As a
teenager in the 1960s I devoured crime and spy thrillers. I especially loved
the British spy thriller writers, such as Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, Len
Deighton, Frederick Forsyth and John le Carre.
And I’ve
read, and reread, nearly all of Eric Ambler’s fine thrillers, especially The Mask of Dimitrios, one of my favorite thrillers.
Neil Nyren
at CrimeReads.com offers a look back at this late, great thriller writer.
Eric Ambler
was the father of the modern thriller. That’s a big statement, but you don’t
need to take my word for it. John Le Carré called him “the source on
which we all draw,” and Len Deighton, “the man who lit the way for us
all.” Frederick Forsyth said he was the man “who took the spy thriller
out of the gentility of the drawing room and into the back streets where it all
really happened,” and Graham Greene declared him simply “unquestionably our
best thriller writer.” He won many Edgar and CWA Dagger awards, including
lifetime achievement honors from both, and in 1981, was made an officer of the
Order of the British Empire.
Before Ambler, international thrillers tended to be
dominated by such writers as John Buchan, Herman Cyril McNeile (known as
“Sapper”), and their many imitators. These books were often rousing adventures,
but filled with improbabilities, both of plot and character, plus a hearty
jingoism and a well of right-wing, Old World prejudice that would curl your
hair today.
Ambler was having none of it. The villains were totally implausible, he
wrote in his memoir, titled with typical Amblerian double-meaning, Here Lies, and the hero “could be a tweedy fellow with
steel-grey eyes and gun pads on both shoulders or a moneyed dandy with a taste
for adventure. He could also be a xenophobic ex-officer with a nasty
anti-Semitic streak. None of that really mattered. All he really needed to
function as hero was abysmal stupidity combined with superhuman resourcefulness
and unbreakable knuckle bones.”
Ambler’s heroes, especially in his brilliant run of
between-wars novels published between 1936 and 1940, are very unexceptional
sorts, the quintessence of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary
circumstances. They are often engineers or journalists or writers who stumble
unexpectedly into danger through a combination of bad judgment and bad luck,
and then have no choice but to try to dig themselves out of it on their own,
because no one is likely to help them. They are often solidly middle class,
raised in a world of black-and-white certainties that they discover has been
completely obliterated by an infinite variety of grays.
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