Eric Ambler

Born: London, England; June 28, 1909

Died: London, England; October 22, 1998

Also wrote as • Eliot Reed (with Charles Rodda)

Type of plot  • Espionage

Contribution • Eric Ambler has been called the virtual inventor of the modern espionage novel, and though this is an oversimplification, it suggests his importance in the development of the genre. When he began to write spy nov-els, the genre was largely disreputable. Most of its practitioners were defenders of the British social and political establishment and right wing in political phi-losophy. Their heroes were usually supermen graced with incredible physical powers and a passionate devotion to the British Empire, and their villains were often satanic in their conspiracies to achieve world mastery. None of the pro-tagonists in Ambler’s eighteen novels is a spy by profession; the protagonists are recognizably ordinary, and Ambler’s realistic plots were based on what was actually occurring in the world of international politics. In addition, be-cause he was a craftsman, writing slowly and revising frequently, he succeeded in making the espionage genre a legitimate artistic medium.Many of Ambler’s works have been honored. For example, Passage of Arms (1959) earned the Crime Writers Association (CWA) of Great Britain’s Gold Dagger and Crossed Red Herrings Awards; Dirty Story (1967) and The Levanter (1972) also won the Gold Dagger; and The Light of Day (1962) was awarded the 1964 Edgar for best novel by the Mystery Writers of America (MWA). In 1975 Ambler was named a Grand Master by the MWA and received the Diamond Dagger for Life Achievement from the CWA.

Biography • Eric Ambler was born in Charlton, South London, on June 28, 1909, the son of Alfred Percy Ambler and Amy Madeline Ambler, part-time vaudevillians. He attended Colfe’s Grammar School and in 1926 was awarded an engineering scholarship to London University, though he spent much of his time during the two years he was there reading in the British Museum, attend-ing law-court sessions, and seeing films and plays. In 1928, he abandoned his education to become a technical trainee with the Edison Swan Electric Company, and in 1931, he entered the firm’s publicity department as an advertising copywriter. A year later, he set himself up as a theatrical press agent, but in 1934, he returned to advertising, working with a large London firm.Throughout this period, he was attempting to find himself as a writer. In 1930, he teamed up with a comedian, with whom he wrote songs and performed in suburban London theaters. In 1931, he attempted to write a novel about his father. Later, he wrote unsuccessful one-act plays. In the early 1930’s, he traveled considerably in the Mediterranean, where he encountered Italian Fascism, and in the Balkans and the Middle East, where the approach of war seemed obvious to him.

Finally, in 1936, he published his first novel of intrigue, The Dark Frontier, quit his job, and went to Paris, where he could live cheaply and devote all of his time to writing. In 1938, he became a script consultant for Hungarian film director/producer Alexander Korda, and published six novels before World War II.In 1940, he joined the Royal Artillery as a private, but was assigned in 1942 to the British army’s combat photography unit. Ambler served in Italy and was appointed Assistant Director of army cinematography in the British War Office. By the end of the war, he was a lieutenant colonel and had been awarded an American Bronze Star. His wartime experience led to a highly successful career as a screenwriter. He later spent eleven years in Hollywood before moving to Switzerland in 1968. Meanwhile, he resumed novel writing with Judgment on Deltchev (1951), the first of his postwar novels. In 1981, he was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

Analysis • At the beginning of his career, Eric Ambler knew that his strengths were not in the construction of the ingenious plots required in detective fiction. As he was seeking to establish himself as a writer of popular fiction, his only course was the espionage thriller; its popularity in Great Britain was the result of public interest in the secret events of World War I and apprehension about Bolshevism. These concerns were enhanced by the most popular authors in the field—John Buchan, whose Richard Hannay was definitely an establishment figure, and Sapper (the pen name of H. Cyril McNeile), whose Bulldog Drummond stories were reactionary, if not downright Fascist, in tone.Ambler found neither their heroes nor their villains believable, and their plots, based on conspiracies against civilization, were merely absurd. Having seen Fascism in his travels in Italy, he was radically if vaguely socialist in his own political attitudes, and his study of psychology had made it impossible for him to believe that realistically portrayed characters could be either purely good or purely evil.

He decided, therefore, to attempt novels which would be realistic in their characters and depictions of modern social and political realities; he also would substitute his own socialist bias for the conservatism—or worse—of the genre’s previous practitioners.His first novel, The Dark Frontier, was intended, at least in part, as a parody of the novels of Sapper and Buchan. As such, it may be considered Ambler’s declaration of literary independence, and its premises are appropriately absurd. A mild- mannered physicist who has been reading a thriller suffers a concussion in an automobile accident and regains consciousness believing that he is the superhero about whom he has been reading. 

Nevertheless, the novel also reveals startling prescience in its depiction of his hero’s antagonists—a team of scientists in a fictitious Balkan country who develop an atomic bomb with which they intend to blackmail the world. Ambler’s technical training had made him realize that such a weapon was inevitable, and though he made the process simpler than it later proved to be, his subject was clearly more significant than his readers could realize.

Though he sought consciously in his first works to turn the espi-onage genre upside down, Ambler was quite willing to employ many of the elements used by his popular predecessors. Like Buchan’s Richard Hannay, his early protagonists were often men trapped by circumstances but willing to enter into the “game” of spying with enthusiasm and determination. In his next three novels, Background to Danger (1937), Epitaph for a Spy (1937), and Cause for Alarm (1938), he set his plots in motion by the device Buchan employed in The Thirty-nine Steps (1915). His naïve hero blunders into an international conspiracy, finds himself wanted by the police, and is able to clear himself only by helping to unmask the villains.What makes these novels different, however, is Ambler’s left -wing bias. The villains are Fascist agents, working on behalf of international capitalism, and in Background to Danger and Cause for Alarm the hero is aided by two very attractive Soviet agents. In fact, these two novels must be considered Ambler’s contribution to the cause of the popular front; indeed, one of the Soviet agents defends the purge trials of 1936 and makes a plea for an Anglo-Soviet alliance against Fascism.

Ambler’s most significant prewar novels, however, are A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939) and Journey into Fear (1940). The latter is very much a product of the “phony war” of the winter of 1939-1940, when a certain measure of civilized behavior still prevailed and the struggle against Fascism could still be under-stood in personal terms. The ship upon which the innocent hero sails from Istanbul to Genoa is a microcosm of a Europe whose commitment to total war is as yet only tentative. Ambler perfectly captures this ambiguous moment, and Graham, his English hero, is, in a sense, an almost allegorical representation of Great Britain itself, seeking to discover allies in an increasingly hostile world. 

A Coffin for Dimitrios is Ambler’s most important prewar work, a novel which overturns the conventions of the espionage thriller while simultaneously adopting and satirizing the conventions of the detective story. His protagonist, Charles Latimer, is an English writer of conventional detective stories. In Istanbul, he meets one of his fans, a colonel of the Turkish police, who gives him a foolish plot (“The butler did it”) and tells him about Dimitrios Mackropoulos, whose body has washed ashore on the Bosporus.

A murderer, thief, drug trafficker, and white slaver, Dimitrios fascinates Latimer, who sets out upon an “experiment in detection” to discover what forces created him. Latimer discovers, as he follows the track of Dimitrios’s criminal past through Europe, that Dimitrios is still alive, a highly placed international financier who is still capable of promoting his fortunes by murder. As Latimer comes to realize, Dimitrios is an inevitable product of Europe be-tween the wars; good and evil mean nothing more than good business and bad business. Nevertheless, when Dimitrios has finally been killed, Latimer returns to England to write yet another detective story set in an English coun-try house, even though the premises of his story—that crime does not pay and that justice always triumphs—have been disproved by Dimitrios.

Ambler’s career as a novelist was interrupted by World War II and by a highly successful career as a screenwriter. Among the many films he wrote are The Cruel Sea (1953), which won him an Oscar nomination; A Night to Remem-ber (1958), adapted from Walter Lord’s 1956 book about the sinking of the Ti-tanic , and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Several of his own novels were adapted into films, as well. Journey Into Fear was filmed in 1942, directed by and star-ring Orson Welles, and was re- adapted in 1974. Epitaph for a Spy (1938) was adapted to film in 1943 as Hotel Reserve , starring James Mason, and Background to Danger (1943) starred George Raft, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre. The Mask of Dimitrios, starring Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, was filmed in 1944, and The Light of Day was adapted as Topkapi in 1964.

When Ambler resumed writing novels after an eleven-year hiatus, the world had changed radically. In a sense, the world of the 1930’s, though con-fusing to Ambler’s protagonists, was morally simple: Fascism was an easily discerned enemy. By the early 1950’s, however, the atomic spies, the revelations of Igor Gouzenko, the Philby conspiracy, and the ambiguities and confusions of the Cold War made the espionage novel, in Ambler’s view, a much different phenomenon. For the most part, therefore, his later novels have nothing to do with the conflict between East and West and are usually set on the periphery of the Cold War—in the Balkans, the Middle East, the East In-dies, Africa, or Central America. Furthermore, the narrative methods in the later works are more complex, frequently with no single narrative voice, and the tone is sometimes cynical.

In 1950 Ambler began collaborating with Charles Rodda (under the pseudonym Eliot Reed) on five novels, but his own novels earned more attention. Judgment on Deltchev, his first solo postwar novel, was inspired by the trial of Nickola Petkov, who had been charged with a conspiracy to overthrow the Bulgarian government. Ambler set the novel in an unidentified Balkan country; while its political background is clearly presented as a conflict between “progressives” and reactionaries and though Deltchev is accused of attempting to betray his country to “the Anglo-Americans,” it has little to do with the larger concerns of the Cold War.

It was the result of Ambler’s effort to find a new medium for the espionage novel, and it went further than any of his prewar novels in developing the premises of Journey into Fear. There his protagonist’s problem was how to discover among a ship’s passengers someone he could trust; in Judgment on Deltchev, the plot to assassinate the prime minister is peeled away, layer by layer, as Ambler’s narrator, an English journalist, attempts to find out what really happened, again and again discovering the “truth,” only to see it dissolve as yet another “truth” replaces it.Ambler’s next two novels, which continued to exploit his interest in plots that are not what they seem, are of considerable interest, despite flawed endings. The Schirmer Inheritance (1953), about an American lawyer’s search for a German soldier who is hiding in Greece, where he fought for the Greek Communists after the war, is flawed by an unexplained change of heart by the young woman who accompanies the lawyer as his interpreter; she is manhandled by the German and yet suddenly and without explanation falls in love with him. In State of Siege (1956), set in a fictitious country in the East Indies, Ambler develops an apparently real love between his narrator, an English engineer, and a Eurasian girl and then permits him to abandon her when he finally is able to escape from the country.

After this shaky interlude, however, Ambler produced a series of novels which thoroughly explored the possibilities of the novel of intrigue and provided a variety of models for future practitioners.Ambler’s usual hero is an average, reasonable person, but in The Light of Day (1962) and Dirty Story (1967), he makes a radical turn. Arthur Abdel Simpson, his Anglo- Egyptian narrator, is an opportunist with few real opportunities. In The Light of Day, Simpson, who works as a guide in Athens in order to pursue his career as a minor thief and pimp, is caught rifling a client’s luggage and is blackmailed into cooperating with him. Later, when arms are found behind a door panel of the car he agrees to drive across the Turkish border, the Turkish police force him to cooperate with them. Simpson’s neutral position, in between two forces which in his view are equally exploitative and threatening, would seem to be Ambler’s comment upon the modern dilemma.

In this novel and in Dirty Story, in which Simpson is entangled first in the production of pornographic films and then in the politics of Central Africa but survives to become a trader in phony passports, the narrator may be odious, but he is also better than those who manipulate him, and his strategy—to tell people what they want to hear, to play opponents against each other, to survive as best he can—is, Ambler seems to suggest, the same, in a sense, that everyone has been using since 1945. 

This vision informs The Intercom Conspiracy (1969), probably Ambler’s most distinguished postwar novel. It is based upon an idea which appears frequently in Cold War espionage fiction—that the innocent bystander will find little to choose between the intelligence services of the two sides—while avoiding the mere paranoia which usually characterizes developments of this theme. It deals with the elderly, disillusioned heads of the intelligence services of two smaller North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries; they purchase a weekly newsletter, then feed its editor classified information which is so menacing in nature that the major intelligence agencies must pay for its silence. With this work, Ambler seemed to make the ultimate statement on espionage—as an activity which finally feeds on itself in an act of self-cannibalization.Ambler’s other postwar works continued to exploit the themes he had already developed, but one of them, The Siege of the Villa Lipp (1977), is a remark-able experiment, the story of an international banker who launders illegally acquired funds for a variety of criminals. 

Here Ambler translates the tactics of modern intelligence agencies into the terms of modern business practices, in a sense returning to the premises from which he worked in his earliest fiction. His descriptions of the way banking laws and methods can be manipulated are so complex, however, that the novel too often reads like an abstract exercise in economics.All Ambler’s novels develop what he has called his primary theme: “Loss of innocence. It’s the only theme I’ve ever written.” This seems to suggest his view of the plight of humanity in its confusing predicament during the period which has seen the rise and fall of Fascism, the unresolved conflicts of the Cold War, and the increasing difficulty of the individual to retain integrity be-fore the constant growth of the state. The methods which he has employed in the development of this vision, his great narrative skill, his lean and lucid prose, and his determination to anchor the espionage genre firmly within the conventions of modern literary realism, make his achievement the first truly significant body of work in the field of espionage fiction.