Airport paperback thrillers are very long these days. You’d best take a flight to Sydney.
This was not always the case. As yesterday was a wet Bank Holiday Monday I picked up a classic thriller published in 1939; a mere 260 pages and all the better for that. Is it dated? Not really. The political landscape in the Balkans is much the same as it was in the 1930s. One thing that may mystify a young reader today is the pneumatique in Paris. It was used from 1866 until it finally ran out of stem, the mot juste, in 1984. The same technology was used by Czarnikow to distribute telexes around the building.
Eric Ambler knows how to write a thriller and it’s not just me who thinks this.
“Many authors of international thrillers have acknowledged a debt to Ambler, including Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, John le Carré, Julian Symons, Alan Furst, and Frederick Forsyth.” (Wikipedia)
The Mask of Dimitrios was made into a film in 1944 with, among others, Sydney Greenstreet who made such an impact in The Maltese Falcon. But the book’s the thing for a rainy day and I will be laying in a supply of Amblers in the hope of a wet summer.
Eric Ambler was a first class thriller writer. Robert Harris wrote in his introduction to the 1999 edition of The Mask of Dimitrios ” his early novels were so good, his fame so great and his influence so far reaching that none of his contemporaries would have dreamed that within his lifetime his work would disappear from the bookshops…a whole generation …has grown up knowing almost nothing about him.”
Like Edgar Wallace, the famous crime writer of the thirties, he has sadly fallen without trace into oblivion.