lady that we’d take it. She said you haven’t seen it and I said we live in the building and we want this apartment. And we stayed for seven years.

TG: It didn’t take you seven years to write the book-did it?
AF: I wrote two and half books. I finished The Polish Officer in Sag Harbor. I wrote Dark Star  and Night Soldiers in Paris.

TG: Where do you live in Paris today?
AF: In the sixth. Near L’Église St. Sulpice.

TG: Why the sixth?
AF: It’s the heart of Paris for me. I like it the best. I know all of the arguments and counter arguments for all of the arrondissements. I might have gone back to the fourth or the third but they’ve become very crowded and full of sleek shops where as the sixth there are tourists but still lots of Parisians. And silly things like Les Editeurs (rue de L’Odéon.). I like going there. The days of the Guide Rouge are over. My friends in Paris tell me that everyone eats in their own quartier. They try 10 places and pick two and when you show up you are connu. 

TG: Do you have a favorite café in the sixth?
AF: I like to eat at Le Rostand because it’s just good. We go to various paces depending on our mood. If you go towards Bon Marché there are a couple. The chicest place I know Coffee Parisien on the rue Princesse serves club sandwiches. When we lived in the Marais we used to love to go the Mexican place, La Perla. It’s till there and very good.

TG: Do you have a favorite café in the morning?
AF: No. We have coffee at home but I go out for bread and The Trib like everyone else.

TG: Kayser or Poliane?
AF: I have three boulangeries: A, B and C.  One’s closed Tuesday. One’s closed Wednesday and they’re different. One’s not so great but it’s close.

TG: Different breads at different boulangeries?
AF: That stuff lasts so long at our place. When I taught in Provence I was living in Sommieres midway between Nimes and Montpelier and I used to get pain de campagne. The baker made it twice a week- heavy dense, humid. It was quite wonderful especially with the right butter like buerre de motte in a block.  You don’t see it much any more. You have to go to the outdoor markets. It’s not packaged. It’s what the cheese dealers sell. It’s wonderful. I love it.

TG: Why did you decide that Paris had to be a character in your books and specifically Paris of the avant-guerre?
AF: If you like at the history of the last century, the center was really the 1930s and the rise of Hitler. The great thing about is that is so intensely dramatic: violence and extraordinary events precipitated by the clash between Marxism and Nazism. It was time when you could be a hero or a villain, or a fugitive or a victim. But you had to be something. There were no bystanders. For a novelist it was catnip or it was for me. I felt that I could portray it. I knew everything about it. I instinctively knew a lot about it.

TG: Where was your family from in Europe?
AF: Latvia. Three of my four grandparents came from Latvia.

TG: Do you feel that informed your sensibility about the period?
AF: I think so. We lived in Europe for a long time and America for only 80 years. So I still have European roots that come to life when I return to Europe as I kind of belong there in some way. I don’t feel guilty about. I am an American. I vote, I give money to politicians but nonetheless I am somewhat significantly European by instinct.

TG: You grew up on the Upper West Side (New York City) surrounded by Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, many survivors of the camps.
AF: Yes I was around it as a child. The Isaac Bashevis Singer refugees were sitting on park benches on Broadway and they lived in the Ansonia. It’s the Upper West Sides as Singer describes it. There were still dairy restaurants. Steinberg’s was still there and there still were Jews going to dairy restaurants. All of this is gone.

TG: It’s now Seinfeld not Steinberg.
AF: That’s very smart to say that. I think that’s really quite true. In some ways that’s the next step.

TG: My friend, the writer Cara Black describes her best Parisian friend’s mom coming back to her apartment during the occupation and finding the entire building empty- everyone including her family-shipped off to the camps.  On my last trip to Paris I went to the new Holocaust museum in the Marais and was awed by how a country that denied her complicity during the occupation was almost Germanic in their attention to detail in presenting all of the evidence to the contrary. Have you been there?

AF: Yes. They know how to do things. They do it right.

TG: In preparing for our conversation I read a few of your earlier novels and found references to some excellent writers who are not household names-especially Joseph Roth. Did you discover him early in your career?

AF: I knew about Joseph Roth early in my thirties, I read The Radetsky March.

TG: Was the reference intended as an homage to Roth?
AF: Absolutely. In one of my books the hero is reading The Radetsky March and I quote a paragraph. In my last book, Dark Voyage I quote a long, long quote from an unpublished Babel story. It was in his granddaughter’s biography of him.

TG: When you sit down to create your characters do you have certain historical figures in mind?

AF:  Sometimes. The second book I wrote was suggested by the existence of Ilya Ehrenburg. When I started to read his novels I thought this is an incredible character. How could you not put this character in a novel. Andre Szara In Dark Star  was based on Ilya Ehrenburg who lived on the rue de Cherche-Midi. And Casson, the film producer in The World at Night was based on a real-life producer and another character in the French resistance who was picked up for a clandestine trip back to London by a fishing trawler and got a half-mile off shore and thought of his fiancé who he was to marry in two weeks and jumped off the boat and swam back to shore.

TG: How has Paris affected your work?
AF: Nothing but good, Just being there and living and breathing it presents itself as a novelists’ paradise. All of the dynamics–the way it smells, the way it conducts itself, the way the women are, the way the men are, its’ history, the way the French think about things. They are funny, smart and ultimately very human. I really like it there. I like them. I’m a Francophile. I call myself a pathological Francophile.

TG: And finally, how has Paris affected your life?

AF: It’s my great pleasure. Some people like golf for me it’s all rolled up into a city. It functions a continuing self-renewing pleasure