ERIC AMBLER

The Opening

Neil, you wrote, “Eric Ambler’s heroes, especially in his between-wars novels (1936-1940), are ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. They’re often engineers, journalists, or writers who stumble into danger through a combination of bad judgment and bad luck and then have no choice but to try to dig themselves out of it … They are solidly middle class, raised in a world of black-and-white certainties that they discover has been completely obliterated by gray.”

Neil, you wrote, “Eric Ambler’s villains live in that gray. They’re criminals, conmen, governments, corporations, revolutionaries, spies, and corrupt officials. … They’re realists. They’ve calculated what it takes to succeed and are willing to do whatever is necessary to achieve that goal. If those acts are considered reprehensible by others, that’s not their problem.”

Authors Neil Nyren Has Edited
You’ve edited more than 300 New York Times bestsellers. Crime and suspense writers you’ve edited include Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, John Sandford, C. J. Box, Carl Hiaasen, Daniel Silva, Jack Higgins, Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follett, Jonathan Kellerman, Martha Grimes, Alex Berenson, Thomas Perry, Gerald Seymour, Ed McBain, and Ace Atkins.

What’s it like working with these authors?

Do you have any favorite authors you’ve worked with or favorite books you’ve edited?

How to Write a Mystery (Handbook on the Craft of Mystery Writing)
Neil, you authored the first chapter of the book, “The Rules—and When to Break Them.”

What are the rules in the mystery genre? Why do these rules matter – and when don’t they matter?

What are examples of authors/books that broke the rules and achieved something remarkable?

The 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time (TIME Magazine)
“In an Eric Ambler spy novel, the hero is usually an ordinary fellow who lands in an unfamiliar foreign city and soon finds himself in rising water. In A Coffin For Dimitrios, published in 1939, the city is Istanbul between the world wars, and the hero is a writer intrigued by a newly dead Greek criminal whose life story leads him deep into the Balkans, and worse. Everything unfolds with the brisk tension and debonair assurance that made Ambler fans of everyone from Alfred Hitchcock to John le Carré to Alan Furst, and anchored the nascent genre in a kind of dashing realism.” —Karl Vick (TIME Magazine editor)

“I set out to improve a shoddy article,” Eric Ambler once explained. “Dorothy Sayers had taken the detective story and made it literate. Why shouldn’t I do the same for spies?”

Neil, you wrote, “Eric Ambler was the father of the modern thriller. John Le Carré called him ‘the source on which we all draw,’ and Len Deighton, ‘the man who lit the way for us all.’ Frederick Forsyth said he was the man ‘who took the spy thriller out of the gentility of the drawing room and into the back streets where it all really happened.’ Graham Greene called him ‘unquestionably our best thriller writer.’”

Neil, you wrote, “I’ve worked with many writers of international suspense, and whenever I’ve wanted to recommend a book to any of them that captures the genre as well as any book possibly can—this is the one I send them to.”

Neil, you wrote, “Before Eric Ambler, international thrillers were dominated by such writers as John Buchan (The Thirty-Nine Steps) and their many imitators.” Talk a bit about the difference between these earlier books and books like Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household and A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler.

The Geopolitical Scene
In a 1981 New York Times interview, Eric Ambler said: “Thrillers are respectable now. Back in the beginning, people weren’t quite that sure about them, [but] they really say more the way people think and governments behave than many of the conventional novels. A hundred years from now, if they last, these books may offer some clues to what was going on in our world.”

The novel is set in Europe 20 years after WWI, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and creation of new states like Yugoslavia. Post-war violence and chaos can be felt everywhere. You wrote, “World War I had left the world in a shambles, out of which fascism had sprung and was quickly spreading across Europe. Economies were bad, nations splintered.”

Eric Ambler said “1936 was when ‘Italy invaded Abyssinia, civil war broke out in Spain, and Hitler ordered the German army to reoccupy the Rhineland. It was a year of yet more refugees and of marriages arranged to confer passports. It was also the year in which the League of Nations was at last seen plainly to be impotent. These where the things that I was trying, in my own fictional terms, to write about.’” (Neil Nyren)

A Coffin for Dimitrios “portrayed a Europe threatened by an enigmatic coalition of fascist politicians, corrupt bankers, and ruthless street thugs. … It remains a penetrating portrait of Europe on the verge of calamity and destruction” (Reader’s Digest 304).

“The important thing to know about an assassination or attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet” (16).

“Propaganda always begins with words, but soon it proceeds to deeds. When there are no facts to support lies, facts must be made.”

Mystery Novels vs. Real Mysteries
A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler begins with Charles Latimer, a former academic and mystery novelist, in Istanbul as he prepares for his next book. Latimer meets Colonel Haki, a Turkish police officer.

Latimer is “always meeting people [like Haki] who felt that they could write detective stories if they had the time.”

Haki and Latimer view the body of Dimitrios Makropoulos, found dead in the Bosporus. Dimitrios committed murder, theft, blackmail, espionage, drug smuggling, and sex trafficking.

Haki reads nothing but romans policiers, but he quickly points out the difference between the complex chaos of real crime and the completeness of mystery novels. Haki knows murder is sordid, yet he loves the black and white morality of cozy mystery novels.

Latimer’s Fascination with Dimitrios
In A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler, Dimitrios’ story “begins” during the 1922 Smyrna Holocaust that ended the Greco-Turkish War. Over 120,000 people died but “somewhere amidst that horror had been Dimitrios, alive” (ch. 3).

We learn from the testimony of Dhris Mohammed that, “Many men are afraid of [Dimitrios], but I do not understand this as he is not strong and I could break him with my two hands.”

Why is Latimer so interested in Dimitrios? In what ways does this interest become an obsession? In what ways does he see Dimitrios as “a unit in a disintegrating social system” (76)?

Latimer wants to know how Dimitrios’ story ends (“and then what happened?”). In what ways does Dimitrios’ fragmented story compel Latimer to want to uncover the “complete truth”?

Latimer is a civilized man from a civilized society. He taught at a university. He writes moralistic, cozy detective stories, where the world is neat and tidy, detectives use logic, and villains get their just due. Latimer embodies the idea that reason and humanity trump war and tragedy.

Dimitrios represents the uncivilized, violent, animalistic nature of man. He lives for himself alone. He’s willing to stab anyone in the back to protect himself or get ahead.

What doesn’t Latimer understand at the start of the novel, and what does he come to understand? What does Latimer learn about the “real” world throughout his investigation?

An “Underground” Cast of Characters
Latimer meets Dimitrios’s former collaborators—a Bulgarian madam, a Danish smuggler, a Polish spymaster. Irana Preveza says, “One thinks that one wants to be understood when one wants only to be half-understood. If a person really understands you, you fear him.”

Mr. Peters
Latimer meets a “fat, unhealthy-looking man of about fifty-five” on a train to Sofia.

Mr. Peters says, “Live and let live—that is the secret of happiness.” “One cannot fight against one’s Destiny. If the Great One wills that we shall do unpleasant things, depend upon it that He has a purpose even if that purpose is not always clear to us.”

How does Mr. Peters explain away or apologize for his criminal behavior?

When Latimer leaves the train in Sofia, Mr. Peters says, “Good-bye, Mr. Latimer.” Latimer doesn’t wonder how Mr. Peters knew his name. (Interestingly, Eric Ambler points this out to the reader.)

Mr. Peters is intrigued that Latimer has seen Dimitrios dead. Only the next morning does Latimer realize that Dimitrios’ murderer is still at large and there must have been a motive.

Mr. Peters proposes an alliance, a pooling of resources. Mr. Peters says if Latimer comes to Paris, he’ll get 2,500£ (500,000 French francs).

Latimer’s Moral Censure
In A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler, Latimer meets Wladyslaw Grodek near Geneva. Grodek was once the most successful master spy in Europe. Hired by Italian agents, Grodek crafts an ingenious plan to learn the location of Yugoslav minefields. He wines and dines Bulic, a government clerk. With Dimitrios’ help, Grodek gets Bulic to fall deep into gambling debt. The plan is perfect — until Dimitrios robs Grodek.

Mr. Peters’ mind was “divided too neatly. With one half, he could peddle drugs and buy rentes and Poemes Erotiques, while with the other he could excrete a warm, sickly fluid to conceal his obscene soul. You could do nothing but dislike him” (194).

Mr. Peters tells Latimer, “I do not fear your moral censure, but I resent, mildly yet quite definitively, your being shocked” (198).
In Sofia, Latimer met with Marukakis, a French news agency correspondent. In a letter to him, Latimer writes, “It is such a poor story, isn’t it? There is no hero, no heroine; there are only knaves and fools. Or do I mean only fools?”

Plotting Against Dimitrios
In Paris, Latimer learns about the arrests of members of a drug gang (betrayed by Dimitrios, who turned informer). He realizes Mr. Peters was part of that gang and is really Frederik Petersen.

Mr. Peters tells Latimer about how Dimitrios caught the drug gang’s plot: “We were fools, [Dimitrios] told us, if we thought that he did not know that we were plotting against him.”

Mr. Peters tells Latimer that the dead man is Visser, a member of the drug gang. Visser had been blackmailing Dimitrios (Monsieur C.K.), who has become a person of importance.

Mr. Peters takes elaborate precautions to keep Latimer and himself safe. Latimer even tries to go to tell the police about the blackmail plot.

Good vs. Evil
In A Coffin for Dimitrios, Eric Ambler wrote, “It was useless to try to explain [Dimitrios] in terms of Good and Evil. They were no more than baroque abstractions. Good Business and Bad Business were the elements of the new theology. Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent; as logical and consistent in the European jungle as the poison gas Lewisite and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town. The logic of Michelangelo’s David, Beethoven’s quartets and Einstein’s physics had been replaced by that of the Stock Exchange Year Book and Hitler’s Mein Kampf” (249).

When Latimer first sees Dimitrios, he assumes he’ll look like evil incarnate. Instead, he’s a picture of distinguished respectability” (266).

“Colonel Haki had been right after all. The story of Dimitrios had no proper ending” (279).

Latimer Becomes a Novelist Once Again

In what ways has Latimer changed from who he was at the start of the book? Has he changed?

Let’s talk about the last line of the book: “The train ran into a tunnel.” Is Eric Ambler hinting at a new, dark adventure for Latimer?

Let’s talk about The Mask of Dimitrios (the film) (1944).