That's a good description of the inadvertent heroes in the espionage novels of Alan Furst and of why, nearly 70 years after the events described in them, his books have an urgency that seems unimaginable in spy novels with a contemporary setting. These are stories of a time when the most heroic possible act was simply to stay conscious, to resist both the moral indifference Spender spoke of and the natural human tendency to assume that things won't get much worse.

So, in Furst's Europe of the '30s, the secret world of the espionage novel -- the passwords and hiding places, the people in low and high places whose jobs and day-to-day lives disguise other more desperate and daring lives, the ability to read the meaning of public events, to parse official language for signals to allies and enemies -- becomes, paradoxically, the only way to live, if not openly, then at least with awareness. Furst's characters feel the exhilaration and the burden of the realization that the history of humanity depends on them.

In his 1989 book "Wartime," Paul Fussell angered many people by writing, "There has been so much talk about 'The Good War' ... and the like, that the young and the innocent could get the impression that it was really not such a bad thing after all." Furst tries to unite that unpopular sentiment with his frank admiration for the bravery of the time and his love of its stories; he also has a provocateur's instinct for insisting that even when we're faced with the clearest moral choice, things are never as simple as they seem.

Furst is also a romantic. The titles of his cycle of novels -- six so far, set in Europe from 1934 to 1945 -- tell you that: "Night Soldiers," "Dark Star," "The World at Night," "Kingdom of Shadows." These books are full of elements that we've learned to treasure from movies of that period: ordinary heroes thrust into extraordinary circumstances who choose danger over their own safety, beautiful women using their charms to work as spies, secret lovers' trysts that carry the promise of loss even in their happiest moments, rendezvous of another kind conducted in shabby, out-of-the-way cafes and well-appointed brasseries. Intrigue breeds romance here.

The conventions are familiar, but Furst's talent for creating thumbnail sketches of his players, the attention he pays to detail -- what his characters eat and wear and read, the way the weather mocks or complements the dire circumstances -- makes everything seem newly minted. It's those other books and movies depicting wartime intrigue that feel clichéd, never mind that they came first. Furst writes with the vividness of an originator.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"