The Mask of Dimitrios by
Eric Ambler
pbk out April 99
(Pan)
at £5.99
Peace in Europe was demolished along with the Berlin Wall. No sooner had the
Soviet Bloc vanished from the maps, than we once again heard the familiar
place-names along the road to catastrophe - Serbia, Macedonia, Croatia - and
the familiar noise of competing empires carving up the Continent. In the
run-up to yet another pan-European war, everything is as it always was; only
the technology has changed. We are living through the 1930s again, and 1940
is coming up fast. Sounds like a good time to read Eric Ambler, doesn't it?
Pan's Classic Crime series includes three Amblers - Epitaph for a spy
is scheduled for Autumn 1999 - as cheap but decent paperbacks, with a short
introduction by Robert Harris. There is no doubt that in recent years, Ambler
has been more revered than read. Every writer concerned with political
intrigue cites Ambler as an influence - perhaps the seminal influence - but
how many people under the age of 50 do you know who've read him?
His first novel was published in 1936; he died in 1998. In a long career
he wrote nineteen novels as well as being an Oscar-nominated Hollywood film
scripter. As Harris points out, Ambler's fame was once so great that it is
extraordinary to realise that "a whole generation has grown up knowing almost
nothing about him".
Reading him for the first time now, all these years later, it wasn't
immediately obvious to me why Ambler is considered so important. These are
good books, certainly: dripping with that pre-war, storm-cloud atmosphere, in
which mildly cynical, unheroic Englishmen (there is no such place as
"Britain" in Ambler's world) criss-cross paths with a variety of cynically
idealistic foreigners, in the swaying corridors of trans-border trains or the
dimly lit corners of pathetically shabby nightclubs.
His characters are all big, irresistible and distinct. His writing is
fast but unhurried, full of intellect yet unpretentious and unfussy, and
sprinkled with marvellous comedy. His plots are probably best described as
serviceable vehicles for all of the above, as well as for Ambler's trademark
anti-war, anti-monopoly political observations.
But - and perhaps it's only because I'm so familiar with Ambler's
successors, his literary descendants - I wasn't strongly aware that I was
reading "classics". Then again, who cares? Anyone who reads Charles Dickens
because he wrote classics is going to miss 90% of the fun, and the same is
probably true of Eric Ambler. Don't read him because he's part of our genre's
heritage: read him because he knew how to write. "Dimitrios" is his most famous book - or title, at least - a 1939 story
of a crime novelist who becomes at first fascinated, and then dangerously
obsessed, with a notorious criminal named Dimitrios. The plot is a fairly
thin line, upon which are strung sparkling episodes involving spies,
assassins, the crooked underworld of several countries, and always, of
course, the coming world war. "Journey into fear" (1940) is far more satisfying as a thriller, its
story linear without being too predictable. An English engineer working for
an arms company is being hunted across Europe by secret agents of a hostile
power determined to prevent him filling his client's order. His only route of
escape is on a claustrophobic slow boat trip from Turkey to Genoa. But which
of his fellow passengers can he trust?
At the time of his death, says Harris in the introduction, Ambler was
looking forward to seeing his work in print again. I have no doubt that it
will stay in print now, until the nuclear warheads remainder it forever - or
until peace returns to Europe, however unlikely that might seem at the moment.
The Mask of Dimitrios by
Eric Ambler