Alan Furst's wildly atmospheric spy novels tell the stories of ordinary men who are called to make fateful choices in a dying Europe on the eve of the Second World War. The Spies of Warsaw (Random House), the tenth installment in his secret history of the 1930s, opens with two of the book's 23 spies making love: Edvard Uhl, a German engineer, dallies with a make-believe Polish countess provided by the French spymaster Jean-François Mercier de Boutillon, who entertains the real thing in the shower after a brisk game of tennis.

"There were probably great passionate love affairs in the French Resistance or the Polish Resistance," the 67-year-old novelist explains when I meet up with him at his house in Sag Harbor, New York, "because what do humans have to make themselves feel better?" Furst has a distinctive habit of substituting sex scenes for murders at the beginning of his books. When I suggest that the emphasis on the solace of sex rather than, say, drinking marks his work as the product of a distinctly Jewish approach to the spy novel, he laughs. "It never occurred to me to have them drinking," Furst says, reminding me that The Spies of Warsaw does include a scene of French spies smoking hash.

Furst's novels combine the research habits of a top-shelf historical novelist with a taste for psychic warfare that recalls the work of British writers like W. Somerset Maugham ("Ashenden, that's a fantastic novel"), Anthony Powell ("His books about the war are really spy novels"), and Evelyn Waugh. With the publication of Night Soldiers in 1988, followed by Dark Star three years later, Furst became a cult author whose work was passed around among a knowing readership; his novels had a habit of popping up in the right places, like the open-air arms bazaar at Peshawar or the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, where I encountered them in 1994.

Smoking a mid-afternoon cigarette and listening to Bartók in the writing shed behind his modest wood-frame house, Furst is a rumpled, lively man who seems comfortable with the knowledge that he will always be ever so slightly out of place in Sag Harbor, in Paris, or anywhere else he might choose to live — in other words, an echt New Yorker. (He grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side.) The wild hair on top of his head and the cheap black Casio watch on his wrist are reminders of his academic bent. The Post-it notes on the desk where we are sitting contain plot points for his eleventh spy novel, which will be set mostly in the vanished country of Yugoslavia. "Italy attacks — Oct. 28, 1940," one note reads. "April 6 — Germany invades through Bulgaria," reads another.