A Look Back At Eric Ambler, The Father Of The Modern Thriller

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.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://crimereads.com/eric-ambler-a-crime-readers-guide-to-the-classics/ 

The Enduring Relevance Of Eric Ambler's Spy Novels

I read Eric Ambler's spy novels when I was a teenager in the 1960s and I've reread the classic thrillers again and again over the years.

So I was pleased to have come across John Gray's piece in the BBC magazine on Eric Ambler (seen in the above photo) and his spy novels.  

The author is Eric Ambler, whose 1930s novels created a new type of thriller. Born in 1909 into a family of music hall entertainers who ran a puppet show, Ambler seems to have become a writer almost by chance. A scholarship boy who trained as an engineer, he toured as a comedian before becoming an advertising copywriter. Along the way he tried his hand at writing avant-garde plays, without much success, then between 1935 and 1940 produced the six novels that changed the thriller forever.

The protagonists of Ambler's novels aren't the hearty public school patriots who stride through the pages of John Buchan. Nor are they the hard-bitten, weary professionals who feature in Somerset Maugham's stories of the agent Ashenden, which were based on Maugham's own experience working for British intelligence in World War One and Russia around the time of the Bolshevik revolution. Ambler's heroes are ordinary people - often unemployed engineers, freelance journalists or jobbing writers - who, while struggling to make a living, stumble into a danger zone whose existence they hardly suspected. The world they discover is one their middle-class morality hasn't prepared them to deal with.

Ambler's villains aren't devilish figures. They're doing no more than apply profit-and-loss accounting to the business of overthrowing governments. Bribery, blackmail and murder are simply take-over techniques applied in the context of politics. The heroes try to hang on to some shreds of decency, but soon find that the imperatives of survival take precedence over those of morality. For the hapless engineers and writers as much as for the ruthless con-men and killers, ethics has become redundant.

In Ambler's masterpiece The Mask of Dimitrios, published in 1939, an English writer of detective stories, Charles Latimer, reflects on the career of a master criminal he believed had been murdered. Investigating the criminal's past in order to gather material for a new book, the writer discovers that Dimitrios Makropoulos - "the drug pedlar, the pimp, the thief, the spy, the white slaver, the bully, the financier" is alive and prospering:

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33972802