Episode 81: A Coffin for Dimitrios (Eric Ambler)

Sarah Harrison: Welcome to Tea Tonic & Toxin, a book club and podcast for anyone who wants to explore the best mysteries and thrillers ever written. I’m your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters: And I’m your host Carolyn Daughters. Pour yourself a cup of tea, a gin and tonic …

Sarah Harrison: … but not a toxin …

Carolyn Daughters: And join us on a journey through 19th and 20th century mysteries and thrillers, every one of them a game changer.

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Sarah Harrison  01:39

We are back, and I hope all our listeners are still listening.

Carolyn Daughters  01:44

Oh, of course they are. They are extra listeners. They have extra listeners this time

Sarah Harrison  01:48

and reaching out to us on the social media, on our website, on, actually, our listening platforms. Did you know you can text me now you’ll see a thing that says “text.”

Carolyn Daughters  01:59

It’s like text the podcast or text, I saw that, and then I think I texted you to test it out. Yeah, I’ve gotten a few texts, but I can’t see who’s texting it, but you can do it. It comes straight into texting. Sarah’s getting the text — your feedback.

Sarah Harrison  02:15

I actually can’t reply.

Carolyn Daughters  02:18

She can’t apparently she can’t reply, but she’s reading.

Sarah Harrison  02:21

I think I can post them on our platform.

Carolyn Daughters  02:26

Listener, okay, we have a listener of the episode, and today’s listener of the episode is Erika Krouse, right here in Colorado. She is an instructor at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and she is an amazing writer. She wrote Tell Me Everything, which is a memoir. We had her on our show a little while back.

Sarah Harrison  02:48

And she won an Edgar Award.

Carolyn Daughters  02:49

She won an Edgar Award. Folks, she’s and a lovely person. She’s a lovely, generous person, a great interviewee. If you’ve not listened to that episode, please go back and listen to Erika’s episode. It’s just really powerful. The conversation with her, I think, was really great. And her book, Tell Me Everything is a stunner. And she’s got a new book coming out, Save Me Stranger. So thank you, Erika Krouse. You can also be a listener of the episode. All you have to do is like, comment, share, text, Sarah, rate us on one of our platforms, and we’ll make you there’s a good chance we’ll make you a listener of the episode.

Sarah Harrison  03:33

You can click this if you click the support link, if you want to support the podcast or join our Patreon for extra special content, that pretty much guarantees you’re going to be a listener of the episode. Because I actually do get your name, I can easily announce you. I’m also excited. We’ve got another stunner of a book to discuss this episode. We’ve been talking about A Coffin for Dimitrios, which was originally published in England as The Mask of Dimitrios. A chance encounter with a Turkish Colonel with a penchant for British crime novels leads mystery writer Charles Latimer into a world of sinister, political and criminal maneuvers throughout the Balkans in the years between the world wars, hoping that the career of the notorious Dimitrios, whose body has been identified in an Istanbul morgue, will inspire a plot for his next novel. Latimer soon finds himself caught up in a shadowy web of assassination, espionage, drugs and treachery. The author, Eric Ambler, is often said to have invented the modern suspense novel beginning in 1936 he wrote a series of novels that introduced ordinary protagonists thrust into political intrigues they were ill-prepared to deal with these novels were touched for their touted, excuse me, for their realism and Ambler established himself as a thriller writer of depth and originality. In the process, he paved the way for such writers as John Le Carré, Len Deighton, and Robert Ludlum. He was awarded four gold daggers and a diamond dagger from the Crime Writers Association, was named a grand master by the Mystery Writers Association, and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth. In addition to his novels, Eric Ambler wrote a number of screenplays, including A Night to Remember and The Cruel Sea.

Carolyn Daughters  05:28

A Night to Remember is the Titanic movie.

Sarah Harrison  05:32

Published in 1939 A Coffin for Dimitrios is our eleventh book. Find more about it and all of our book selections at teatonicandtoxin.com

Carolyn Daughters  05:46

You can find out more about A Coffin for Dimitrios and also about our guest, Neil Nyren. He’s back for a second episode, and we’re thrilled. He’s the former executive vice president associate publisher and editor in chief of GP Putnam sons, prior to his time at Putnam, Neil Nyren worked at E.P. Dutton, Little Brown Random House, Arbor House and Athenaeum. He was known in particular for his love of mysteries and thrillers. Neil was awarded the 2017 Ellery Queen Award for outstanding people in the mystery publishing industry from the Mystery Writers of America. He also received the 2025 thriller Legend Award from international thriller writers. He still edits two of his long-time authors and now writes about crime fiction and publishing for Crime Reads Book Trip, The Book Thrill, The Third Degree, and others. He has spoken at conferences from Maine to Florida and from South Carolina to Hawaii. And he also wrote the first chapter in how to write a mystery, which is a handbook on the craft of mystery writing. Welcome, Neil!

Sarah Harrison  06:57

Thanks for coming back. Neil.

Neil Nyren  06:58

It’s my pleasure.

Sarah Harrison  07:01

We’re really thrilled to have you. You have such interesting experience and interesting perspective. We talk about all these different awards that people in books win. I wanted to hear a little bit more about your Ellery Queen Award. Before we get to our discussion on A Coffin for Dimitrios, could you talk about that for a sec?

Neil Nyren  07:21

Yes, at the Edgar Awards every year. I mean, almost all their awards are indeed for the various books, but they do have one award which is usually given to somebody in publishing that they think has advanced the craft of crime publication and the way you hear about this thing, do not get any warning really. Months before you’ll get a phone call from somebody and say, Hi, I’m from the Mystery Writers of America. And they say, so you’ve just won this award. And the thing is, as an editor, you don’t expect awards. I mean, your authors are the ones who get the awards. You’re the person behind the scenes. You’re helping them win their awards. And so it’s a complete and total surprise, but it was nice because you get, you actually get the award at the Edgar Award, I’m there in tuxedo. They like people to wear tuxedos. Most people don’t. But I figured, yeah, gonna give me award. I’m gonna dress up in a tuxedo. And I get to give a speech to the audience, a short speech, that it won’t long speeches. It’ll be the same with that thriller legend thing, which I told I will be receiving, but that’s not until next June, actually. And it’ll be the same thing they told me about a few months ago, and I’ll get to stand up and give again a short speech, because I’ve been to far too many of these things. I know what we want when we’re sitting in the audience, you don’t want to hear anyone blathering on. The people who win the big awards, fine. They can blather if they want to, people like me, they just clap. There you go. That’s it. To be a thriller legend. I don’t even know what that means, actually, but to call myself a legend now, it’s black and white. Sarah and I are already calling you a thriller legend. That’s why we wanted you to join us to discuss A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler.

Sarah Harrison  09:55

Neil Nyren.

Neil Nyren  09:56

You heard it here first. Actually, one of the two authors I still edit, is C.J. Box, and in his acknowledgements, he refers to me as the “legendary Neil Nyren.” So he just said, I knew it all along.

Carolyn Daughters  10:02

That’s incredible. So, editors are behind the scenes, right? It’s the author who’s front stage and center. However, you’ve edited more than 300 New York Times bestsellers. Your authors that you’ve edited include Tom I’m just going to read a list, because that’s and it’s a part. It’s a fractional partial list. Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, John Sanford, 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 as Ace Atkins. I could go on and on, but I’m not going to our listeners will recognize at minimum, two or five of those names, and some of our listeners will recognize all of them. This is an incredible body of work that you have an incredible number of very talented, widely respected, bestselling authors you’ve worked with. What experiences come to mind over the career that you’ve had with regard to manuscripts that took you by surprise when you saw them, or an author that you thought, I can’t believe I’m working with this author. This is amazing. It opened your eyes in a special way. What do you have any standout moments or individuals’ manuscripts?

Neil Nyren  11:35

We’ll get to A Coffin for Dimitrios, I promise. But first I’ll tell you a couple stories. Thing is, when editor decides he wants to buy a book, it used to be, you could like a book, and that was fine, you bought it. But the industry is such, no, you cannot really do that. You have to love that book. You have to be the one who’s just spearhead in the publishing house for that book, you have to be ready to get up on the battle mints and shout it out. You have to really be that book’s advocate, so that if you read a manuscript and it doesn’t really speak to you, even if you think it has virtues and all that you should not buy it. You should let somebody else buy it. So I’m going to give you two stories, one on each side of the coin. Back in the 1980s, I got a manuscript from somebody who had one failed book, and this book had a movie option, but as we used to say, that and a token got you on the subway, and I read it, and I thought, good. I wasn’t swept away. I wasn’t sure. I really bought its premise, and they gave it to somebody else in the house. They felt basically the same, so we passed on it. But Doubleday got everything about this book. They understood it exactly. And if I had liked the firm just enough, just enough to buy it. Would it have become the phenomenon that it did? And I don’t think it would, because I was not all in on that. But on the other side of the coin, this is also in the 80s, I got in the manuscript, which was already on its second agent, because the first agent had not been able to sell it. Its title was shrunken heads, which could not have helped to case any.

But still, there was something about the book that pulled at me. There was a certain intensity to the writing that just made little the hair in the back of my neck stand up, and I just felt there was something here. So I gave it to my boss, and he didn’t like it. Then, in a slight breach of protocol, I gave it to my boss’s boss, and he didn’t like it either. And then, in a larger breach of protocol, I did not stop. Once you get an answer, you got an answer, usually, but I kept nudging on this book. And finally, they like me. And finally they said, All right, you can make an offer for it. Here’s how much you can offer. It was practically pocket change $2 and a linty Tic Tac. I called up to agent, and I made the offer, and there’s this pause on the phone. He said, I’ve never sold anything for that little money. And I said, I understand. I get it. Go on out see if you can get what you’re looking for. But if you can’t, I still will be here. So about two months later, phone rings. “Is that offer still open?” I’m so glad you brought me on your podcast to discuss A Coffin for Dimitrios so I could share this story! Well, the author and I worked on the book for a while. We changed the title, and then it was time to send it out for paperback now, at that time, right now, most, not all, but most of the publishers are vertical, which means you have your hard cover line and you have your mass market paperback line and your trade paperback line. You sold them all. But back there, that was not always the case. And so what you did, if you did not have the paperback line, which the house I was at the time did not you go out see what you get for the paperback so it went out, and it ended up in an auction, which concluded at $500,000. My boss and my boss’s boss said, Well, shit, and now they were all in. I can assure you, they were all in. Oh my gosh. The title that we changed that book to was when the bow breaks. It was the first novel by Jonathan Kellerman, and he’s been on the bestseller list ever since. Now, was I a genius for sticking to my guns for that and an idiot for turning the other one down? No, it’s just like one book spoke to me and the other one did not speak to me in the same way. And in the end, everybody won. Because, I mean, for all the money men that we have in our business, and we have plenty of money men, book publishing at its heart, at its core is still very highly subjective as a business, I mean, where passion could mean as much as any algorithm. And I say, Thank God for that.

Carolyn Daughters  17:16

That’s it. Those are incredible stories, and I’m so glad you’re here on our podcast about A Coffin for Dimitrios to share them. I mean, every book that is published has its home, right? And so the firm was not meant to have its home with you, but it had its home elsewhere. I guess it’s done okay. I’ve heard and maybe I read it. I probably read it. I read a lot, though, yeah, so that’s, it’s so interesting that we don’t think about that whole publishing process, and it really is a process. You’ve got to find your agent, then you find your editor, and you’ve got it. You gotta like your home has your book has to have a home in all of these different places. It has to speak to these individual people who surely have their body of work that they respond to. But every once in a while, something probably lands on a desk and they’re like, I have to have this thing. This book. Is this book a fit for me, and that was the case with Jonathan Kellerman.

Neil Nyren  18:28

That’s true. And I was just lucky that they liked me enough that they let me finally make an offer on the book. Otherwise it gone somewhere else or maybe never would have been published.

Carolyn Daughters  18:38

I don’t know. Wow, incredible.

Sarah Harrison  18:42

That’s super interesting. And I love taking those modern author stories and reflecting back on our historic Book Club stories too and seeing how they start off all these genres. One of the things that really stuck out for me with A Coffin for Dimitrios as being different from all the prior books we’ve read. Is it? I know this is very common now, but this was really the first one I’ve heard that got into a lot of detail around drugs, drug sales, drug taking, addicts, like, when they just started talking about heroin, and I was like, oh, oh, we’re talking about, like, heroin addicts and cocaine addicts and all of these things that I just mentally hadn’t associated with. 1939 Can you talk about Eric Ambler’s approach to that and how is, how did it, how does it play into the story arc of these books?

Neil Nyren  19:44

I think it was Frederick Forsyth who said about Eric Ambler (the author of A Coffin for Dimitrios), that he was the man who took the spy thrower out of the gentility of the drawing room and into the back streets where it all really happened. The drugs and the prostitution, all that like, that’s the real world, stuff that awful lot of suspensors were not really writing about at that time and that opened the door for a lot of people to write about stuff that had not been considered genteel enough to make it into these things and then, now, of course, there are literally no holds barred. You can find anything you want to. It’s a subject matter of a crime novel, and it’s made that’s one of the things that makes it such a rich genre, because you get everything in there.

Carolyn Daughters  20:42

I mean, Sherlock Holmes took drugs, but we haven’t really seen like drug dealing, and yeah, like the drug culture, like a drug dealing ring.

Neil Nyren  20:54

We’ve never seen him buying the drugs. I wonder, does he? Does he send out Watson to get it for him? Does he send out some, some, some of the boys, you know?

Carolyn Daughters  21:06

Yeah, the Baker Street Irregulars bring it by on Fridays.

Neil Nyren  21:12

That carpet slipper of his is always fully stocked, I believe.

Carolyn Daughters  21:20

I felt with A Coffin for Dimitrios like this is the dark underbelly of Europe. This was not even in the cozy mysteries that are in the draw drawing rooms and such, we’re not getting the larger picture. But in several books, including the wheel spins. We recently read from Ethel Lina White, where you get this sense of this beautiful landscape of Europe, and this just  train travel and people living luxurious lives. In this book, it just sweeps that away. And it feels like there’s a spotlight on a kind of world, or a kind of way to live in the world that you don’t see in every book in the 1930s. It felt different to me in that way.

Neil Nyren  22:18

That’s true. You have that woman who was the contact for Dimitrios, that brothel madam, and you hear her story. Those are people that usually were not being talked about in books like A Coffin for Dimitrios, either. The ladies of the evening.

Carolyn Daughters  22:39

Irena Preveza.

Neil Nyren  22:41

Right, yeah.

Sarah Harrison  22:43

Carolyn and I were talking about her last night when we were watching the movie, and both of us loved this quote that she had. I’d like to get your take on it. She 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.

Neil Nyren  23:12

I mean, somebody in her profession, you do not want to expose yourself. I mean, you want to do I mean, it’s a very transactional business. You do not want somebody getting too close, unless there’s somebody in the side that you really do bug that see. But most of these things, it’s like you just want to get the business done, get the money. And if somebody starts prying too close, you could be vulnerable in ways that you don’t want to be vulnerable, right?

Sarah Harrison  23:44

And she definitely seemed vulnerable to Dimitrios, but it was interesting too, because she described the other person that she feared who knew her too well was her husband. She said he understood her because he loved her, but Dimitrios did not love.

Neil Nyren  24:02

Did I love anybody? No, I only loved the money.

Carolyn Daughters  24:09

Dimitrios had this ability, as we learn in A Coffin for Dimitrios, to see through people. He had, he just really was a good reader of people, I think, and so he, she, at one point, I think, says he knew me better than I knew myself. Wow. I mean, that’s incredible.

Neil Nyren  24:28

Well, that’s one of the ways that he got ahead, was that he could read people very well and get them to do what he wanted them to do by knowing what their weaknesses were. And so that’s how he became a king been here and a king being there, and assassin there. You just, you just knew the ways to do stuff, and that whole long story with the Yugoslav clerk in the naval department. And. Does just an absolute perfect way of demonstrating how you worm your way into a situation till you have the guy completely on the hook, and then you yank the hook and like, this is step by step thing. Do you just lay it out as if on a chart.

Carolyn Daughters  25:23

Yeah, Sarah, we were talking about that last night, a little bit how that’s it’s that story, I think, is told in a letter that Latimer is writing, and it feels like very visual and very like you could almost see it filmed a movie based around that entire long play. And it’s, it’s really quite clever, yeah,

Sarah Harrison  25:48

I loved that part. One of the weird things when you meet these characters. So the guy that was the victim who got them the map of, I believe it was a minefield that they were after. Yeah, Bullock, um, goes to prison at the end, and Vladimir feels sorry for him and the guy telling the story, I was like, Ah, he’s a traitor. He got what he deserved, like, just disregarding the trap he led and how he, like, pulled him inch by inch into being that person. He’s, like, the traitor. And you saw that a few times from characters in A Coffin for Dimitrios.

Carolyn Daughters  26:32

There’s Drish Mohammed, there’s Grodek, Mr. Peters. These are to some degree, savvy guys, or in the case of dress Mohammed like a very muscular, big guy, and yet Dimitrios is able to destabilize all these guys. And they, at times, let down their guard, or they underestimate Dimitrios to their peril, which I just thought was an interesting theme I kept seeing coming up in A Coffin for Dimitrios that even like really savvy guys like rogue end up getting played by Dimitrios.

Neil Nyren  27:09

That’s right, and Peters, and just about anybody who faces which is why Dimitrios is so dumb founded when this guy, Latimer, actually gets the better of him. He cannot believe this, where they have the confrontation at the end of the book, and he just, he just can’t believe this. This idiot, remember the quote that Dimitrios has he says I was thinking at the end, one is always defeated by stupidity. If it’s not one zone, it’s to stupidity of others. And he still almost prevails, of course, but it’s actually one of the it’s one of the things about Latimer. I mean, he is this naive guy who eventually, during the course of A Coffin for Dimitrios, becomes less naive, but still, he is smart enough to tell like with Peters. Peters is saying, Oh, I’ll split this big blackmail thing with you. And he knows he’s just going to try and cheat me out of it anyway. So I slowed him to have it all. I be smart enough to turn that down. And when Dimitrios proposes deals to them, he’s smart enough to say, no, no, I don’t want anything to do with that. I mean, he turns out to be much more intelligent, innately about this stuff than he probably ever thought that he was and that is the reason that he ends up surviving this whole thing and then at the end of A Coffin for Dimitrios, merrily going off to write a new mystery novel.

Sarah Harrison  28:52

We read a lot of these great books from the past. One of the things that really resonates about some of these books that stand the test of time is like there, there’s a level of insight beyond being a clever plot or a new twist or anything, there’s a level of insight into humanity that I just enjoy reading on Latimer. There’s a part I marked just way back in chapter four, but there’s such great foreshadowing in this book, and so Chapter Four opens and it says, the situation in which a person imagining fondly that he is in charge of his own destiny is, in fact, the sport of circumstances beyond his control. It’s always fascinating and so great foreshadowing, but it’s also like a human truth for sure.

Neil Nyren  29:44

It’s true. And like a Vladimir this quote of his about after two days or so of just poking around, and he realizes, cause of this galling, he says it was not so much as ignorance of the party he was playing. But the bliss which accompanied the ignorance just so appalled him, so stupid even later, like about two thirds of the way through A Coffin for Dimitrios, I forget who is, and says it to him. He says, Mr. Latimer, this is not a detective story. There’s no need to be so stupid.

Carolyn Daughters  30:21

That’s wonderful. So at the end, when I’m seeing this playing out, I’m thinking, okay, are they, is Mr. Peters actually going to get away with this, this thing? Is he going to get this money? Is he going to take the money and run and then we find out Dimitrios played him to some degree. Dimitrios is known all along where Mr. Peters lives, or Peterson lives, yeah, it because it’s the three houses in a row that Yeah. And so it’s, it’s interesting, the underestimation again, like, Peterson Peters is making assumptions that, well, I’ve, I’ve got one up on Dimitrios, but, but then, like, I think, okay, Dimitrios has some flaws. One of them is that he let grow deck live earlier. So when he takes this map, photograph of a map or a chart from grow deck earlier, he lets grow deck live, and grow deck even says that was his mistake. And then when he when at the end, he’s in this room with Latimer and Mr. Peters, I kept thinking, like, Why doesn’t he just shoot them? Like, why? Because that’s the whole Hollywood sort of thing. We’re like, let’s have a whole conversation before I shoot you, like, chat for a while. And I thought if he had simply gone in shot them, he would have been done. So I don’t know. That felt a little out of character for me.

Neil Nyren  31:56

For Dimitrios, I think he just, and, I mean, he knew that Peters was greedy. He was sure about Peters. He knew Peters would jump at all this. And I think he just disregarded Latimer so much as being this boom that he just didn’t think this guy was any challenge whatsoever. And in fact, it was really, it’s really an accident that Latimer did not die because, I mean, his invention back on the first page about the criminals, odd taste and interior decoration, yes, it’s only because Latimer trips on that rug that the shop misses it, and then he just runs at him and he knocks the gun out of his hand and all that sort of stuff, yeah, but like, Dimitrios almost got away with all that stuff, you know? And it’s just dumb luck and vitamins part,

Carolyn Daughters  32:53

I want to ask both of you, Sarah and Neil, do you see Latimer as having changed by the end of A Coffin for Dimitrios? Has this experience changed him in an identifiable way.

Neil Nyren  33:04

Well, that is a very good question, because, I mean, at the end of A Coffin for Dimitrios, he’s going off to write a mystery novel, and is thinking about doing this British country house mystery, if I remember correctly, which sounds, doesn’t sound like he learned anything. But still, how can he go through all of what he’s gone through and not have brought something out of it? So even though that’s what the ending implies, I have to think that what he’s gone through has made him much more serious about himself, both about what he believes and about what he is capable of doing, or maybe I’m just wishful thinking in my part.

Sarah Harrison  33:54

I don’t know. I think probably his books got better. I could imagine him improving as an author, because he starts this whole journey almost on a whim. He doesn’t know how to explain it to folks. I’m just doing some research. I’m trying to see if one could possibly follow the trail of a refugee during these times and as things actually unfold, and he starts to get a dose of the reality underpinning all of these characters, I would imagine his books at least got I don’t know if his character made a drastic development, but his characterization probably did.

Carolyn Daughters  34:37

Do you think his novels got grittier, or do they stay the drawing room, cozy as it’s implied, that he’s trying to put his little cute cast of characters together, kind of thing.

Sarah Harrison  34:48

I would imagine they got a little grittier, right, more realistic.

Neil Nyren  34:56

I think that Eric Ambler is hinting, though. With his choice of what the next book is going to be, that he is just turning back to the same old stupid book that Eric Ambler himself turns his nose off. That quite rightly so. But I do think that in his own personal life, if not in his writing. I mean, he knows how to clean up a crime scene. He did a great job. At the beginning of A Coffin for Dimitrios, I’ll do this. I’ll do that, and I’m out. I’m gone.

Carolyn Daughters  35:43

Colonel Haki, all he reads are these roman policiers. He reads these basically cozy mysteries. It’s his thing. But Colonel Haki is living this really interesting life where he is catching criminals like Dimitrios. He has no illusions about what the world is and so and then Latimer, who has had this experience throughout A Coffin for Dimitrios, at the end, is returning to his books. Like, is this sort of message about the comfort of the cozy novel and how we need a little escapism? Like, what do you guys think about that?

Sarah Harrison  36:22

Well, Neil, didn’t you just say that Eric Ambler didn’t like those kinds of books?

Neil Nyren  36:27

Of course, these are more straight mysteries. So we don’t know what his taste in mysteries was. We know from quotes he’s given that that the way to Dorothy Sayers open up the detective novel he wanted to do for suspense. So obviously, he likes Dorothy Sayers. Of course, Dorothy Sayers was an enormously layered writing so like she was, it was quite right for him to admire whether he liked and Agatha Christie in the same way. I don’t know, because Christie was a bit shallower. I always thought, never being a big Christie fan myself. I’m not going to get hate mail from people.

Carolyn Daughters  37:10

Send that mail directly to Neil Nyren.

Neil Nyren  37:13

Exactly, as opposed to someone like Josephine Tey, who is so much more complicated and layered a writer, and even Ngaio Marsh was more interesting as a writer. Agatha Christie is excellent on her plots, but like you cannot say she has any characters.

Sarah Harrison  37:32

I think we have Josephine Tey and Ngaio Marsh. That’ll be exciting.

Neil Nyren  37:39

Absolutely, I love, I love those people.

Carolyn Daughters  37:43

The last line of the novel. Latimer is like planning his novel that he’s mapping out, and seems like he has returned to his usual life, but the last line of the novel is really interesting, and so I want to hear your take on that for from both of you as well. The train ran into a tunnel.

Neil Nyren  38:08

I don’t know if that means anything or not. Okay, you could read it as meaning something. I’d sure know if it does, okay, it’s a cinematic thing, it’s standing in the movie. Train goes into the tunnel. Credits come up.

Carolyn Daughters  38:29

The Sun Also Rises, and the sun also sets, right? So the train didn’t emerge from the tunnel. The train went into one.

Neil Nyren  38:38

Could be reading too much into it. But what do I know? That is why books are great. We can all read into them what we want to.

Carolyn Daughters  38:48

I have been known periodically to read too much into things. But Sarah, what are your thoughts?

Sarah Harrison  38:52

It’s a great closing line. It does sound. It does sound very cinematic, and I am excited that A Coffin for Dimitrios was made into a movie. We’re going to do a short episode on the movie, just a little bit. It’s an extra, it’s a bonus episode for our Patreon subscribers. So we’ll do that with Neil right after this. It’s wonderful. We’re not even sure if this is a growth story for Latimer, but it sounds like maybe it’s not.

Neil Nyren  39:27

That is true. It could well be he just all right, I got all that out of the way. Now let’s just get back to my normal life. Of course, Europe is erupting in war around him, so I’m not sure how normal life is going to be.

Carolyn Daughters  39:43

In defense of the possibility that it’s intentional, I think a lot of the writing in this book is highly intentional. So we’ve read Agatha Christie, we’ve read Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, one of my favorite books I’ve read in a very long time. I was blown away by it. And then I feel also in in A Coffin for Dimitrios that Eric Ambler is very intentional, so he doesn’t have accidental sentences too often. And the better the writer. Of course, every word is there for a reason, and so I like to think that Eric Ambler put it there intentionally, but he wrote quite a few books, and maybe not. We don’t know.

Sarah Harrison  40:36

I don’t know, but we did have, I know we’re nearing our time again, which is just incredible. I didn’t even, I didn’t get to get to my favorite Peters line yet, but maybe we will get to it. But as a big fan, what sorts of books? There are a number of Eric Ambler books in addition to A Coffin for Dimitrios. Maybe you can throw in some of your modern authors you’ve edited as well since you probably have the widest breadth of reading of most people we spoke with who, who are you recommending and what are your favorite top Eric Ambler books for those that want to continue on this path.

Neil Nyren  41:14

Well, my definitely my second favorite book is the one we talked about earlier in the last episode, which is Journey into Fear. You can read that as a companion piece to A Coffin for Dimitrios, and it is fabulous. I recommend it to everyone. And this one is published in 1940 so we actually do have war going on now, and a lot of it has to do with what’s going on between Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. And you may not think that’s important, but it turns out that’s very important, and that’s like motivation so on, my other favorite Eric Ambler book after A Coffin for Dimitrios and Journey into Fear is a books he did in 1962 called The Light of Day. It’s about a small-time con man, and in later in life. When the war broke out, Ambler went to war. And then after the war, he started doing a lot of movie scripts. And it wasn’t until, like, 1951 that he came back to writing books again. Then he started toying around with these little petty criminals in common as his heroes, because he is taken with them anyway. In The Light of Day, our semi-hero is a guy who lives in Athens, and among his scams, he will take his car out to the airport and pick up people as a taxi and bring them back. And once he knows their hotel room, he’ll go and burgle their hotel room, but he does it to the wrong guy, and that guy says, You know what, I’m not gonna report you to the police. If you’ll do me a favor, I need somebody to drive a car from Athens to Istanbul, and I’ll even pay a little bit to do it. And he figures, all right, good deal, though, when he gets stopped at the Turkish border, of course, the doors of the car are filled with armaments. This wasn’t going to be a free ride here. So the question is this for a coup? Is this for an assassination? It’s for something else entirely. I cannot tell you what it is, but don’t tell us yet. If you’ve read, if you’ve seen the movie, Topkapi, I don’t know if you ever have but that that was based upon this book. Peter Ustinov, Melina Mercouri, Robert Morley, lots of people. That movie was an inspiration to many other real-life criminals. But since I’m not telling you what it is, unless you actually ask for it. It is quite famous for that, but the movie is good, and the book itself is excellent.

Sarah Harrison  44:09

In addition to A Coffin for Dimitrios, Journey into Fear, and The Light of Day, what would be a recommendation for a modern author? Maybe one you’ve edited that you just adore?

Neil Nyren  44:17

Well, I’ll make recommendations for people I have not edited because there’s actually a whole lot more people that I have not edited than I have. Among my favorite writers are Tana French, Laura Lippman, and Kate Atkinson. I recommend all three of those people to anybody who loves mysteries. They write very different styles, very different content, but they’re just an example of the breadth there. There’s also someone else who’s only just had a second book published named Ramona Emerson. She is Navajo, and her first book, which is called Shutter. It’s about a woman who takes photographs of crime scenes for the local to police department. And she’s trying to be both modern and traditional at the same time, which is very difficult. And thing with her is that she takes extremely good crime scene photographs, but she also sees the presence of the people who died, and they can see her, and they’re usually quite upset, and sometimes they demand justice, and since she’s the only one they can yell at about it. They yell at her, and it’s quite upsetting, and it’s how she’s balancing all that, especially because it’s one crime scene of a woman who jumped off a bridge, and that woman is insisting very, very heatedly that she did not jump off that bridge she was pushed and just sucks her in and like just everything involved, not only all the Native American stuff, but just the crime progression itself, she’s just, I think she’s going to be a star.

Sarah Harrison  46:15

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Neil, it’s been a pleasure having you on these two episodes.

Carolyn Daughters  46:21

And we hope you’ll just keep joining us on, I don’t know, 40 or 50 more episodes. We’re going to talk a bit about The Mask of Dimitrios (A Coffin for Dimitrios), which is a movie that Sarah and I watched last night. Neil, you saw this film several years ago. We’re gonna talk through a few things.

Sarah Harrison  46:46

If you’re a Patreon subscriber, or if you’re not, become one real quick, and you can see some of this special content with Neil Nyren. Thank you so much.

Sarah Harrison 
We hope you enjoyed this episode on The Mask of Dimitrios (A Coffin for Dimitrios). If you did, it would mean the world to us if you would subscribe and then you’ll never miss an episode. Be sure to leave us a rating or review on Apple podcasts Spotify, or wherever you listen to Tea, Tonic & Toxin. That way, likeminded folks can also find us on all platforms.

Carolyn Daughters
You can learn more about all our book selections at teatonicandtoxin.com. You can also comment, weigh in, and follow along with what we’re reading and discussing @teatonicandtoxin on Instagram and Facebook. And you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Finally, please visit our website, teatonicandtoxin.com to check out current and past reading lists and support our labor of love, starting at only $3 a month.

Sarah Harrison
We want to thank you for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. We absolutely adore you. Until next time, stay mysterious.