Honoré de Balzac

Born: Tours, France; May 20, 1799

Died: Paris, France; August 18, 1850

Also wrote as • Lord R’Hoone • Horace de Saint-Aubin

Types of plot • Espionage • police procedural • psychological • thriller • inverted

Contribution • Honoré de Balzac wrote his fictional works as the self-appointed secretary of French society. It was natural, therefore, that he should consider the police (both political and judicial), this newest and most efficient branch of modern, autocratic governments. He was in fact one of the earliest writers of French fiction to recognize the police as society’s best defender against subversives and criminals.Like members of other powerful and arbitrary organizations, Balzac’s policemen were shown to be relentless in their missions and cruel in their vengeance. Thus, he was less interested in police work as such than in the psycho-logical study of policemen of genius—not only for their Machiavellian cynicism and superior understanding of people, but also for their quest to dominate and rule the world. Such theories of vast conspiratorial associations and of intellectual power influenced later novelists, including Fyodor Dostoevski, Maurice Leblanc, Pierre Souvestre, Marcel Allain, and Ian Fleming, among others.

Biography • The eldest of four children, Honoré de Balzac was born on May 20, 1799, in Tours, France, where his father was a high government official. His mother inculcated in young Honoré a taste for the occult and for Sweden-borgian metaphysics. After his early studies, distinguished only by the breadth of his reading, Balzac attended law school while auditing classes at the Sorbonne.

Although he was graduated in 1819, he rejected a legal career and decided instead to write plays. His first work, a verse tragedy about Oliver Cromwell, was judged a failure by friends and family. Undaunted by their verdict, how-ever, Balzac began writing penny dreadfuls and gothic thrillers under various pseudonyms. Furthermore, he expected to become rich by establishing a publishing company, a printery, and a typefoundry; all three, in turn, went bankrupt and saddled him with insurmountable debts.

Not until 1829 did Balzac—using his real name—enjoy a modest success, with the publication of Les Chouans (1829; The Chouans, 1890). Driven as much by a need for money as by his desire to re-create the world, this new Prometheus wrote between 1829 and 1848 some one hundred titles that make up his monumental La Comédie humaine (The Comedy of Human Life, 1885-1893, 1896; best known as The Human Comedy). He also published several literary magazines, short on subscribers but long on brilliant analysis, as shown by his study of Stendhal in the September 25, 1840, issue of Revue parisienne. In addition, Balzac’s plays were usually well received by both critics and public, as were the essays, news-paper pieces, and Les Contes drolatiques (1832-1837; Droll Stories, 1874, 1891).In 1832, Balzac received a fan letter from the Ukraine signed “L’Ètrangère.” Thus began his life’s greatest love affair, with the cultivated Count-ess Èveline Hanska. Besides pursuing a voluminous correspondence, the lovers met as often as opportunity and money allowed. 

Nevertheless, after her husband died in 1841, she continued to evade the marriage proposals of a financially strapped and increasingly ill Balzac (he suffered from cardiac hypertrophy), until March 14, 1850, when she finally married him. After the couple returned to Paris on May 21, Balzac’s condition quickly worsened. He died soon after, on August 18, 1850.

Analysis • Honoré de Balzac first practiced his craft by imitating, often slavishly, the sensational romances of Ann Radcliffe, Charles Maturin, and Mat-thew Lewis, with their fantasies of the grotesque and the horrible. Balzac also learned that fiendish wickedness and sadistic sensuality can heighten the plea-sure of a thrill-seeking public. Although he never officially acknowledged his early efforts, he incorporated many of their lessons in his later works, especially in the tales of the supernatural and criminal.Balzac’s magnum opus, The Human Comedy, is a vast and detailed panorama of French society of the first half of the nineteenth century. In fact, Oscar Wilde has remarked, “The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.” In nearly one hundred novels and stories evolve some two thousand fictional characters, who appear in various milieus, types, and professions, from Paris to the provinces, from old maids to poor relations, from lawyers to policemen and gangsters. 

Corentin is rightly the most famous of Balzac’s policemen. He enters the scene in The Chouans, the first book to which Balzac signed his name, adding the self-ennobling particle de. Set in Brittany in 1799, the novel is a mixture of sentimental love story and political police intrigue. The obvious villain of the piece is Corentin, the spiritual, if not natural, son of Joseph Fouché, Napoleon Bonaparte’s minister of police. In spite of his youth (he was born around 1777), Corentin already possesses all the qualities required of a great secret agent, since he has learned from his mentor and chief how to tack and bend with the wind. Everything about him is wily, feline, mysterious: His green eyes announce “malice and deceit,” he has an “insinuating dexterity of address,” he seeks to obtain respect, and he seems to say, “Let us divide the spoil!”

Always willing to suspect evil motives in human behavior and too clever to hold to only one position, Corentin already embodies Balzac’s concept of the superior being, although in elementary form. To succeed, Corentin rejects no methods; he knows well how to use circumstances to his own ends. Further-more, morality always changes and may not even exist, according to this modern Machiavellian, who is unconcerned with praise or blame: “As to betraying France, we who are superior to any scruples on that score can leave them to fools. . . . My patron Fouché is deep . . . enough, [and] he has always played a double game.” To this conception of life can be added a natural bent for everything that touches police work. The idea, so dear to Balzac, that “there are vocations one must obey,” is a kind of professional determinism that forces one to turn to what is already possible within oneself and to act and think accordingly.

Although not a series character in the accepted sense, Corentin does reappear in several other novels, particularly in Une Ténébreuse Affaire (1841; An Historical Mystery, 1891), in which he again acts in several covert operations, this time to protect various cabinet members unwisely involved in an at-tempted coup against Napoleon Bonaparte, and in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1838-1847; The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, 1895). 

In The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, he plays the role of a private detective and works more to keep in practice than out of financial need.An Historical Mystery offers an excellent example of a ruthless police force, temporarily foiled perhaps but mercilessly victorious in the end. The novel also reveals that the political police are so unprincipled that they doctor the evidence and manipulate the facts in order to frame the innocent and thereby hide their own crimes. If, in the process, their victims are executed or imprisoned, it only serves to reinforce the notion of a powerful police, made all the more so when self-interest or wounded pride is at stake:

In this horrible affair passion, too, was involved, the passion of the principal agent [Corentin], a man still living, one of those first-rate underlings who can never be re-placed, and [who] has made a certain reputation for himself by his remarkable exploits. Finally, Balzac’s own worldview is made evident in the laying out of the ministerial plot and its subsequent cover-up. Indeed, the author of L’Envers de l’histoire contemporaine (1842-1848; The Brotherhood of Consolation, 1893) and Histoire des treize (1833-1835; The Thirteen, 1885-1886) loves to invent secret societies, either benevolent or nefarious, as a means of increasing the individual’s power or, more likely, that of the government, which he calls “a permanent conspiracy.” Because the political police are given a virtual carte blanche in the defense of the government and the ruling class, they are quick to take advantage of their status; they act arbitrarily and with impunity, often outside the law, thereby becoming so powerful that Balzac thought of them as a state within the state.

Corentin is ably assisted by Contenson, a virtuoso of disguise, and by Peyrade, a crafty former nobleman with a perfect knowledge of aristocratic manners and language. Twenty years after their success in An Historical Mystery, all three are reunited in The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans. Following a series of fantastic adventures replete with poisoned cherries, hidden passage ways, rapes, and kidnappings—in short, all the melodramatic devices of Balzac’s apprenticeship—they are ultimately instrumental in thwarting the villain’s machinations.Quite different from the political police are the judicial police, for their primary function is to prevent crimes and arrest criminals. Both because of the niceties required by law and because of their official and overt role, they are depicted in Balzac’s novels as less sinister and frightening. 

Thus, their reputation is reduced, especially since even the well-known Sûreté seldom seems to succeed in apprehending thieves and murderers.It is not that these policemen have more scruples, but that they lack the immense powers of action at Corentin’s disposal. Unlike their political counter-parts, they rely mostly on agents provocateurs and on denunciations from citizens who, attracted by financial rewards or driven by passion, often aid in the capture of criminals. For example, it is thanks to Mlle Michonneau that Bibi-Lupin can arrest Vautrin, a convict escaped from the hulks of Toulon and hid-ing at Mme Vauquer’s boardinghouse.In addition to differences in their functions and methods, the judicial police attract a very particular type of individual: Many officers are either ne’er-do-wells or come from the ranks of supposedly reformed criminals. 

Whereas political agents show intelligence, perspicacity, and perverse cunning, those of the official forces are generally mediocre and easily duped, this despite the popular saw that it takes a thief to catch a thief. Among these latter, though clearly superior, is Bibi-Lupin. An interesting character, being himself a for-mer convict, Bibi-Lupin organized and has headed the Brigade de Sûreté since 1820.He first appears in Le Père Goriot (1835; Father Goriot, 1844). In it, upon the arrest of his former chainmate, he hopes that Vautrin will attempt to escape, which would furnish him with the legal pretext to kill his archenemy. This clever trick might well have worked if only Vautrin were not Vautrin and had not suddenly sensed the trap. In The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, the Sûreté chief will again be ordered to fight against Vautrin, who this time is disguised as Abbé Carlos Herrera as his part in an elaborate but foiled swindle. (This is the same case on which Corentin and his associates are working.)

Bibi-Lupin does in fact recognize Vautrin’s voice and a scar on his left arm, yet he cannot prove beyond a doubt that Herrera and Vautrin are indeed one and the same. Yet because of his experience with prisons, their special slang and mores, acquired during his own stays at Nantes and Toulon, Bibi-Lupin counts on the possibility that several inmates may unwittingly betray their leader. His strategy does not lack shrewdness, although it fails since the accused has immediately resumed his ascendance over his fellow gang-members. In a last attempt to unmask the false abbot, the police chief tries to make him betray himself by putting him in a cell with one of his former protégés.Once more, Vautrin sees through Bibi -Lupin’s ruse; he speaks only in Italian with his friend—to the indescribable rage of the spy who watches them, does not understand a word, and does not know what to do. Balzac creates a universe that is forbidden to the uninitiated, one in which the superior man frustrates his enemies’ schemes and achieves his ends thanks to a secret language, a code, a magic formula, a system that remains impenetrable to all outsiders.

This duel between two mortal rivals can only end in the defeat of Bibi-Lupin, who is obviously outclassed by Vautrin. Tricks that would have succeeded with lesser people do not work with such a formidable adversary. Furthermore, accused by his superiors not only of having stolen from arrested suspects but also, and especially, “of moving and acting as if you alone were law and police in one,” Bibi-Lupin realizes only too late his danger. Later, he can but watch as his former prison companion becomes his deputy and then replaces him six months later. That Vautrin, like any good and honest bourgeois, should retire after some fifteen years of police service filled with daring exploits—during which time he acted as Providence incarnate toward those his unorthodox methods had saved from ruin or scandal—is ironic, considering his view of the world.

Vautrin is the master criminal of The Human Comedy. Like all fictional criminals of genius, he wants much more than the vain satisfactions that money brings. He seeks above all to dominate, not to reform, a society which he de-spises and whose hypocritical middle-class morality he scorns. “Principles don’t exist, only events. Laws don’t exist, only circumstances,” he explains to an all-too -attentive Eugène de Rastignac in Father Goriot. Such lucidity and cynicism, combined with an inflexible will, have led this satanic “poem from hell” to consider crime the supreme revolt against an intrinsically unjust world—a revolt further intensified by his homosexuality.

In the end, however, Vautrin goes over to the other side and becomes head of the Sûreté, just as his model, François-Eugène Vidocq had done. Vidocq, whose mémoires had been published in 1828-1829, was a good friend of Balzac and often told him of his police adventures or his prison escapes, as numerous as they were extraordinary. Besides Vidocq, Vautrin is said to resem-ble other historical figures such as Yemelyan Pugachov and Louis-Pierre Louvel, a result of Balzac’s technique of using historical originals, which he re-interprets, re-creates, and ultimately transforms.

Vautrin does not believe that there are insurmountable barriers between the police and the underworld, and it does not disturb him to “supply the hulks with lodgers instead of lodging there,” as long as he can command: “In-stead of being the boss of the hulks, I shall be the Figaro of the law. . . . The profession a man follows in the eyes of the world is a mere sham; the reality is in the idea!”In Honoré de Balzac’s opinion, police work does not consist of tracking down clues, questioning suspects, and solving crimes, but rather of arresting subversives, real or imagined, solely out of political necessity. Although he admires the nobility and courage of those who resist and finds his political operatives and their methods odious, Balzac recognizes that, regardless of the number of innocent men and women crushed in their path, they must all play their essential part in the eternal struggle between Order and Chaos.

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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.

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Margery Allingham

Born: London, England; May 20, 1904

Died: Colchester, Essex, England; June 30, 1966

Types of plot • Amateur sleuth • espionage • police procedural • thriller Principal series • Albert Campion, 1929-1969.

Principal series characters • Albert Campion, an aristocrat, University of Cambridge graduate, and amateur sleuth, was born in 1900. 

At the beginning of the series he is a flippant young man, but as the series progresses, Campion matures, marries Lady Amanda Fitton, and becomes a father. Thin, pale, well bred, well tailored, he is the kind of man whom no one clearly remembers. Campion’s seeming vacuity masks his brilliant powers of observation and deduction. A considerate and honorable person, he is often referred to as a kind of uncle, in whom everyone confides. Although his full name is never dis-closed, Allingham indicates that Campion is the younger son of a duke.

•Amanda Fitton, later Lady Amanda Fitton, eventually becomes Cam-pion’s wife. Amanda is first introduced in Sweet Danger (1933) as a teenage girl with mechanical aptitude. When she reappears several years later, Campion and the cheerful, daring young woman first pretend to be engaged. As their relationship develops, they proceed to a legitimate engagement and finally to marriage. When Albert returns from the war at the end of Coroner’s Pidgin (1945), Amanda introduces him to her wartime achievement, their three-year-old son Rupert, who continues to appear in later books and at the end of the series is a graduate student at Harvard University. Amanda becomes an air-craft designer, and even after marriage she continues to rise in her firm, finally becoming a company director.

•Magersfontein Lugg, Campion’s valet, is a former convicted cat bur-glar whose skills and contacts are now used for legal purposes. A bona fide snob, Lugg tries unsuccessfully to keep Campion out of criminal investiga-tions and up to the level of his ducal forebears.

Contribution • Along with Ngaio Marsh, Nicholas Blake, and Michael Innes, Margery Allingham was one of those writers of the 1930’s who created detectives who were fallible human beings, not omniscient logicians in the Sherlock Holmes tradition. Her mild-mannered, seemingly foolish aristocrat, Albert Campion, can miss clues or become emotionally entangled with unavailable or unsuitable women. Yet, though his judgment may err, his instincts demonstrate the best qualities of his class. Although Allingham is noted for her careful craftsmanship, for her light-hearted comedy, for her psychological validity, and for such innovations as the gang leader with an inherited position and the inclusion of male homosexuals among her characters, she is most often re-membered for her realistic, often- satirical depiction of English society and for the haunting vision of evil which dominates her later novels.

Biography • Margery Louise Allingham was born on May 20, 1904, the daughter of Herbert John Allingham, an editor and journalist, and Emily Jane Hughes, her father’s first cousin, who also became a journalist. By the time of her birth, the family lived in Essex, where every weekend they entertained a number of other journalists. Although Allingham’s parents reared two other children, she spent many of her childhood hours alone, often writing. At seven, Allingham published a story in the Christian Globe, a publication of which her grandfather was editor. That year she went away to the first of two boarding schools; she left the second, the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge, when she was fifteen.Finally, she enrolled in the Regent Street Polytechnic in London as a drama student, but her first novel, Blackkerchief Dick: A Tale of Mersea Island (1923), an adventure story set in Essex, had already been accepted for publication, and when her friend Philip (Pip) Youngman Carter persuaded her that her talents were more suited to writing than to acting, she left school to work on another novel. In 1927 she married Youngman Carter, who had become a successful commercial artist.

With the publication of her first mystery novel, The White Cottage Mystery, in 1928, Allingham settled into her career. In The Crime at Black Dudley (1929), she introduced Albert Campion, the amateur detective who was to appear in all of the mystery novels which followed.

In 1929, Margery Allingham and her husband moved to Essex; in 1934, they purchased their own home, D’Arcy House, expecting to live and work quietly in the little village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy. World War II soon broke out, however, and with Essex an obvious invasion target, Allingham became active in civil defense, while her husband joined the army. Her autobiographical book The Oaken Heart (1941) describes the fear and the resolution of Britons such as herself during the first months of the war. In 1944, Allingham returned to her mysteries. With periodic visits to their flat in London, she and her hus-band lived in D’Arcy House for the rest of their lives. Between 1929, when she wrote the first Campion mystery, and her early death of cancer on June 30, 1966, Allingham worked steadily, averaging almost a volume a year, primarily novels but also novellas and collections of short stories. Before his own death in 1970, her husband completed Cargo of Eagles (1968) and wrote two additional Campion novels.

Analysis • After her pedestrian story of police investigation, The White Cottage Mystery , which she later removed from her list of works, Margery Allingham hit upon a character who would dominate her novels and the imaginations of her readers for half a century. He was Albert Campion, the pale, scholarly, seemingly ineffectual aristocrat whom she introduced in The Crime at Black Dudley. As Margery Allingham herself commented, the changes in Campion’s charac-ter which were evident over the years reflected changes in the author herself, as she matured and as she was molded by the dramatic events of the times through which she lived.

When Allingham began to write her novels in the 1920’s, like many of her generation she had become disillusioned. Unable to perceive meaning in life, she decided to produce a kind of novel which did not demand underlying commitment from the writer or deep thought from the reader, a mystery story dedicated to amusement, written about a witty, bright group of upper-class people who passed their time with wordplay and pranks—and occasionally with murder. In Allingham’s first novels, Albert Campion is somewhat like P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster, pursuing one girl or another while he at-tempts to outwit an opponent.

The fact that the opponent is a murderer is not particularly significant; he is an intellectual antagonist, not a representative of evil. Furthermore, most of the action itself is comic. In Look to the Lady (1931), for example, a formidable country matron abandons her tweeds and pearls for the garb of a mystical priestess, presiding over the rites of the Gyrth Chalice. In her costume, she is hilarious, a target of satire; when she is found dead in the woods, she is of far less interest, and the solution of her murder is primarily an exercise of wit, rather than the pursuit of justice.

With Death of a Ghost, in 1934, Allingham’s books become less lighthearted but more interesting. Her prose is less mannered and more elegant, her plots less dependent on action and more dependent on complex characterization, her situations and her settings chosen less for their comic potentiality and more for their satiric possibilities. Death of a Ghost is the first book in which Allingham examines her society, the first of several in which the world of her characters is an integral part of the plot. Before the murder takes place in Death of a Ghost, Allingham must create the world of art, complete with poseurs and hangers-on, just as later she will write of the world of publishing in Flowers for the Judge (1936), that of the theater in Dancers in Mourning (1937), and finally that of high fashion in The Fashion in Shrouds (1938).

Just as Allingham becomes more serious, so does Albert Campion, who abandons even the pretext of idiocy, becoming simply a self-effacing person whose modesty attracts confidences and whose kindness produces trust. In Sweet Danger he had met the seventeen-year-old mechanical genius Amanda Fitton. After she reappears in The Fashion in Shrouds, Campion’s destiny is more and more linked to that of Amanda. If she is good, anyone who threatens her must be evil. Thus, through love Campion becomes committed, and through the change in Campion his creator reflects the change in her own attitude.

With the rise of Adolf Hitler, it had become obvious that laughter alone was not a sufficient purpose for life. Even the more thoughtful social satire of Allingham’s last several books before Death of a Ghost was inadequate in the face of brutality and barbarism. Only courage and resolution would defeat such unmistakable evil, and those were the qualities which Allingham drama-tized in her nonfiction book about her own coastal Essex village in the early days of the war; those were also the qualities which Albert Campion exhibited in the wartime espionage story Traitor’s Purse (1941). 

In that thriller, the forces of evil are dark, not laughable, and the traitorous megalomaniac who is will-ing to destroy Great Britain in order to seize power over it is too vicious, too threatening, to evoke satire. Like his country, Albert Campion must stand alone against the odds; with symbolic appropriateness, he has just awakened into bewilderment, aware only that civilization is doomed unless he can de-feat its enemies before time runs out.

With Traitor’s Purse, Allingham abandoned the mystery form until the war was nearly won and she could bring Campion home in Coroner’s Pidgin. Al-though for the time being evil had been outwitted and outgunned, Allingham comments that she could never again ignore its existence. The theme of her later novels is the conflict between good and evil. Such works as The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) and Hide My Eyes (1958) are not based on the usual whodunit formula; early in those books, the criminal is identified, and the problem is not who he is but how he can be caught and punished.From his first appearance, Campion has worn a mask. 

In the early, light-hearted comic works, his mask of mindlessness concealed his powers of deduction; in the satirical novels, his mask of detachment enabled him to ob-serve without being observed; in the later works, as a trusted agent of his government, Campion must carefully conceal what he knows behind what-ever mask is necessary in the conflict with evil. Clearly the change in Campion was more than mere maturation. As Allingham’s own vision of life changed, her view of the mystery story changed, and her detective Campion became a champion in the struggle against evil.

The qualities of Margery Allingham’s later works are best illustrated in The China Governess (1962) . The first words of the novel are uttered by a police-man: “It was called the wickedest street in London.” Thus, the conflict of good and evil, which is to constitute the action of the book, is introduced. Although the Turk Street Mile has been replaced by a huge housing project, the history of that street will threaten the happiness and the life of Timothy Kinnit. Kinnit, who has recently become engaged, wishes to know his real origins. He was a child of the war, a man who had appeared as a baby among a group of evacuees from Turk Street and was casually adopted by the kindly Eustace Kinnit.

As the novel progresses, past history becomes part of the present. It is in the new apartment house on the site of old Turk Street that a brutal act takes place, the killing of a decent old woman. Yet evil is not confined to Turk Street. During the war, it had followed the evacuees to the Kinnit house in Suffolk, where an East End girl callously abandoned the baby she had picked up in order that she might be evacuated from London, a baby whose papers she later used to obtain money under false pretenses. The highly respectable Kinnit family has also not been immune from evil. 

In the nineteenth century, a governess in the Kinnit family supposedly committed a famous murder and later killed herself. For one hundred years, the family has kept the secret which is exposed in The China Governess: that the murder was actually committed by a young Kinnit girl. At the end of the book, another murderess is unmasked, ironically another governess who is masquerading as a wealthy Kinnit relative and who is finally discovered when she attempts to murder Basil Toberman, a socially acceptable young man who has spitefully plotted to destroy Timothy Kinnit. Thus a typical Allingham plot emphasizes the pervasiveness of evil, which reaches from the past into the present and which is not limited to the criminal classes or to the slums of Lon-don but instead reaches into town houses and country estates, pervading every level of society.

The China Governess also illustrates Margery Allingham’s effective descriptions. For example, when the malicious Basil Toberman appears, he is “a blue-chinned man in the thirties with wet eyes and a very full, dark- red mouth which suggested somehow that he was on the verge of tears.” Thus Allingham suggests the quality of bitter and unjustifiable self- pity which drives Toberman to evil. Later, an intruder who emerges from the slums is described in terms which suggest his similarly evil nature: “He was tall and phenomentally slender but bent now like a foetus. . . . He appeared deeply and evenly dirty, his entire surface covered with that dull iridescence which old black cloth lying about in city gutters alone appears to achieve.”

Allingham’s mastery of style is also evident in her descriptions of setting. For example, on the first page of The China Governess she writes with her usual originality of “The great fleece which is London, clotted and matted and black with time and smoke.” Thus metaphor and rhythm sustain the atmosphere of the novel. Similarly, when the heroine is approaching Timothy’s supposedly safe country home, the coming danger is suggested by Allingham’s description of “a pair of neglected iron gates leading into a park so thickly wooded with enormous elms as to be completely dark although their leaves were scarcely a green mist amid the massive branches.”

If evil were limited to the London slums perhaps it could have been controlled by the police, admirably represented by the massive, intelligent Superintendent Charles Luke. When it draws in the mysterious past and penetrates the upper levels of society, however, Luke welcomes the aid of Albert Cam-pion, who can move easily among people like the Kinnits. In the scene in which Campion is introduced, Allingham establishes his usefulness. Quietly, casually, Campion draws Toberman into an unintentional revelation of char-acter. 

Since the heroine, who is eavesdropping, has already heard of Campion’s sensitivity and reliability, she is ready to turn to him for the help which he gives her, and although he is not omniscient, he sustains her, calms her excitable fiancé, and brilliantly exposes the forces of evil.Because Margery Allingham builds her scenes carefully, realistically describing each setting and gradually probing every major character, the novels of her maturity proceed at a leisurely pace, which may annoy readers who prefer the action of other mysteries. Margery Allingham is not a superficial writer. Instead, because of her descriptive skill, her satiric gifts, her psychological insight, and her profound dominant theme, she is a memorable one.

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