Bullet Points: Post-Vacation Edition

If you were wondering last week why The Rap Sheet seemed so paltry with its postings, it was because I took eight days off for a trip to Minneapolis to see my best friend, Byron. We’ve known each other since college (he was a class year ahead of me), and have since been in the habit of visiting each other during the summer months, alternating back and forth; this was my year to fly east. We’d talked in advance of my departure about doing all kinds of active things when I was in Minnesota, including taking a long drive north to the shores of Lake Superior and maybe taking a hike someplace. But once I was in the company of my friend and his wife, all such planning went out the window.

Byron and I actually wound up doing the things we so often do together: comparing observations about our lives while sampling beers at local pubs (The Lowbrow on Nicollet Avenue has become a favorite stop), checking out new-to-us eateries (among them, on this trip, the Hot Plate Diner for breakfast), going for long walks around the lakes near his suburban neighborhood, and of course, sitting out on his home’s sun-baked back patio, just reading. I’d packed along a quartet of novels, including David Fuller’s terrific Sweetsmoke and William Kittredge’s The Willow Field, and made it through all of them, while helping to keep Byron’s dog, Shiloh, exercised with occasionally thrown tennis balls. Worried that I might be without books for the return flight to Seattle, we made a trip to Once Upon a Crime, the local independent mystery bookstore that successfully changed hands earlier this year. (For evidence of our drop-in, see the photograph above: I am the dumpy, overheated guy on the left, with Byron on the right.) We also paid a call on radio legend Garrison Keillor’s Common Good Books, situated along Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, which turned out to be an uncommonly handsome and appealing shop—definitely one worth revisiting sometime.

I don’t often find the time for holidays, but this one was made especially, if unexpectedly, relaxing by the fact that I couldn’t seem to recall my e-mail password. Therefore, I had no way to check my messages remotely for a week. Yes, it meant that I needed to scroll through and weed the junk mail from among 871 e-notes when I returned home. Yet for eight blissful days, all I really had to do was think about what to read next, where to eat with my friends, and what movies we all wanted to screen during the evening hours. My batteries were thus recharged for another few months.

My file of intriguing crime-fiction links was overflowing before I left, and is even larger now that I’ve been looking around to see what I missed last week. I can’t hope to mention everything of interest, but here a few items I think you will find worthy of attention.

• A very well-deserved commendation: New York City bookseller, editor, and publisher Otto Penzler, 73, has been named as the winner of this year’s David Thompson Special Service Award for his “extraordinary efforts to develop and promote the crime-fiction field.” Penzler should receive his prize during Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans, Louisiana (September 15-18). Previous recipients of this accolade, named for the late co-owner of Houston’s Murder by the Book, are my Rap Sheet colleague Ali Karim, Len and June Moffatt, Judy Bobalik, and Bill and Toby Gottfried.

• If you haven’t already voted for your favorite nominees in the 2016 Dead Good Reader Awards competition, you can still do so here. As I stated in an earlier post, the winners are set to be declared at a special event on Friday, July 22, during this year’s Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England.

• The Twenty-Three, the concluding volume in Linwood Barclay’s Promise Falls Trilogy, isn’t even due out in the States till November. But already there’s word of this Ontario author’s next novel—and it’s a work for children. As The Bookseller explains, “Chase is a middle-grade novel about a dog called Chipper who has been melded with state-of-the-art computer technology to carry out secret missions for an organization called The Institute. When Chipper’s natural instincts, such as chasing squirrels, start taking over during missions, The Institute decides to pull the plug on him.” Expect to see Chipper in bookstores sometime next year.

• While we’re on the subject of Canadian crime-fictionists (and with Canada Day fast approaching on July 1), note that Mystery Scene’s Oline H. Cogdill has put together “a quick primer” on some of that country’s finest genre writers, including Giles Blunt, Maureen Jennings, Howard Engel, and Ausma Zehanat Khan. If you’d like to learn more about the field’s history and present stars, refer to a two-part survey of Canadian mystery-makers I wrote for Kirkus Reviews back in 2013. Part I of that report is here, with Part II to be found here.

• With the sunny season having finally begun in North America, it’s totally appropriate for Janet Rudolph to have posted this list of summer-oriented mysteries in her blog.

• Just when I thought Plots with Guns was dead, buried, and eulogized, that once-popular e-zine abruptly reappears with an issue containing stories by Patricia Abbott, Rusty Barnes, Benjamin Whitmer, and others. Read them all for free here.

• Isn’t it a bit early to be writing about the best books of 2016? Well, apparently not if you’re working for BookRiot or Omnivoracious: The Amazon Book Review, both of which have weighed in recently with their initial-six-months assessments. The BookRiot rundown includes Lyndsay Faye’s Jane Steele and John Lawton’s The Unfortunate Englishman, as well as Skip Hollandsworth’s gripping non-fiction serial-killer yarn, The Midnight Assassin. Introducing its own list, Omnivoracious calls Noah Hawley’s Before the Fall “[one of] our universally favorite novels of the year so far,” and then goes on to applaud Stephen King’s End of Watch, John Hart’s Redemption Road, Mary Kubica’s Don’t You Cry, Bill Beverly’s Dodgers, Joyce Maynard’s Under the Influence, and 15 additional titles.

• To nobody’s surprise, Criminal Element’s Leslie Gilbert Elman—who most ably covered the opening two seasons of Endeavour on PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery!—is now writing about Season 3 of that Shaun Evans series. Click here to enjoy her write-up on “Ride,” the first of this season’s four episodes, and here to see what she had to say about last weekend’s installment, “Arcadia.” (By the way, for anyone not conversant in the classic Inspector Morse TV series, from which Endeavour derives, the English actress Abigail Thaw, to whom Elman refers in her post, and who plays newspaper editor Dorothea Frazil in Endeavour, happens to be the now 50-year-old daughter of John Thaw, who portrayed Morse in that previous, 1987-2000 series.)

• In case I failed to mention this before, once Endeavour has completed its broadcast run for the year (it has already been renewed for a fourth season—hurrah!), you can look forward to the final season of Inspector Lewis on Masterpiece Mystery! Three episodes will be shown, beginning on Sunday, August 7.

• Mystery Scene celebrates yet another British TV whodunit in its new issue: Grantchester, starring James Norton and Robson Green (which recently concluded its second-season run on PBS). The brightly penned cover feature has Craig Sisterson, the New Zealander behind the annual Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel, interviewing James Runcie, author of the The Grantchester Mysteries (the latest of which is Sidney Chambers and the Dangers of Temptation). Elsewhere in that same issue, Kevin Burton Smith offers a survey of fictionists famous in other fields who have tried their hand at composing private-eye yarns; Tom Nolan profiles both Naomi Hirahara (Sayonara Slam) and another California writer—one who has heretofore escaped my radar—Bart Paul (Cheatgrass); and Kate Jackson, who blogs at Cross-Examining Crime, looks back at “The Wimsey Papers,” Dorothy L. Sayers’ serialized observations on World War II through the eyes of her fictitious sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey.

• Oh, and happy first birthday to Cross-Examining Crime!

• Den of Geek! offers a new teaser trailer for Quarry, the eight-episode Cinemax TV series—based on Max Allan Collins’ novels about an itinerant Vietnam War vet turned hit man (Quarry’s Choice, Quarry in the Black), and starring Logan Marshall-Green—that’s set to premiere on September 9 at 10 p.m.

• “10 Hit Man Novels that Everyone Should Read.”

• I’ve been a fan of actress Carla Gugino ever since she starred in the 2003-2004 ABC-TV series Karen Sisco, based on the character created by Elmore Leonard, so I am pleased to hear that she’s returned to the boob tube with Roadies, a Cameron Crowe-created comedy-drama that debuted on Showtime on June 26.

• Note to Karen Sisco fans: Although that short-lived series hasn’t yet earned a DVD release (and why the hell not?), I see all 10 episodes of the show have suddenly become available on YouTube, thanks to a kind soul calling himself Oliver Martin. Check them out quickly before the copyright police come to steal them away!

• Speaking of unexpected YouTube discoveries, click here to watch a 1971 teleflick called Love Hate Love, which as far as I can tell was made from the last screenplay composed by British spy-fictionist Eric Ambler (A Coffin for Dimitrios). The plot description reads: “Ryan O’Neal plays Russ Emery, a glib engineer who steals the heart of a fashion model named Sheila Blunden [played by the lovely Lesley Ann Warren]. She in turn leaves her jet-setter fiancé, who turns out to be a psychotic who will not let go of Sheila that easily.”

• OK, I’m just stealing these next two items straight from B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder. First on the docket:

Hulu announced the premiere date of Hugh Laurie's new ten-part psychological thriller Chance, set for Wednesday, October 19. Laurie will star as forensic neuropsychiatrist Dr. Eldon Chance, who is dragged against his better wishes into an extremely dangerous world of corrupt cops, mistaken identities and mental illness. The cast also includes Gretchen Mol as Jaclyn Blackstone, the abused wife of a detective (Paul Adelstein) whose possible dissociative identity disorder causes big problems for the doc. Chance was created by Desperate Housewives and Bates Motel writer/director Alexandra Cunningham and author Kem Nunn, who wrote the novel that the show is based on.

• And then there’s this reminder:

First Monday is a new monthly crime fiction/thriller night held in Central London at the College Building of City University. The upcoming July 4th event, sponsored by Killer Reads, will feature award-winning authors Andrew Taylor, Stephen Booth, Anna Mazzola, and Beth Lewis. The evening will be chaired by Claire McGowan, bestselling author of the Paula Maguire series and senior lecturer on the City University Crime Writing MA course.

• For The Strand Magazine’s Web site, author William Lashner (The Four-Night Run) has compiled a list of “ten writing tips I learned from the books of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who together pretty much invented the modern detective story.”

• What does Chandler owe to The Mary Tyler Moore Show?

• I have definitely fallen behind in recommending new installments of Nancie Clare’s excellent Speaking of Mysteries podcast. A few recent guests worth hearing from: Cara Black (Murder on the Quai), Erik Axl Sund (The Crow Girl), Steve Hamilton (The Second Life of Nick Mason), and Dan Fesperman (The Letter Writer).

• Several other author interviews worth reading: Former ThugLit editor and author (Rough Trade) Todd Robinson chats with Entropy; Joe Clifford (December Boys) goes one-on-one with S.W. Lauden; Paul Bishop posts a two-part interview with W.L. Ripley (Hail Storme)—Part I here, Part II here; Patricia Abbott (Shot in Detroit) answers 20 questions posed by fellow novelist Dana King; All Is Not Forgotten writer Wendy Walker fields queries from BOLO Books; and Double O Section grills Warren Ellis about his James Bond comic books.

• For some bizarre reason, failing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump believes he’s mentally far superior to other human beings (a real “man of the people,” eh?). Yet there are apparently no books or bookcases in his home.

• In a welcome break from all the sorry economic predictions surrounding Great Britain’s public vote to leave the European Union, Crime Fiction Lover has posted blurbs covering a dozen “great” crime novels set in as many UK cities. The list includes Ian Rankin’s Even Dogs in the Wild (Edinburgh), Belinda Bauer’s Rubbernecker (Cardiff), Adrian McKinty’s Rain Dogs (Belfast), and a book that completely escaped my notice when it was distributed last year, Shallow Waters, by Rebecca Bradley (Nottingham).

• Maybe it’s time to pay more attention to women crime writers. Both Terrence Rafferty, in The Atlantic, and Barry Forshaw, in The Independent, have recently made that argument quite convincingly.

• Michael Herr wasn’t a crime novelist. The Kentucky native was instead best known for penning Dispatches, an entertaining and often moving 1977 memoir of his work as a correspondent for Esquire magazine, covering the Vietnam War during the late 1960s. When I heard the news last week that Herr had died at age 76, I recalled how Dispatches had been one of the first non-fiction works I’d really enjoyed in my early 20s, a splendid example of what was once called “new journalism,” combining serious reportage with literary storytelling techniques. It had led me to other Vietnam books, such as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, as well as to Herr’s memorable 1990 novel, Walter Winchell. Long ago, in a faraway life that I only barely recognize, I’d hoped one day to write a journalistic work as classic as Dispatches. That I never accomplished that goal is my own damn fault. That I can at least look back upon Dispatches and marvel at the dexterity with which its author delivered his yarn is pale succor, but succor nonetheless. Thank you, Michael Herr. (More here and here.)

• Don Winslow is writing a sequel to The Cartel.

• The Seattle Times provides a guide to some of the best TV series adaptations of literary sleuths, including both Bosch and Jack Irish.

• Being among those many readers who’ve refused to make a transition from traditional print books to e-books, I was pleased to see Alexis Boncy’s recent short essay, “Why I Still Love Actual Paper Books,” in The Week. She writes, in part:

I want to be absorbed by a book in a way that actual page-turning, not pixel-moving finger flips, allows. Choosing print over e-books means separating my reading from anything else—everything else, I should say, given the enormity of what we can do and information we can access from smartphones and tablets. It means I put down one thing before I pick up another, that I allow my attention to be taken wholly and open myself to feeling the full weight of the words on the page. That they will make me laugh or cry or think a little differently or discover something new.

And I want to finish a book and slot it on the shelf according to my personal Dewey Decimal system, a complex algorithm that accounts for genre, subject, author, how much I liked it, and how much I liked it compared to everything else. The e-alternative is to finish and watch as the book’s cover, once a full-screen image, shrinks and recedes to its tiny place on my e-bookshelf. The diminishment extends to the whole experience; the story fades, the memories go unvisited.

• Someday I want to put together a feature about the numerous novels combining crime fiction with science fiction. In the meantime, though, I can appreciate David Cranmer’s reviews, in Criminal Element, of Isaac Asimov’s Elijah Baley/Daneel Olivaw yarns. He’s already commented on The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957). I hope he will soon cover The Robots of Dawn (1983), the third book in Asimov’s Robot series, as well.

• This is a book I should definitely add to my shelves.

• Finally, what did Donald Hamilton think of the four 1960s Matt Helm films adapted from his novels and starring Dean Martin? A letter he wrote in 1991 gives us some clues: “[M]y philosophy is that I write to entertain and once I’ve done a book or story to my satisfaction, anybody who can use my material entertainingly, and is willing to pay me for the privilege, is welcome, even if he doesn’t stick very closely to my original vision (if I may use a fancy word for it).”

The Book You Have to Read: “Doctor Frigo,” by Eric Ambler

(Editor’s note: This is the 108th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s pick comes from James Thompson, a Kentucky-born author now living in Finland. Thompson’s 2010 novel, Snow Angels, the first in the Inspector Vaara series, marked his entrance into the international crime-fiction scene and was critically well-received. [Booklist cited it as one of the 10 best debut crime novels of the year.] He has already contracted with publisher G.P. Putnam’s Sons for four Inspector Vaara novels. The second, Lucifer’s Tears, will appear in March 2011.)

One of my first profound reading experiences as a child was an early Eric Ambler novel, A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939). I was about 10 at the time, and I haven’t read the book since, but I remember that it revolved around tracing the history of a drug dealer and murderer whose body had been pulled out of the Bosporus. I can still picture hundreds of slaughtered corpses from Ambler’s graphic description of the early 20th-century pogrom against the Greeks. This led me to read the actual history of the pogrom. I also fell in love with the thriller, crime, and adventure genres, a road I’m still on.

In large part because of Coffin, my early teen years were populated by the works of Graham Greene, John le Carré, and more thriller authors of the period, and they carried me in other directions, toward writers such as W. Somerset Maugham and Evelyn Waugh and Ernest Hemingway. Given that I’ve read thousands of thrillers and crime novels by this point, and I now write them for a living, it can be rightly said that with Coffin, Ambler played a significant part in defining what would become my life. The last Ambler novel I read was Send No More Roses (1977), something like a decade ago. But then recently, in a used bookstore, I found a beat-up copy of Doctor Frigo, a 1974 Ambler work I wasn’t familiar with. So when editor J. Kingston Pierce asked me to review a novel for The Rap Sheet’s “forgotten book series,” I knew this one had to be my subject.

* * *

Ernesto Castillo lives in exile on the island of St. Paul-les-Alizés, in the French Antilles. Twelve years before, his father, the leader of a country in Central America, a former Spanish colony that is never referred to by name, was assassinated.

Castillo, our narrator, is a man who views himself as reserved and discreet, civilized and cynical, but above all, detached. Ever since the night two gunmen shot down his father on the steps of a hotel, then were themselves dispatched in what seemed like part of a coup d’état by the military junta, Castillo’s mother (recently deceased) and many of her government-in-exile cronies dreamed that Castillo would return to his homeland as an avenging angel, right the wrongs done to their family, and assume his due place as his father’s successor.

But Ernesto Castillo, also called Doctor Frigo, is a physician so nicknamed because he has the bedside manner of a refrigerator. Doctor Frigo wants no part in political machinations or revenge. He wants the past buried. Castillo would prefer to forget his homeland, or if he can’t, then at least hold it at a firm arm’s length, along with his family and his countrymen, especially those determined to regain their former political prestige.

Castillo is an employee of the State, subsidized by the French government, and has his medical practice at the local hospital. His mistress, Elizabeth--estranged from her husband--is an artist, a delightful and eccentric woman. She’s also a descendant several times removed from the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, and to Elizabeth’s mind, a metaphor for everything in life may be found in the history of the Hapsburg Empire. Castillo wants no more or less from life than his medical practice, a simple existence on the island, and Elizabeth. But of course, such is not to be.

A large oil reserve has been discovered in Castillo’s former Central American homeland, and a new coup is in the offing there, as various interests scramble to acquire the immense wealth that find will offer. Everyone from French Intelligence to the oil cartels to the quondam masters of the Central American nation of Castillo’s birth believe they need the support of Castillo, the son of the former president, to take the country and its oil. And if he refuses to lend his backing, then each in turn threatens to take or ruin his life.

I was on page 87 of Ambler’s novel when I stopped and thought to myself, “I’ve read this story before.” Indeed, Doctor Frigo is Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana (1958), only darker and more sophisticated, without the melancholy humor so characteristic of Greene. Even the Central American and Caribbean settings feel like the countries of Greeneland. If, in my elder years, I have a couple of weeks to spare during retirement, I’ll back-plot both stories, tear the houses down to the studs, so to speak, and examine how close in structure they truly are. Greene called Ambler “our greatest thriller writer.” After reading Doctor Frigo, I believe the admiration must have been mutual.

I’m far from the first person to note the influence Ambler had upon Greene, and later upon John le Carré. The impact Doctor Frigo exercised on Le Carré seems apparent even in a cursory examination of The Tailor of Panama (1996). Or perhaps Tailor is a retelling of Our Man in Havana. Or maybe both are true. All three books feature inept protagonists swimming beyond their depths in the seas of espionage and intrigue, only to find that by daring--and some dumb luck--they manage to defeat their opponents, professionals at political corruption.

With its themes of oil-driven geopolitics and men who callously subvert history for personal enrichment, Doctor Frigo remains as relevant for the reader today as when it was published nearly 40 years ago. And like the majority of Ambler’s works, this one is worthy of remembrance and reflection. Find out for yourself by giving it a read.

The Book You Have to Read: “The Light of Day,” by Eric Ambler

(Editor’s note: This is the 83rd installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s pick comes from the well-traveled and multilingual Leighton Gage, who has so far written three novels featuring Chief Inspector Mario Silva of Brazil’s federal police. The most recent of those is this year’s Dying Gasp.)

* * *

It came down to this: if I had not been arrested by the Turkish police, I would have been arrested by the Greek police. I had no choice but to do as this man Harper told me. He was entirely responsible for what happened to me.

Thus begins Eric Ambler’s 1962 novel, The Light of Day. The narrator, we immediately suspect, is a man loath to shoulder responsibility for his actions. The bad things that happen to Arthur Abdel Simpson are always
someone else’s fault.

Abdel? Yes, Abdel. Ambler’s protagonist, it turns out, was born in Cairo. He explains that his middle name, Abdel, is a concession to his Egyptian mother.

But my father was a British officer, a regular, and I myself am British to the core. Even my background is typically British.

My father rose from the ranks. He was a Regimental Sergeant Major in the Buffs when I was born; but in 1916 he was commissioned as a Lieutenant Quartermaster in the Army Service Corps. We were living in officers’ married quarters in Ismailia when he was killed a year later. I was too young at the time to be told the details. I thought, naturally, that he must have been killed by the Turks; but Mum told me later that he had been run over by an army lorry as he was walking home one night from the officers’ mess.

You notice how much I’m quoting from the book? I didn’t intend to when I began writing this piece. But then I reached the conclusion that the best way to convey Ambler’s genius is to let Arthur speak for himself. I deleted everything I’d written and started anew.

I was too young when my father was killed to have known him well; but one or two of his pet sayings have always remained in my memory; perhaps because I heard him repeat them so often to Mum or to his army friends. One, I remember, was “Never volunteer for anything,” and another was “Bullshit baffles brains.”

Arthur calls himself a journalist, but in reality he’s a thief, a pornographer, and a pimp, all of which he reveals in the course of self-serving explanations such as this:

Is it a crime to earn money? The way some people go on you would think it was. The law is the law and I am certainly not complaining, but what I can’t stand is all the humbug and hypocrisy. If a man goes to the red-light district on his own, nobody says anything. But if he wants to do another chap, a friend or an acquaintance, a good turn by showing him the way to the best house, everyone starts screaming blue murder.

With lines like these, we know from the get-go exactly what kind of a fellow we’re dealing with. And yet, such is Ambler’s skill that we find ourselves warming to Arthur Simpson--and, by the end of the book, we’re downright fond of him. Ambler helps us along in this regard by making the other baddies in his novel much worse than Arthur. In Light of Day’s early chapters, it isn’t so much a case of liking Arthur as a case of disliking the people plaguing him. It soon becomes evident that all of them are capable of violence. Simpson, on the other hand, is a criminal of another ilk, a coward viscerally incapable of harming his victims. Yes, he’s a crook, but one, he tells us, who’s “only been arrested 10 or 12 times” in his whole life.

As this story begins, our (anti-)hero, down on his luck, as usual, is scrambling for cash. The rent is due, and his demanding girlfriend, Nicki, has been dunning him for more new clothes. We find him at the Athens airport trolling for tourists. His scam of the moment is to offer foreigners his services (as the driver of his own car) and subsequently burgle their rooms. He makes the mistake of approaching a mysterious man named Harper:

He looked like an American ... Of course, I now know that he is not an American, but he certainly gave that impression. His luggage, for instance, was definitely American; plastic leather and imitation gold locks. I know American luggage when I see it ... He arrived ... on a plane from Vienna. He could have come from New York or London or Frankfurt or Moscow and arrived by that plane--or just from Vienna. It was impossible to tell. There were no hotel labels on the luggage. I just assumed that he came from New York. It was a mistake anyone might have made.

Arthur first takes Harper to his hotel, then on to an appointment at a house of assignation called Madame Irma’s. Thinking his pigeon occupied, Arthur then hastens back to Harper’s room to rifle the luggage.

But Harper turns the tables. He’s been hunting for a man like Simpson and has laid a snare to entrap him. Catching Arthur in the act, Harper forces him to sign a confession, then threatens to denounce him to the Greek police unless Arthur ferries a car from Athens to Istanbul.

Simpson, whatever else he is, is no fool. No one goes to the trouble Harper has gone to unless there is something in the assignment that doesn’t meet the eye. Arthur suspects that it’s a scheme involving drug or arms smuggling, and as soon as he’s safely out of Athens, he pulls to the side of the road and gives the automobile a thorough going-over.

He’s surprised to find that the car contains no contraband, at least he thinks it doesn’t. Confidently, he continues on his journey. But, unfortunately for him, there are incriminating items in that vehicle, concealed in a place he has completely overlooked. And though Arthur couldn’t locate them, the Turkish border authorities do.

It’s a time of political instability in Turkey. The Turks suspect Arthur’s involvement in a coup d’état. But they want to round up the whole gang, and so they force Arthur to continue to play along. That way, they’ll be able to get the goods on his employers.

It turns out they’re wrong about the coup, but it isn’t until we’re much further along in the book that we finally discover what Harper and his cohorts are really up to. Meanwhile, we are not quite sure what kind of a book we’re reading. Is it a spy story? A political thriller? In the event, it turns out to be neither one.

Now, if you’ve never read this novel, but you’ve seen Topkapi (a 1964 film based upon the book, in which Peter Ustinov plays the role of Simpson), then you already know what’s afoot. But I rather hope you haven’t seen the film, or if you have, that you can’t remember it.

One thing I can assure you: if you read The Light of Day, you won’t ever forget Arthur Abdel Simpson. And, if you like him as well as I do, you can find him again in another book that Ambler wrote five years later, Dirty Story.

In that one, Simpson is still in Athens and still up to his old tricks. Very early on in the first chapter you’ll find a great line. Ambler put it in Italics: “H. Carter Gavin, Her Britannic Majesty’s Vice-Consul in Athens, is a shit.”

God, I wish I’d written that.

Epitaph for a Spy Novelist

Had he not died all of 11 years ago, British espionage novelist Eric Ambler would today be celebrating his 100th birthday. As I explained on this date back in 2006:

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.

I don’t really have anything to add to that short bio of the author. So let me instead direct you to some other pieces about Ambler that have appeared in The Rap Sheet and on other sites:

• “Pulp Valentine: Eric Ambler and the Invention of the Spy Novel,” by Stephen Metcalf (Slate)

• “Dangerous Games,” by Thomas Jones (The Guardian)

• “Beyond the Balkans--Eric Ambler and the British Espionage Novel, 1936-1940,” by Brett F. Woods (California Literary Review)

• “The Book You Have to Read: Journey into Fear, by Eric Ambler,” by Charles Cumming (The Rap Sheet)

• “The Book You Have to Read: A Coffin for Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler,” by Ali Karim (The Rap Sheet)

• “Why Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios Is a Masterpiece,” by Sarah Weinman (The Wall Street Journal)

• “Eric Ambler’s Obituary from The Guardian, 1998”
(The Marxism List)

The Book You Have to Read: “A Coffin for Dimitrios,” by Eric Ambler

(Editor’s note: This is the 36th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s pick comes from Rap Sheet and January Magazine contributor Ali Karim.)

About a month and a half ago, British thriller writer Charles Cumming wrote on this page about Eric Ambler’s magnificent 1940 novel, Journey Into Fear. I have been a follower of espionage fiction for a number of years, and of course Ambler’s work resonates prominently in my mind. But one of his classic novels has taken on more meaning for me lately, what with the daily drumbeat of sour economic news: A Coffin for Dimitrios (also known as The Mask of Dimitrios). It’s been 69 years since that book first reached stores; yet very little has changed when it comes to human nature and our propensity for committing unreasoned and unreasonable acts.

More than a quarter-century has passed since I first enjoyed A Coffin for Dimitrios. However, as I picked up my battered old copy and sat with it under my reading lamp, I marveled once again at how Ambler blended such well-delineated characters within his corkscrew of a plot, its subtext shocking us with its insight. The first thing I realized was how fresh and relevant the story seems today, focusing as it does on the dark side of human nature and reminding us that problems in the Balkans have been part of our history for generations. The second thing I noticed was that this tale offers very little in the way of action (until the end, at least); instead, its appeal is rooted largely in Ambler’s portrayal of 1930s Europe as a volatile and dangerous place, with war clouds massing overhead and the electrical smell of ozone conspicuous. Finally, I understood why this novel has been so influential on both writers and filmmakers.

Let’s start out by considering Coffin’s plot, which at first appears simple and almost clichéd. We have Charles Latimer, a former academic turned detective novelist on holiday in pre-World War II Turkey. Latimer meets Colonel Haki, a Turkish police official (and fan of detective fiction), who wants the Englishman to write a novel in the future featuring a plot he has concocted. These sorts of suggestions are made to crime fictionists all the time, and Latimer’s initial response is to decline gracefully. But his curiosity is piqued when Haki starts telling him more about the discovery of the body of underworld enforcer and master criminal Dimitrios Makropolous, washed up on a beach.

Like the mythical Keyzer Soze (from the 1995 film The Usual Suspects), Dimitirios was an international gangster, murderer, trafficker in women, spy, and assassin-for-hire, who hid behind different names and identities, operating for a shadowy banking group (the Eurasian Credit Trust) and carrying out the dark deeds required by his paymasters. Compelled to learn more about the man who lies dead on Colonel Haki’s morgue slab, Latimer proceeds to trace back through Dimitrios’ life. The journey will change our hero as the trail he’s following snakes from the Middle East to Paris, and drags him through the criminal deeds that so defined Dimitrios in life. However, Latimer must also remain wary of his researches. Can he really trust the recollections of his late subject’s numerous enemies? And how will Latimer’s liberal value system be challenged when he unearths the truth and extent of the evil that took up residence in Dimitrios’ soul?

Dimitrios’ criminal record starts with the murder of Sholem, a moneylender and deunme (a Jew converted to Islam) whose throat was cut. While the slippery Dimitrios fled from that crime scene, his less-quick-witted accomplice, Dhris Mohammad, was caught and hanged by the authorities--thanks in part to Dimitrios’ plotting. Colonel Haki had described Dimitrios Makropolous as “a dirty type, common, cowardly scum.” Latimer, however, sees that Dimitrios was far more sophisticated, and perhaps a man of his times. “Bad business were the elements of the new theology,” Ambler writes at one point. “Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent; as logical and consistent in the European jungle as the poison gas called Lewisite and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town.” So Latimer, like Joseph Conrad’s Marlow (in Heart of Darkness), begins a journey to find out who and what Dimitrios was.

This is a classic theme, but in Ambler’s skilled hands it becomes something special, something memorable. He makes Dimitrios seem even more sinister by keeping him off-stage until the very end of Coffin, and instead using letters, criminal rap sheets, and the recollections of others to build up the character’s notoriety. I’m convinced that A Coffin for Dimitrios must have influenced Graham Greene’s screenplay for The Third Man (1949), and it surely has had an impact on the fiction of more modern writers, including Robert Harris, John le Carré, Len Deighton, Alistair MacLean, and Alan Furst. As Alfred Hitchcock wrote in an introduction to a 1943 omnibus edition of Ambler’s novels: “[Ambler’s villains] are not only real people, they are actually the kind of people who have generated violence and evil in the Europe of our time.” And Dimitrios is just that--a psychopath to whom morality, conscience, and international borders mean nothing.

As Charles Latimer pursues information about his subject, he encounters the sinister and obese Dane, Peters (aka Petersen), a former partner of Dimitrios who was double-crossed and sent to prison. Peters is now looking for revenge, as he’s convinced that the master criminal faked his death.

There is a chilling interlude when Peters sends Latimer to meet the retired spymaster, Grodek, who is spending his retirement in Switzerland. Via a series of letters, we learn how Dimitrios and Grodek entrapped a low-level government clerk named Bulic and his wife, who had sought financial and social advancement. This sequence is made all the more chilling by Dimitrios’ matter-of-fact methods. Writes Ambler:

Bulic was kicked in the abdomen and then as he bent forward retching, in the face, gasping for breath and with pain and bleeding in the mouth, he was flung into a chair while Dimitrios explained coldly that the only risk he ran was in not doing what he was told.

The end of the journey for Latimer finds him agreeing to join Peters in another sting operation, this one meant to flush out Dimitrios from behind his mask. In a tense and anxiety-inducing climax, the British author and protagonist comes face to face with his quarry, only to realize that Dimitrios is actually the personification of the crises that Europe was facing in their era.

A pivotal novel in the thriller fiction genre, and a remarkable work of existentialist literature, A Coffin for Dimitrios blends politics, espionage, banking, and the underworld together to show how all of those factors are essential to the foundations of modern society. Unfortunately, society seems to require “enforcers” like Dimitrios Makropolous, who will take on the tasks that “civilized” men and women eschew. No matter what situation we find ourselves in, the darkness in our nature is always visible.

I wonder what Dimitrios and Latimer would have thought about today’s economic crisis.

The Book You Have to Read: “Journey into Fear,” by Eric Ambler

(Editor’s note: This is the 30th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection comes from UK novelist Charles Cumming, whose novels A Spy by Nature and The Spanish Game will be published in the United States in November by St. Martin’s Press. His latest novel, Typhoon, will be released in paperback in the UK in February.)

In the winter of 1995, I was approached for a job with the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). I was 24 years old. Up to that point in my life, I had read only one “serious” spy novel--John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)--and had never had much interest in books about the secret world. All that changed after my experiences with MI6. Inspired by what had happened to me, I read mountains of Le Carré, dipped into the best of Len Deighton, and became fascinated by the real-life exploits of Aldrich Ames, Kim Philby, and Anthony Blunt. In 2001, my first novel, A Spy by Nature, was published in the UK. A dramatized version of my encounter with MI6, it tells the story of Alec Milius, an ambitious wannabe spy who becomes embroiled in the world of industrial espionage.

To be honest, during this period Eric Ambler was not on my radar. It wasn’t until 2005 that a friend recommended Ambler’s masterpiece, A Coffin for Dimitrios (sometimes called The Mask of Dimitrios). I was bowled over by it. Much of what I had admired in Le Carré’s fiction--his expert plotting, his characterization and dialogue, his determination to use the spy genre as a platform for examining political and social issues--were all present in Ambler. So, of course, I looked at Ambler’s other novels. My favorite among them is probably Journey into Fear.

First published in 1940, Journey into Fear tells the story of Graham, an unassuming employee of the armament manufacturers “Cator and Bliss” at the dawn of World War II. Graham is a staple Ambler hero, an ordinary man who finds himself embroiled in extraordinary circumstances. “He was a careful driver, an imaginative pedestrian and a strong swimmer; he neither rode horses nor climbed mountains; he was not subject to attacks of dizziness; he did not hunt big game and he had never had even the smallest desire to jump in front of an approaching train,” the author explains.

After visiting a nightclub in Istanbul, Graham returns to his hotel room, where an unidentified man tries to shoot him. Graham sustains a nasty injury to his hand and is taken to Colonel Haki, a mysterious figure in Turkish intelligence, who tells him that he has become the victim of a sinister Nazi plot. According to Haki, Graham’s only hope of making it home alive is to take a passenger ship from Istanbul via Greece to Genoa. Against his better judgment, Graham agrees.

This is where Ambler’s skill as a writer really kicks in. Isolated at sea, Graham is surrounded by a number of brilliantly drawn secondary characters. There is the seductive nightclub dancer, Josette, and her seedy husband, José. There is the charming German scholar, Dr. Fritz Haller, and the mysterious tobacco importer, Mr. Kuvetli. In the manner of an Agatha Christie whodunit, any one of them could be Graham’s nemesis. Ambler derives an extraordinary amount of suspense from this, drawing out the day-to-day tedium and social niceties of the ship to agonizing effect. When, finally, he reveals his hand, the twists and turns of the plot catch the reader off guard.

Not that Ambler is solely interested in plot mechanics. He uses lengthy passages of dialogue, for example, to explore political ideas. A committed Communist, at least until the Nazi-Soviet pact, Ambler had no interest in perpetuating reassuring stereotypes about the glory of the British Empire. Here is Josette railing against double-standards in Downing Street:

“I do not understand it,” she burst out angrily. “In the last war you fought with France against the Turks ... They are heathen animals, these Turks. There were the Armenian atrocities and the Syrian atrocities and the Smyrna atrocities. Turks killed babies with their bayonets. But now it is all different. You like the Turks. They are your allies and you buy tobacco from them. It is the English hypocrisy. I am a Serb. I have a longer memory.”

In exploring those ideas, Ambler elevates the spy novel to a different level, paving the way for the likes of Le Carré, Deighton, Alan Furst, and Dan Fesperman. Not for him the ludicrous jingoism of William le Queux, or the dizzying exploits of John Buchan in The 39 Steps. It is no coincidence that Ian Fleming was a friend and admirer of Ambler’s. Indeed, in the 1963 film version of From Russia with Love, James Bond himself can be observed holding a copy of A Coffin for Dimitrios. The ultimate compliment!

It’s a pity that Ambler has been out of fashion in the land of his birth for so long. In the United States, Vintage Crime/Black Lizard has reissued most of the novels in a range of stylish paperbacks, all of which are easily obtainable via Amazon.com. If you’ve read and admired A Coffin for Dimitrios, I cannot recommend Journey into Fear highly enough.

Amblin’ Towards 100

Today marks what would have been the 99th birthday of the man often called the father of the modern spy novel, Eric Ambler. Ambler was born in London, England, on this day in 1909. The future engineer, author, and holder of Britain’s much-esteemed OBE was born into a family of entertainers and puppeteers. He died in 1998.

Ambler’s best known work is arguably 1939’s The Mask of Dimitrios, published in the United States as A Coffin for Dimitrios. The book was made into what has become a highly regarded noir film in 1944. The Mask of Dimitrios was directed by Jean Negulesco and starred Sydney Greenstreet, Zachary Scott, Peter Lorre, and Faye Emerson.

Two years ago, Rap Sheet editor J. Kingston Pierce remembered Ambler in this space:

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.

Although much more could be said about Ambler, his books and his immense contributions to the genre, I think I’ve said enough for now. But check this space next year at this same time. I expect that the 100th anniversary of Ambler’s birth will inspire some fond remembrances.

The King Flees

Who in the heck remembers that famed British spy novelist Eric Ambler (The Mask of Dimitrios, Epitaph for a Spy) created a 1960-1962 private-eye series for American television titled Checkmate? Ivan G. Shreve Jr. from Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, that’s who. And he notes on the site that Ambler abandoned the project soon after actor Doug McClure (later to star in The Virginian and Barbary Coast) was cast as the third necessary member of a San Francisco detective agency.

Read what Shreve has to say about Checkmate here. If you’re looking for an episode guide, click here.

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.

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.”