The Mask of Dimitrios

"Eric Ambler is the grandfather of the serious spy novel. Exactly. Broadly speaking, there are two schools of spy novel : the Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum school, which is purely escapist and highly entertaining, full of guns and gadgets and fast women; and then there’s the more serious, literary strand, which is interested in character and behaviour as much as in story. Ambler was the same generation as Graham Greene, and he was, like a lot of educated people at that time, a kind of proto-Marxist, a socialist. He believed that he could use the thriller not only to entertain but also as a political tool, to say something about the state of the nation. Then Le Carré picks up that ball and runs with it, and takes the idea of the serious spy novel to another level – partly because Ambler had laid the groundwork and partly because Le Carré is an infinitely more gifted writer who was fortunate enough to have the Cold War as his canvas."

"Eric Ambler was a leftist who, a bit like George Orwell , saw through Stalin before many other people on the British left did. He realized Russia was descending into totalitarianism and called it out quite early on. So he deserves a lot of credit for that. He was very popular in his day, but he fell out of fashion, as is the way of things. Then, a few years ago, his books were reprinted as modern classics and found a new audience. He’s the thriller writer’s writer in many ways. People like le Carré and Graham Greene heaped a lot of praise on Ambler. At the time, in the 1920s and 30s, the thriller was pretty much books written in the mould of The 39 Steps or The Riddle of the Sands . They’re boy’s own adventure stories. Then Ambler comes along and has a totally different approach. Ambler has a very European perspective. It’s not written from a chauvinistic British perspective. He’s really interested in the events that are happening on the continent. I find that quite attractive and interesting. He’s somebody who writes about international intrigue, but places it very much in the shabby backstreets of the capitals of Europe. His casts are petty thieves, con-men, prostitutes. That’s probably very accurate: how espionage devolves to the bit-part players. There’s also this sense of menace that hangs over the book, which, again, probably resonates a lot with our times. He was watching the world descend into dictatorship and there’s this sense of foreboding. He does that very well. It has a slightly unlikely plot. Ambler does something which Graham Greene does in The Third Man and Somerset Maugham does in the Ashenden books, which is to make their heroes writers. So the hero of The Mask of Dimitrios is a writer who is just interested in following up stories. He hears about a man called Dimitrios, a notorious criminal figure, who has apparently died. Then he decides—slightly implausibly, it has to be said—that he’ll turn detective and find out what really happened to Dimitrios, and ends up in a chase across Europe. There’s a meta-textual, self-referential quality to it. It’s writers writing about writing, in a way. As the story unfolds, they’re asking quite deep questions about what it means to write fiction, who the writer is, and what they’re trying to achieve."

"Penguin has just done a lovely reissue of some of Eric Ambler’s novels. I’ve been reading him, and indeed was reading him as I was writing A Stranger in Corfu . The Mask of Dimitrios —sometimes published as A Coffin for Dimitrios —is his greatest novel. It was written in 1939 and it’s about the mess the world is in in the lead-up to the Second World War. In the same way that Greene has Fowler as an outsider in The Quiet American , Eric Ambler has Latimer, who is a crime writer. Ambler always has these outsider characters come into the world of spies and does it wonderfully. Latimer is a bit of a John Buchan figure; he’s adventurous but also (like Fowler) a bit cynical and world-weary. He’s in Istanbul, which is the setting for a number of Ambler’s great spy novels: he sees it as this hinge point between East and West, and a place where the world comes together. Latimer hears from a local police chief about a character called Dimitrios, who is this Greek supervillain, and goes after him. Latimer persuades himself it’s research for his next novel, but it feels as if there’s a more existential and mysterious drive behind it. Latimer is fascinated by the darkness of Dimitrios’s life. It’s about how paranoid and corrupt the world is—the world of the Great Game and great powers struggling for control. Reading it, you do feel it’s a barometer for the collapse that is to come. It evokes the climate that led to the Second World War. [SPOILER ALERT] Dimitrios is a man of his time. There are the terrible crimes that he carries out, the wheels within wheels that we discover. He engages with a slightly anti-semitic line in the novel about European banking. There is this sense that he is a representative of the clandestine corruption that runs through everything in the world at that point. There are several spoilers one would want to avoid, but it’s saying that the state is implicated in the underworld of the time. Latimer goes deeper and deeper, and becomes more and more implicated. He is drawn closer and closer to this extraordinary and enigmatic figure, and, a bit like The Quiet American , he eventually has to choose sides. The meta-narrative is also really fascinating. It’s a novelist researching a novel. He becomes the protagonist of the novel, and he is writing it constantly through the lens and with the voice of somebody who is unable to decide whether he is in a spy novel or not. I love that about it. It feels so modern."