The Ability to Thrill

With ThrillerFest beginning tomorrow in Phoenix, Arizona, it’s appropriate to note that today marks what would have been the 97th birthday of Eric Ambler (1909-1998), the English author who did so much to develop the modern spy novel.

The son of entertainers, Ambler studied engineering at London University and wrote plays, before embarking on a career composing novels. As noted in The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing, “In the mid-1930s Ambler set out to redeem the then-lowest form of popular fiction, the thriller, by making it a vehicle for serious treatment of the European political situation, increasingly polarized between fascism and communism. ... In six novels between 1936 and 1940”--beginning with The Dark Frontier (1936) and concluding with 1939’s The Mask of Dimitrios (aka A Coffin for Dimitrios)--“Ambler revolutionized the thriller, bridging the gap between ‘popular’ and ‘serious,’ ‘entertainment’ and ‘literature.’”

Although he wrote two dozen books over his career, including Epitaph for a Spy (1938), Passage of Arms (1959), The Light of Day (1962), and Waiting for Orders (1991), some of which were turned into films, it’s usually Dimitrios that’s remembered as his greatest work--“one of the classics of spy fiction,” to quote Bruce F. Murphy from The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery.