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Eric Ambler

Eric Ambler (1909-98) was one of the most fascinating British writers of the late 1930s. His novels retain a remarkable sense of the dread and terror that filled Europe as world war broke out. Some were made into films (not least Orson Welles’ superb version of Journey into Fear), all were bestsellers, inventing a new, more realistic form of spy novel, where the main protagonist is not so much a hero as a victim, pursued by malevolent Fascist forces of overwhelming power.

Simon Winder, Allen Lane Publishing Director, on the books that made Eric Ambler.

I first came across Eric Ambler’s novels in a bookshop in New York about fifteen years ago. I had been living there for a long time and was probably nostalgic for some British writing – the editions were so cheap, pulpy and unattractive that there were severe barriers to buying them at all (all issues we have tried to remedy with the Penguin Modern Classic editions!). I had heard of him as a contemporary of Graham Greene and someone who shared Greene’s enthusiasm in the 1930s for writing thrillers with a political edge (in Greene’s case terrific books such as A Gun for Hire, Stamboul Train or It’s a Battlefield). Many years have since gone by, trying and failing to get hold of the rights in his books for Modern Classics and it is a huge relief to me to have at last managed it in time for his centenary celebrations this summer.

Ambler’s later books, published from the 1950s to the mid 1970s, are on the whole fairly routine and, although very successful at the time, not really worth picking up. It is the group of novels published just before and during the early phase of the Second World War which make him a major writer (plus his highly entertaining memoir Here Lies Eric Ambler). Uncommon Danger (1937), Epitaph for a Spy (1938), Cause for Alarm (1938), The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) and Journey into Fear (1940) still keep their gripping, paranoid atmosphere. They are also books with a mission – using the thriller format to alert British and American readers to the poisonous, Fascist environment of Europe. Where most conventional ‘high literature’ written in Britain at the time seems to pretend Nazism doesn’t exist, here is a group of exciting, well-written novels, generally about innocent Englishmen finding themselves in quite the most wrong places imaginable. The locations are brilliantly created: a world-weary Istanbul, a deeply sinister northern Italy, a claustrophobic ship crawling with desperate refugees and Nazi assassins.

The centenary of Ambler’s birth is a good time to rediscover a major British writer, a master of the violent, seedy and cynical and a great story-teller.

Penguin Classics are bringing 5 Eric Ambler titles back into print in May:

Cause For Alarm

Epitaph for a Spy

Journey Into Fear

The Mask of Dimitrios

Uncommon Danger