Eric Ambler's Revisionist Thrillers: Epitaph for a Spy, A Coffin for Dimitrios, and the Intercom Conspiracy

Abstract

Below a grainy photograph of author, then eighty years old, back dust jacket of Mysterious Press's 1990 revised hardcover edition of Eric Ambler's The Dark Frontier (1936), first of his eighteen proclaims that he virtually created modern espionage story. More than a decade later, copywriters for Black Lizard paperback reprints of ten other Ambler texts, all published in Vintage Crime series, (1) hedged their bet with a boilerplate caption averring that he is often said to have invented modern suspense and thereby paved way for [...] John [l]e Carre, Len Deighton, and Robert Ludlum. Allowing for hyperbole to which such blurbs are notoriously prone, their different ways of categorizing Ambler's fiction suggest his work's elusive quality. In 1972, emphasizing murky taxonomy of popular subgenres, Julian Symons argued that the detective story, along with police story, spy story, and thriller, makes part of hybrid creature we call sensational literature (4). Whether we regard Ambler's achievement as a permutation of nineteenth-century adventure tale or novel of intrigue, he remains undervalued as a surprisingly cunning craftsman of narrative technique. The few scholars who have discussed Ambler at length concur that, as World War II approached, he intentionally set out to transform conventional that had ensured widespread success for such precursors as John Buchan, Dornford Yates, and particularly E. Phillips Oppenheim, prolific and self-styled prince of storytellers. (2) During thirties their subgenre's reputation was none too high. Unlike classical detective novels, observes Peter Lewis, most thrillers did not possess even a modicum of literary respectability and were generally regarded as true pulp (11). What Ambler found especially repugnant in Oppenheim's productions, as well as those churned out by his numerous imitators, was their predilection for pasteboard heroes and villains caught in melodramatic plots. (3) From vantage point of his ironically titled Here Lies: An Autobiography half a century later, Ambler makes clear why, setting out in 1935 to compose The Dark Frontier as a parody, he was convinced that the had nowhere to go but up (121): It was villains who bothered me most. Power-crazed or coldly sane, master criminals or old-fashioned professional devils, I no longer believed a word of them. Nor did I believe in their passions for evil and plots against civilization. As for their world conspiracies, they appeared to me no more substantial than toy balloons, over-inflated and squeaky to touch, with sad old characters rattling about inside like dried peas. The hero did not seem to matter much. He was often only a fugitive, a hare to villain's hounds, prepared in end to turn pluckily and face his pursuers. He 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. (120-21) At a time when he was absorbed by writings of Carl Gustav Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, what Ambler derogates as antique fantasies of the old secret[-]service adventure thriller seemed ludicrously superannuated (Dark Frontier xiii). Fueled by an impulse to debunk such stereotypes, his inaugural novel therefore features protagonist Professor Henry J. Barstow, an acclaimed but timid physicist at University of London who, after an unsought invitation to accept a post as technical adviser to international armaments manufacturer Cator and Bliss, finds himself mesmerized by a potboiler extolling daring exploits of Conway Carruthers, Department Y. …