This is not a spy novel

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Eric Ambler

Eric Ambler was an advertising copywriter and would-be playwright when he wrote his first novel, The Dark Frontier. It was not meant to be a spy novel so much as a parody of the sort of spy novel that was then popular. He sets the plot in motion with an extract from just such a novel:

Then, that amazing resourcefulness which had made the name of Carruthers feared and hated by the criminals of four continents came to the rescue.

Later works, like the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming, fit neatly into exactly this mode of story: the spies are professional, suave, sophisticated, are famous throughout the world (yet are anonymous whenever they need to be), have a smile playing constantly about their handsome features, are superbly fit, quick thinking, and are able to escape the deadliest of situations without breaking into a sweat. They are teflon-coated heroes designed to provide fast-paced adventures without a trace of the real.

The person reading about Conway Carruthers of Dept. Y is about as far as it is possible to get from such a spy. Professor H.J. Barstow is short, middle-aged and sedentary. He is also on the verge of a nervous breakdown, which is why he has stopped into this small hotel on his way to an enforced holiday in the West Country. Here, by chance, he encounters a man called Groom who works for an arms company and is looking for an expert to accompany him to the Balkan state of Ixania to examine a new explosive that has apparently been developed there. Barstow, a physicist who has worked with the British government on ultra-high explosives, would fit the bill, but Barstow turns him down.

That evening, Barstow finds and reads the Carruthers novel. The next day he sets out to drive to his holiday destination, but on a narrow country road he crashes the car. When he comes to, he believes he is Conway Carruthers, and that in the disguise of Professor Barstow his mission is to accompany Groom not to aid the arms company, but to destroy all knowledge of a terrible new weapon.

I’m pretty sure that we’re not meant to take this extended set-up too seriously. And throughout the novel there are explicit reminders that this whole thing is somewhat ridiculous. Late in the novel, for instance, Barstow’s companion, the American journalist Casey, comments:

I was unconvinced by this specious explanation but let it go. Carruthers, I had noticed, always liked to regard his incredible guesswork as masterly foresight.

Yet, although the adventure that follows this set-up conforms to the extravagant conventions of the sort of story being parodied, we can also see the rudiments of what would quickly become the typical Ambler story starting to take shape. Art students learn their craft by copying masterpieces; here, Ambler is learning his craft in the process of copying the cruder examples of the type. There are clumsinesses here that would quickly disappear from later works, the most obvious of which is the uncertainty of the narrative voice. The novel opens in third person, with some unseen, unknown narrator telling us what happens to Barstow, but also what is going on in his fractured mind. But this unidentified “biographer”, as Barstow refers to him in the novel’s opening “Statement”, tells us too much. Once the dramatic action really starts, the novel works largely by withholding information in a way that the omniscient third person could not do. So, at roughly the half-way point, the novel shifts to a first person account by William Casey, an American journalist who happens to be on the spot in Ixania. It’s a rather fumbling transition: Casey begins his narrative at precisely the point that the omniscient third person stops, as though each author is aware of what the other says. Only three years later, Ambler would have the narrative control that produced The Mask of Dimitrios, but here we’re seeing someone still learning how to tell this particular story.

Barstow is an amateur who imagines himself into the role of a super-spy. As such he behaves with more confidence and more physical dexterity than we might expect of a 40-year-old finding himself in such deadly circumstances. But at the same time he becomes the model for Ambler’s later heroes: an amateur unwittingly caught up in a dangerous international game. Ambler’s amateurs tend to be forced by circumstances to reveal far greater competences than they expect. There’s something of that in Barstow, but because of his other personality as a super-spy these abilities emerge not through circumstance but as a result of his delusion. Yet the delusion, despite the occasional aside from Casey, is never questioned, never undermined. His plans, ever more elaborate, daring and reliant on split-second timing, always work. And it is not a matter of chance that they work; from his damaged mind a genuine technical and tactical genius seems to have emerged. From which I get the impression that Ambler has convinced himself of the story he is telling, so that we get in effect the daring spy story that Barstow imagines rather than the parodic version that Ambler started to tell.

As a result, the broken narrative voice and the uncertainty over what story we are actually being told mean that this, overall, a less satisfying book than the novels that would follow it. Yet at the same time it is identifiably a book from which those later novels would be born, even down to the fact that villainy lies in the corporate world, heroism in the left-leaning political will of the people. By the time Casey takes over the narrative duties, Ambler is already a better writer than he was in the opening chapters; it is easy to see how some of his best work appeared so quickly in the wake of this hesitant debut.

Cloak and Dagger

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Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes

There is a line that has appeared on the cover of just about every Helen MacInnes novel I have ever seen. It comes from a Newsweek review:

Helen MacInnes can hang her cloak and dagger right up there with Eric Ambler and Graham Greene.

I’m not so sure about Greene, I’ve not really read enough of his “entertainments” to know how valid the comparison might be. But Ambler!

There is a pattern that recurs in most, though not all, of the spy stories by both Ambler and MacInnes. The central character is an amateur, often a journalist or a writer of some sort, caught up unexpectedly in events way outside their normal experience. These events are usually triggered by a chance encounter, escalate at a rate that does not allow the protagonist time to get away, and despite being an amateur the protagonist proves to have reserves of ingenuity that makes him (always him) an effective player in a dangerous game. The drama plays out far from the protagonist’s familiar home territory, and there is usually a journey of some sort central to the action that keeps everyone off balance.

Let us take, for example, one novel by each that I happen to have read recently. Neither is among the best known examples of their work, but they are both typical of their author’s storytelling.

Eric Ambler’s Uncommon Danger (1937) was his second published novel (Ambler’s own preferred title, Background to Danger, is, I think, better). It is the story of Kenton, a freelance journalist, travelling around Europe in 1936. In Nuremberg he loses all his money playing poker dice and has to get a train to Vienna where he hopes to find an old acquaintance who might be persuaded to lend him more cash. But on the train he runs into Herr Sachs who claims to be a Jew escaping the Nazis, and persuades Kenton to smuggle an envelope of what he claims are bonds across the Austrian border in exchange for cash. But before Kenton can return the envelope Sachs is killed, and Kenton is framed for the murder. Kenton then finds himself caught in a spy game between a wily Russian agent and a ruthless representative of a British oil company.

Snare of the Hunter (1974) is, on the other hand, a relatively late work by Helen MacInnes (her first novel had appeared in 1941, so she was a pretty close contemporary of Ambler). This is the story of David Mennery, an American music journalist, who, years before, had briefly befriended a Czech girl, Irina. Now Irina has escaped to the West, and because he once knew her David is recruited to help her on her journey across Austria and into Switzerland where she can be reunited with her father, a famous author in exile. But Irina’s escape has been facilitated by her ex-husband, a powerful figure in the Czech secret service who wants to use Irina as a way of getting to her father.

Though separated by nearly 40 years, there are familiar patterns in both works: David and Kenton play much the same role, with similar competence, and the drama is largely played out in the course of a journey. (There is no journey in another Ambler from the same time, Epitaph for a Spy, but the setting is a small hotel in the south of France and all of the characters are there at the mid-point of a journey.)

Of course there are differences between Ambler and MacInnes. For MacInnes the protagonist is always a hero figure, noble, bold, in the right; though she practically always includes a traitor among those close to the protagonist upon whom he must depend. For Ambler, on the other hand, the protagonist is not morally pure, he is an ambiguous figure who learns resolution only in the face of the danger he encounters. On the other hand, once he has worked out who he can trust, those characters remain trustworthy throughout the novel.

Both writers set their work in relatively exotic European locations; Ambler tending towards Eastern Europe and Turkey, MacInnes preferring glamorous places such as Paris, Saltzburg, Malaga and the Greek Islands. But the location was intimately tied to the romance of MacInnes’s work and she included lots of confident local knowledge in her often extensive scenic descriptions. Ambler didn’t really care that much for landscape, and his  scene setting could often be quite perfunctory. There is, for instance, no sense of France in Epitaph for a Spy.

The biggest difference between the two, though, is philosophical, or at least political. For MacInnes her early novels, written during and just after World War II, invariably featured Nazis as villains; but once the Cold War got started her villains were always of the left: any communist was bad, any fellow traveller was bad, anyone whose politics were left of centre was a fool who unwittingly aided bad people. Ambler was considerably less clear-cut in his choice of villains. In novels like The Mask of Dimitrios or Uncommon Danger the villain acts as an agent for big business, because it is business that shapes European politics more than anything else. Because international business is more corrupt and villainous even than the Nazis, the good guys tend to be on the left. I suspect that Uncommon Danger is one of very few British spy novels in which the Soviet spy is a hero. By the mid-Fifties, Ambler had become less comfortable with communism, and the Russians started to become the villains, but he was never as vehemently anti-left as MacInnes always was.

Ambler’s novels are shorter and tighter: he tends to get down to plot as quickly as possible, and spends little time on extraneous details that might decorate that plot. MacInnes is more expansive, her novels tend to be considerably longer than Ambler’s. She likes to take time setting the scene and situating her characters very precisely in their landscape, she also tells a romance as much as a drama. Nevertheless, MacInnes owes a clear debt to Ambler, both are exploring a common model of the cloak and dagger tale.

Ambling

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Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, Helen MacInnes, John Le Carre, Kim Philby, Len Deighton

Back in my teens and early twenties, spy stories probably constituted the bulk of my reading, both fiction (Helen MacInnes, John Le Carre, Len Deighton) and non-fiction (The Penkovsky Papers, Kim Philby’s My Secret War, a rather dense tome on General Gehlen). Through it all, one name kept repeating: Eric Ambler. The recent reprints of Helen MacInnes novels all come emblazoned with exactly the same quote from Newsweek that the editions I read in the early 70s carried: “Helen MacInnes can hang her cloak and dagger right up there with Eric Ambler and Graham Greene.” Ambler was inescapable: if you liked this stuff, you had to read him. And yet I never did.

I am not exactly sure why. I think, for whatever reason, I had pegged him as the spy fiction equivalent of Edgar Wallace: populist, slick, rather trashy, and above all a representative of an earlier generation. It is an unfair characterisation, of course. Ambler’s career as a novelist stretched from 1936 to 1981, which isn’t all that different from Helen MacInnes’s career, 1941 to 1984. To say that, as spy writers, they belong to different generations is probably stretching it a bit. As for the identification with Edgar Wallace, I have no idea where that came from, but if I’d thought about that Newsweek quotation I’d have realised how far off the mark it is. After all, Ambler is being compared with MacInnes and Greene, neither of whom is exactly in the Edgar Wallace camp.

Be that as it may, it all means that Journey into Fear, a very gratefully received Christmas present from Maureen which I have just finished, is the first thing by Eric Ambler I have read. I should have been reading him 40 or 50 years ago.

Apart from the early chapters being told largely in flashback, it is a very straightforward story, straightforwardly told. Graham (no forename is ever given) is a British armaments engineer in Turkey to wrap up a deal essential for Turkey’s defence in the war that is just starting (it is the early months of 1940). On his last night in Istanbul Graham is shot at as he returns to his hotel room. Graham is inclined to dismiss it as a robbery gone wrong, but Colonel Haki, the head of Turkish intelligence, knows better. Any delay to the deal could be fatal to Turkey’s interests, and if Graham were killed it would put things back by at least six months. Haki therefore persuades Graham to change his plans; instead of travelling back to England by train, where he would be a sitting duck, he joins an old tramp steamer heading for Genoa, from where he can more safely return home.

The bulk of the novel is set aboard this boat as Graham slowly comes to recognise the parlous position he is in. The whole is a brilliant exercise in creating an atmosphere of fear which Ambler orchestrates by repeatedly offering hope and then dashing it. Graham realises that one of his fellow passengers is the Bulgarian assassin that Haki identified, but he can’t convince the ship’s crew that he is not delusional. He has been given a gun for his protection, but the gun is stolen from his cabin. A fellow passenger, an erotic dancer who is clearly trying to seduce Graham (for money, as we later discover), offers to steal her husband’s gun and pass it to Graham, but she isn’t able to deliver the goods. Another passenger proves to be a Turkish agent sent by Haki to protect Graham, but the agent is killed. The German mastermind of the assassination plot offers Graham what seems like a way out, but it turns out to be a deception to make it easier to kill Graham once they get to Genoa.

There are moments of dramatic action, the climax of the novel is quite spectacular, but in the main the novel works as a slow, quiet, accumulation of tension. There’s a way out, no it’s closed off; there’s another way out, no it’s closed off again. And Graham is an ordinary, middle class, middle aged man who has never before found his life in danger, and has never before had to act the way he must act now if he is to stay alive. And all of this is played out in the narrow confines of a rusty old boat, where the handful of fellow passengers may be allies who cannot be relied upon, or enemies who cannot be identified.

What struck me about the novel was how appropriate the comparison with Helen MacInnes is, although Journey into Fear is about half the length of an average MacInnes novel. There is, for a start, the sense of place; though MacInnes would play her story out against familiar landmarks and public spaces, where Ambler’s novel takes us to seedy nightclubs and smoky offices. There is the centrality of a journey, where deadly enemies are right behind or possibly one step ahead; though for MacInnes the journey would be through the sharply described mountains of Above Suspicion or the coastal landscape of Assignment in Brittany, while for Ambler it all takes place in the equally sharply described decks and salon and cabins of the tramp steamer. Above all there is the fact that the story concerns an innocent, an amateur, caught in a violent world that they do not understand and for which they are ill prepared, but who finds within themselves resources of wit and nerve that prove equal to the task. Though MacInnes will introduce romantic interest who proves equally resourceful, whereas Ambler’s romantic interest is, in the end, unreliable. And though both MacInnes and Ambler equip their novels with enough cliffhangers and bursts of action to keep any reader gripped, the real focus is psychological, how nerves and fear and resolve shape and twist and move things along.

It has taken me a long time to discover Eric Ambler, I suspect that now I shall be making up for those long years of neglect.