There is no such thing as a good old-fashioned spy story.

The best, especially the novels of John le Carré, focus on the cracks in the system, double agents like Kim Philby who did more damage from within than the enemy could manage on the other side. Some look into the margins of history, digging out improbable subplots, like “Operation Mincemeat,” a book about the disinformation campaign British intelligence created to mislead Hitler about the invasion of Sicily. The FX television series “The Americans” looks at cold war espionage from the Soviet point of view: the heroes are two K.G.B. agents living undercover in Reagan’s America.

So it’s almost a shock to find that the hero of “Spies of Warsaw,” assigned to keep an eye on Germany before World War II, doesn’t have a secret agenda behind his official secret agenda. This two-part series that begins on Wednesday on BBC America is based on an Alan Furst novel of the same title, and it is true to the original in story and in spirit: it’s an enjoyable, straightforward espionage tale without a lot of twists or extra layers.

In tone and atmosphere, it is a little like the first season of “The Hour,” though that BBC series was a more richly imagined thriller that wove espionage into a deeper look at British society — and the advent of television news — in its postwar letdown.

“Spies of Warsaw,” which begins in 1937, is set amid candelabras and barbed-wire fences in Poland, France and Germany, and brackets Polish demimondaines, German industrialists, SS officers, Bolsheviks, Jewish refugees and French military officers. Yet somehow the pace is sedate, and the supposedly exotic characters cozily familiar.