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reassuringly American accent, to shepherd Marlow out of danger,
though only after deploying him first in a hazardous scheme to sow
discord between the two Axis powers. Not by accident did Ambler
cast Charles Latimer, the protagonist of
A Coffin for Dimitrios,
as the
mild-mannered author of popular detective novels. Here he will en–
counter
"real
murder: not neat, tidy book-murder with corpse and
clues and suspects and hangman, but murder over which a chief of
police shrugged his shoulders, wiped his hands and consigned the
stinking victim to the coffin."
For setting, Ambler chose exotic but seedy locales, cities like
Istanbul and Milan, Sofia and Belgrade; for the uglier-than-sin
villain, he substituted a sllccession of deliberately prosaic thugs.
Vicious but essentially featureless were the assassins in black velour
homburgs in
Cause for Alarm,
the hired killer reeking of cheap scent in
Journey into Fear.
Of the latter we're told, and it's a recurrent theme,
that "his very insignificance was horrible. It leant a false air of nor–
mality to the situation." The menace in Ambler's thrillers was ever in
inverse proportion to the apparent "normality"; the threat of
violence, the logic of its inevitability, loomed far greater than the ac–
tual violence depicted. Ambler always placed a portion of his em–
phasis on who paid for the bullets. Espionage was business by other
means: behind the eponymous desperado of
A Coffin for Dimitrios,
Ambler's most famous criminal creation, stands the resources and
prestige of the "Eurasian Credit Trust."
It's a paradox of Ambler's spy novels that their protagonists are
invariably rank amateurs; Ambler, like Hitchcock, favors variants
on the wrong man theme. Unlike Le Carre's professionals, Ambler's
prewar protagonists are versions of his ideal reader, ordinary chaps
thrust willy-nilly into extraordinary predicaments. The complacent
ballistics engineer in
Journey into Fear
and the nervous production
engineer in
Cause for Alarm
are alike in being innocents abroad who
get disabused of their illusions despite wishing hard to cling to them.
The education of these politically-neutral Englishmen begins once
they cross the Channel and learn "that civilization was a word and
that you still lived in the jungle."
The aim of the exercise was, in part, to shatter the reader's
complacency. Ambler's titles themselves told a story: the
Background
to Danger
was everywhere in the European thirties, the
Causefor Alarm
immediate. The European jungle lived by the application of Nietz–
schean principles. "What a man does depends on what he needs,"
says a character in
Journey into Fear.
"A man is an ape in velvet." Strip
