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Eric Ambler (1909-1998) - joint pseudonym Eliot Reed with Charles Rodda |
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English author, widely regarded with Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene as one of the pioneers of politically sophisticated thrillers. Eric Ambler published 19 novels under his own name and collaborated on four novels with Charles Rodda under the pseudonym Eliot Reed. Among Ambler's best works is The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), where a complex series of discoveries leads the hero, Charles Latimer, a British detective-story writer, to the realization that the man named Dimitrios is still alive and dangerous. During Latimer's search Ambler made allusions to the political situation in the Balkans, adding authenticity to the basic tale – topicality played a great role in the author's fiction. "Besides, here was real murder: not neat, tidy book-murder with corpse and clues and suspects and hangman, but murder over which a chief of police shrugged his shoulders, wiped his hands and consigned the stinking victim to a coffin. Yes, that was it. It was real. Dimitros was or had been real. Here were no strutting paper figures, but tangible evocative men and women, as real as Proudhon, Montesquieu and Rosa Luxemburg. The worlds of escape, the fantasies you created for your own comfort were well enough if you could live with them. But split the membrane that divided you from the real world and tha fantasies perished. You were free and alive; but in a world of frustration." (The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler, introduced by Simon Winder, illustrated by Paul Blow, London: The Folio Society, 2011, p. 102; first published by Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1939, U.S. title: A Coffin for Dimitrios, 1939) Eric Ambler was born in London, the first of three children of
Alfred Ambler, known as Reg, and mother, Amy Madeline Ambler (née
Andrews). They had been entertainers, and gained success at a local
level. Ambler himself also toured in the late 1920s as a music-hall
comedian and tried his hand as a playwright. In his youth, Fyodor
Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment made a deep impression on him. At school Ambler was a top student. He was awarded a
scholarship to attend Colfe's Grammar School in Lewisham. From 1924 to
1927 he studied engineering at
London University and took up an apprenticeship in engineering at the
Edison Swan Electric Company. Later, when the company became part of
Associated Electrical Industries group, he worked in its advertising
department. While on a cruise to the South of France in 1934, Ambler lost
money to a barman in a poker game. He spent a few hungry days reading
James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
And imagined assassinating the barman from a balcony with a rifle. In
the 1930s Ambler wrote avant-garde plays. By 1937 he was
the director of a London ad agency. After resigning he spent a period
in Paris and decided to devote himself to literature. The American
fashion correspondent, Louise Crombie, whom Ambler met in Paris, later
became his first wife. They divorced in 1958. Between the years 1936 and 1940 Ambler wrote six classic thriller novels – The Dark Frontier (1936), in which Ambler invented
"an atomic hand grenade", Uncommon Danger
(1937), about a reporter who gets involved in international intrigues, Epitaph for a Spy (1938), Cause for Alarm
(1938), a mixture of espionage and anti-fascist mystery, The Mask of Dimitrios,
and Journey into Fear (1940),
in which an Englishman, Mr Graham, ends up being hunted across wartime
Europe. Graham is an engineer working for an arms company, "a quiet,
likeable sort of chap, and generous with his whisky." On his business
trip to Istanbul he finds himself in the middle of a nightmare. Unknown
pursuers are threatening his life for unknown reasons. "Death, he told
himself, would not be so bad. A moment of astonishment, and it would be
over. He had to die sooner or later, and a bullet through the base of
the skull would be better than months of illness when he was old." The book was adapted for the screen in 1942, produced by Orson Welles' Mercury company, starring his friend Joseph Cotten. In one scene Everett Sloane (playing Kopeikin), says to Cotten, the armament engineer Howard Graham: "You're a ballistic expert, and you've never fired a gun?" "Well, I just never did," answers Cotten. Welles added to the story scenes of comedy and human interest. "The adventure and thrill part of it is already in the bag," he said to an RKO executive. (Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles by David Thomson, 1996, p. 197) Journey into Fear has often been cited as a major influence on Ian Fleming. When Ambler worked on The Mask of Dimitrios he had not been in the Balkans and he did not have any first-hand knowledge of the real life arms dealer, Sir Basil Zaharoff, who has many similarities with the enigmatic Dimitrios Makropoulos. All his knowledge of Balkan drug dealers and shady businessmen Ambler got from refugees he interviewed in Turkish cafes in Nice. In the screen adaption from 1944, directed by Jean Negulesco, Peter Lorre, an unconventional choice for the role, played Charler Latimer, named now Cornelius Leyden.
Epitaph for a Spy was filmed under the title Hotel Reserve (1944),
starring James Mason and Lucie Mannheim. In the story Monsieur Vadasse,
a teacher on vacation, is accused of espionage in France before WWII. Cause for Alarm
was set in Italy and again an innocent bystander, this time an
engineer, is cut off from routines. Through the literary form of the thriller Ambler examined international
politics big business, stating "it is not important who pulled the trigger but who
paid for the bullets". (Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film by Wesley Alan Britton, 2005, p. 25) In The Dark Frontier Professor Barstow says: "What else could you expect from a balance of power adjusted in terms of land, of arms, of man-power and of materials: in terms, in other words, of Money? . . . Wars were made by those who had the power to upset the balance, to tamper with international money and money's worth." Soviet characters were often depicted in a sympathetic light in Ambler's books. Like
many intellectuals in the 1930s, he had leftist sympathies, and
supported the Popular Front, However, Ambler never became a Communist. In
between attacking
blindness to threats of fascist ideology and nationalism, he developed
a hugely successful thriller formula, where the main character, usually
an ordinary
Englishman, an "innocent abroad" is drawn into a web of international
intrigue. (Basically a version of the "man-on-the-run" thriller,
introduced by John Buchan in The 39 Steps.) In his first books, Uncommon Danger and Cause for Alarm, the American-born Soviet agent named Andreas Prokovitch Zaleshoff was a supporting character:
"a broad-shouldered man of about thirty-eight, with brown, curly hair
that shot up at an angle of forty-five degrees from his forehead. His
clean shaven face was ugly, but not unpleasantly so." The amateur hero
of Uncommon Danger is a cosmopolitan journalist, not naive at all, and in Cause for Alarm he is an engineer, who accepts a job in Mussolini's Italy. In 1938 Ambler became a script consultant for Alexander Korda.
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact increased his estrangement from the leftist
political spectrum. Following the outbreak of World War II he joined
the Royal Artillery as
a private, but was
then assigned to a combat photographic unit. Ambler served in Italy,
and was made assistant director of army cinematography in the British
War Office. Ambler wrote and produced nearly one hundred training and propaganda films. When the American actor Humphrey Bogart toured Italy and entertained the troops near Naples, Ambler met him and the director John Huston, who had spent four days at the front. Between the years 1940 and 1951 Ambler published no new thrillers. He then broke the pause and cooperared with Charles Rodda under the pseudonym Eliot Reed in a series of novels. By the
end of the war, Ambler was a lieutenant colonel and was awarded an
American Bronze Star. The Rank Organization employed him as a screenwriter.
"[V]ery little screenwriting is writing," he said in an interview for the Journal of Popular Culture in 1975, is it "drawing blueprints for someone else to make a movie". (Eric Ambler: A Literary Biography by Peter Lewis, 2014, p. 11) In 1949, Ambler worked with the famous director David Lean in Passionate Friends (1949),
based on the novel by H.G. Wells. "David had curious limitations," he later said.
"For instance, it was painful to watch him trying to write even a step outline for a
script. He would stick out his tongue, frowning with intense concentration. He really had
physical difficulty." (David Lean: A Biography by Kevin Brownlow, 1996, p. 253) Ambler continued with Lean in Madeleine (1950), but when
he fell ill and withdrew, the script was credited only to Stanley Haynes and Nicholas Phipps.
Both films were commercial failures – Lean always considered Madeleine the worst film he ever made. Ambler's adaptation of Arnold Bennett's novel The Card, starring Alec Guinness and Glynis Johns, was a surprise hit in 1952. Ambler first visited Hollywood in 1957. A few years earlier he had made for United Artists the screenplay for The Purple Plain, starring Gregory Peck and directed by Robert Parrish. The movie was based on the novel of H.E. Bates. In the story, set during the Burma campaign, a Canadian squadron leader regains his nerves. "A slight rationalization of wartime tensions and the endurance of hopeless strains may be got from Ambler's screenplay . . . but the bulk of the picture is that ordeal in the jungle, and that's a sheer demonstration of blood and guts," said the film critic Bosley Crowther (The New York Times, April 11, 1955). Ambler's best work for the movies was perhaps in adapting the sea novels The Cruel Sea (1951) by Nicholas Monsarrat and The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1956) by Hammond Innes. In the 1960s Ambler moved to California, where he created the TV show Checkmate (1959-61), about three assorted private investigators in San Francisco, starring Anthony George, Sebastian Cabot, and Doug McClure. "You might go to the end of your days believing that some things couldn't possibly happen to you, that death could only come to you with the sweet reason of disease or an 'act of God', but it was there just the same, waiting to make nonsense of all your comfortable ideas about your relations with time and chance, ready to remind you – in case you had forgotten – that civilization was a word and that you still lived in the jungle." (from Journey Into Fear, published by Hodder and Stoughton, 1940 In post-war thrillers Ambler took a relatively neutral stand to Cold
War antagonism. His characters included idealistic Western liberals, misled
terrorists, corrupt post-colonial politicians, unscrupulous
representatives of multinational capitalism,
and political refugees. The clash between fascism and the free human
spirit, familiar from
pre-war novels, was changed into a global power struggle, in which all
political ideologies are subjugated under the power of Business. One of Ambler's
most interesting characters from this later period is Ernesto Castillo from Doctor Figo (1974).
He is the son of an assassinated political leader, who has become a
legend. Against his better judgment, Castillo is drawn into politics,
and this eventually leads to a coup and destruction of his idealism.
"As always, when working at his best, Ambler manages with very little
violence, and the fireworks of action are held back until the last part
of the book." (Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: a History by Julian Symons, 1985, p. 225) Ambler married twice, the second time to Joan Harrison, who died in 1994. She worked as an assistant to the film director
Alfred Hitchcock, collaborating with others on screenplays for Jamaica Inn and Rebecca,
both adapted from the novels by Daphne Du Maurier. Joan Harrison had produced in 1957 Ambler's
original TV drama 'The Eye of Truth' for Hitchcock's Suspicion series. From 1969 Ambler lived in Switzerland, basically for tax reasons like Alistair MacLean, until returning to Margaret Thatcher's England in the mid-1980s.
His memoirs Here Lies (1985) covered the period from his childhood to his wartime experiences.
The Care of Time (1981), Ambler's last thriller,
was well received – Julian Symons wrote that it "is not quite the
finest Ambler, but it is still the thinking man's thriller of the
year." (The New York Times, September 13, 1981) Again the hero is a journalist and the plot
revolves around spying and international terrorism. In 1959, 1962, 1967 and 1972 Ambler received the Gold Dagger from the British Crime Writers Association and a Diamond Dagger for life achievement in 1986. He won the Edgar Award of The Mystery Writers of America in 1964 and was named as Grand Master in 1975 by the same organization. He was also honoured with literary awards from Sweden and France. In 1981 Ambler was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Eric Amber died in London on October 22, 1998. Many of Ambler's novels have been filmed. Topkapi (1964), adapted from The Light of Day (1962) by Monja Danischewsky, was a commercial hit. Its memorable score was composed by Manos Hadjidakis. In this light-hearted caper international thieves try to rob the Istanbul museum. Peter Ustinov, playing Arthur Abdel Simpson, a petty thief, won his second Academy Award as best supporting actor. Melina Mercouri, who was recovering from a long illness, said it was the first film she truly didn't enjoy making. The director Jules Dassin was her husband. Dassin's adult son and daughter appeared in bit parts. The film was lampooned by Blake Edwards' The Pink Panther. For further reading: Über Eric Ambler, ed. by Gerd Haffmans (1979); 'Ambler, Eric' by A. Norman Jeffares, in Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly (1985); Eric Ambler by Clive James (1990); 'Eric Ambler' by P. Lewis, in Literature and Life: Mystery Writers Series (1990); Alarms and Epitaphs: The Art of Eric Ambler by Peter Wolfe (1993); Eric Ambler by Ronald Ambrosetti (1994); 'Ambler, Eric,' in World Authors 1900-1950, Vol. 1, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996);'Eric Ambler: The Mask of Dimitrios' in Books, edited by Lucy Daniel (2007); Eric Ambler: A Literary Biography by Peter Lewis (2014); Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film by Phyllis Lassner (2016); British Terrorist Novels of the 1970s by Joseph Darlington (2018); Reluctant Heroes, Ambivalent Patriots: Eric Ambler, Graham Greene and Middlebrow Leftist Thrillers, 1932-1945 by Christopher Doyle (thesis; 2018); Eric Ambler's Novels: Critiquing Modernity by Robert Lance Snyder (2020); The 1930s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Nick Hubble, Luke Seaber and Elinor Taylor (2021) - "Ambler's demotic prose style is also modern. He doesn't hang around. Almost every paragraph has some telling incidental detail (in a plush and gloomy Turkish restaurant the characters 'sat down upholstered chairs with exuded wafts of stale scent'). But the reader barely has time to register the quality of the writing because the story moves so quickly. Like his leading characters, Ambler, you feel, is a practical fellow, set on getting the job done with a minimum of fuss, then heading for home and a whisky and soda." (Robert Harris, an introduction to Journey Into Fear, Pan Books, 1999) Selected works:
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