Judgment on Ambler

The fact that The Rap Sheet blog happens to have debuted in the same week Slate magazine chose to publish a series of essays about pulpish crime fiction is coincidental. That I have now managed to create three posts around those essays is no accident. Before we bid Slate’s special section a long good-bye, let me direct you to critic Stephen Metcalf’s fine treatise on how 20th-century English author Eric Ambler invented the modern spy novel by doing away, “once and for all, with cloak-and-dagger melodrama in favor of the qualmish chill of realism.” Although Ambler’s best-known espionage work is probably 1939’s The Mask of Dimitrios (aka A Coffin for Dimitrios), Metcalf chooses to focus, instead, on his 1938 novel Epitagh for a Spy, a distinctive combination of detective tale and spy story that Metcalf commends particularly for its “relaxed urbanity and its tolerance for commonplace experience.”