Episode 80: The Mask of 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 want to give a shout out to our listener of the month. It’s Tim Bueller from here in beautiful Colorado. Tim is a recent subscriber, and we just wanted to give a shout out to him for his interest and support of the podcast. Thanks so much, Tim. We appreciate it. We appreciate all our subscribers.

Carolyn Daughters  01:42
This is a really cool one. I love this book, The Mask of Dimitrios, and I’m really excited about our guest. Today, we’re excited to discuss A Coffin for Dimitrios, also published as The Mask of Dimitrios. Now this book 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. Vladimir 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 all ill-prepared to deal with these novels were touted 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 Carre, Len Deighton, and Robert Ludlum. He was awarded four gold daggers and a diamond dagger from the Crime Writers Association. He was named a grand master by the Mystery Writers Association, and he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth. In addition to The Mask of Dimitrios and his other novels, Eric Ambler wrote a number of screenplays, including A Night to Remember on the Cruel Sea.

Sarah Harrison  03:47
This week was published in 1939. Can you believe this was our 11th book this year?

Carolyn Daughters  03:51
I can’t.

Sarah Harrison  03:52
The year is flying by. So if you want more information about A Coffin for Dimitrios (The Mask of Dimitrios). Go to tea tonicintoxin.com and also get your information on Neil Nyren. He’ll be joining us today for a discussion of A Coffin for Dimitrios. Neil is 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 EP Dutton, Little Brown Random House, Arbor House, and Athenaeum. He was known in particular for his love of mysteries and thrillers. How convenient. Yes, for us, 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 big thrill the third degree and others. He has spoken at conferences from Maine to Florida and from South Carolina to Hawaii. Welcome to our podcast, Neil.

Neil Nyren  05:12
Thank you. Glad to be here.

Carolyn Daughters  05:16
Neil, would you read a little bit of A Coffin for Dimitrios (The Mask of Dimitrios) for us, maybe starting in the first chapter?

Neil Nyren  05:23
I’d be glad to: “A Frenchman named champ for who should have known better. Once said that chance was the nickname for Providence. It’s one of those convenient question begging aphorisms coin to discredit the unpleasant truth that chance plays an important, if not predominant, part in human affairs, yet it was not entirely inexcusable. Inevitably, chance does occasionally operate with a sort of fumbling coherence, readily mistakable for the workings of a self-conscious providence. The story of Dimitrios Makropolis is an example of this. The fact that a man like Latimer should so much as learn of the existence of a man like Dimitrios is a lone grotesque. That he should actually see the dead body of Dimitrios, that he should spend weeks that he could ill afford, probing into the man’s shadowy history and that he should ultimately find himself in a position of owing his life to a criminal’s awe. Taste and interior decoration are breathtaking in their absurdity. When these facts are seen side by side with the other facts in the case, it is difficult not to become lost in superstitious awe. Their very absurdity seems to prohibit the use of the words chance and coincidence. For the skeptic, There remains only one consolation, if there should be such a thing as a super human law, it is administered with sub human inefficiency, the choice of Latimer as its instrument could have been made only by an idiot during the first 15 years of his adult life, Charles Latimer became a lecturer in political economy at a minor English university. By the time he was 35 he had an edition written three books. Now they mentioned the books here, but they’re so boring because they’re academic, I’m not even going to mention them. It was soon after he finished correcting the bulky proofs of the last book and the hope of dispelling the black depression, which was the aftermath that he wrote his first detective story a bloody shovel was an immediate success. It was followed by eyes at the fly and murders arms from the great army of University Professors who write detective stories in their spirit. Time Latimer soon emerged as one of the shame faced few who could make money at the sport?”

I’ll continue reading from The Mask of Dimitrios — “It was perhaps inevitable that sooner or later, he would become a professional writer in name, as well as in fact, three things hasten the transition. The first was a disagreement with the university authorities about what he held to be a matter of principle. The second was an illness. The third was the fact that he happened to be unmarried. Not long after the publication of no door nail this and following the illness, which had made inroads and his constitutional reserves, he wrote was only mild reluctance, a letter of resignation, and went abroad to complete his fifth detective story in the sun. It was the week after he had finished that book successor that he went to Turkey. He had spent a year in and near Athens, and was longing for a change of scene. His health was much improved, but the prospect of an English Autumn was uninviting at a suggestion of a Greek friend, he took the steamer from the pirates to Istanbul. It was in Istanbul and from Colonel Haki that he first heard of Dimitrios.”

Carolyn Daughters  09:16
Dun, dun, dun.

Sarah Harrison  09:19
That’s a great reading from The Mask of Dimitrios. Thank you.

Carolyn Daughters  09:22
How much fun must Eric Ambler have had to come up with the names of these mystery novels that that Latimer had written, no door nail this. So I’m really interested in the opening of novels generally, because they send so many signals and provide so much information to readers that that we’re conscious of and unconscious of and really at. As we’re reading them, we’re determining, do I want to take this journey with the writer? Do I want to read the next three. 100 pages. And so the opening, for me, it’s very important that it grab the reader. And I think probably you would say the same as an editor of so many authors.

Neil Nyren  10:11
You have to do it.

Carolyn Daughters  10:17
Can you talk a little bit about this opening, and what Eric Ambler is doing in this opening to set the scene, introduce the character, and then introduce Dimitrios.

Neil Nyren  10:32
Yes. It’s just a pitch perfect introduction, because first of all, he introduces you to the character and all of his splendid, done entity. He tells you how he got into Ryan detectives, how he got to Turkey in the first place. And also he introduces his basic themes, which is, this is an absurd story. You’re not going to believe it, but wait till I tell it to you, so you’re all set up. You’re ready tell me.

Carolyn Daughters  11:04
And this is an ordinary guy. He said he was working at a minor university. I mean, he wasn’t working at Yale and Harvard, or, he was working, the way he’s described it, he’s one of the few making a living writing these mysteries, and then there’s very fun titles of the mysteries. So we get a sense that he’s made a career here. But maybe he’s not on the bestseller list, necessarily.

Neil Nyren  11:33
No. But they say it was immediate success, and what they Yes, it means but success, but obviously it’s enough to offer him international travel.

Sarah Harrison  11:45
He could quit his job over it. So he might not, he might not consider himself rich, but that seems like a pretty good,

Neil Nyren  11:53
Slight reluctance that he resigned to university.

Sarah Harrison  11:59
I’m gonna ask Neil a little bit about his introduction to Eric Ambler and The Mask of Dimitrios. Also, how did you get into mysteries as a whole? And I read your crime rates article on Eric Ambler, and you’re doing a really cool series there. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got connected with the mystery world. And Ambler, sure.

Neil Nyren  12:25
I first got involved in the mystery world when I was about eight or nine years old. I had a bad cold at home and was miserable, and my father brought me a copy of The Hardy Boys, the secret of skull mountain. So that was it. After that I was set mysteries was great, so I read them, been reading them ever since, and I have been fortunate enough to be able to make a career out of editing and publishing the kinds of books I just like to read for myself, and I started reading Eric Ambler very early. In fact, Ambler was one of my inspirations to do the crime reads pieces in the first place. Crime reads was founded in 2018 and I was they were writing about all the contemporary people and the new books coming out and things like that. But I always felt that there were writers that had been overlooked or forgotten, or people had to be reminded of. And my first, the first two people I thought of was Josephine Tey and Eric Ambler, and that was like they were the reasons they started writing the pieces in the first place, and then it just continued on from that gun law of them.

Sarah Harrison  13:51
Perfect, after our own heart, really.

Carolyn Daughters  13:56
You wrote in that article, I believe, for Crime Reads. You worked with many writers of international suspense, and whenever you wanted to recommend a book to any of them that captures the genre as well as any book possibly can, The Mask of Dimitrios (A Coffin for Dimitrios) is the one you send them. And in fact, you said, I myself own multiple copies. So what? What is about A Coffin for Dimitrios (The Mask of Dimitrios) that really stands out for you as a landmark text in the canon.

Neil Nyren  14:27
There’s so much. First, let me back up to to properly appreciate what Eric Ambler accomplished that made him the, father of the modern suspense novel. You have to appreciate what British suspense writing was like before he came along, and at that time, it was dominated by people like, there’s a guy named Cyril McNeil. His pseudonym was Sapper. And his biggest hero was a guy named Bulldog Drummond. And the kind of heroes that he had, and that all British suspense publishing had, were people who were upper class Englishmen, usually pals as other upper class Englishmen, and they were defending England from foreigners plotting against it. They were all patriotic and loyal and two fisted, physically and morally Intrepid, but not very bright. They’re also extremely xenophobic and antisemitic and Ambler himself in his memoir, which has one of my favorite all time memoir titles, which was here lies, because it’s here lies Eric Ambler, which also implies this guy, Eric Ambler, he’s going to tell you a lot of lies. That’s great, but he said, for the kind of heroes that proceeded to me like he says, All he really needed to function as hero was abysmal stupidity combined with super human resourcefulness and unbreakable knuckle bones. What Eric Ambler did when he started, as in The Mask of Dimitrios, he just wrote about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, and these were people who were not professionals that were journalists and writers and engineers, and through a combination of bad circumstances and bad luck and bad judgment, they got themselves into a situation, and they don’t know how they got into it, but they knew that they were the only person who could get themselves out of it, and they bumble around, but still, during the course of events, they found they have a little bit more resourcefulness than they thought they had, and certainly more than their enemies thought they had. And if you just think about suspense fiction now, if you think about psychological throwers, nine out of 10 psychological throwers follows exactly this pattern, just a person, some one day, something happens to him or her, usually her. We know that, and they have to get themselves out of it. A domestic suspense is the same way Jason Bourne that a lot of the cozy this woman who runs an antique shop or a bakery, and suddenly they got involved in her solid as all on their own resources, and like it, just changed literature. Absolutely changed literature in terms of passing by the cardboard characters and the terrible plots and the evil enemies, and just having ordinary people. And then he also his villains were a different kind of villain as well. And he, he brought realism to the actual villains, because they were instead of people twirling their mustaches and swore the youngsters they were they were cotton, and they were criminals and they were corrupt officials. By that also meaning corrupt officials of governments, and especially huge financial institutions. And they were people. This is a terrible time between the wars. The end of World War I to the beginning of World War II. Governments were falling and economies were toppling, and everybody was uneasy, and nobody knew what was going to happen next. Terribly uneasy time, and a lot of people decided to make their own calculations about what it took to get ahead. They were willing to do whatever was necessary to get it done. And if others didn’t like it was their problem, it wasn’t theirs, and that is true for Dimitrios, too. There’s a quote in The Mask of Dimitrios (A Coffin for Dimitrios) which it was useless to try to explain him in terms of good and evil. There were no more than Baroque abstractions, good business and bad business for the elements of the new theology, Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent. And anyway, just having all this, all this stuff, was just like this huge breath of fresh air. And everybody started running books like that, and it’s lasted to the present day.

Carolyn Daughters  19:36
Now, Latimer is an author of these cozy mysteries. They seemed sort of the drawing room mystery, it seems. And so he is, at least, at the start of the novel, a little more black and white instead of in this, this world of gray, the Dimitrios world. And at one point Mr. Peters in the novel The. Basically calls him on the carpet and says, you know, you’re being very high-handed and moralistic, like, to what degree do you see Latimer as representing this ideal sense of what the world was, versus what the world truly, really, really was, which is Dimitrios, like they seem, they seem like such opposites and so aptly chosen.

Neil Nyren  20:29
Oh, yeah. Latimer is just a babe in the woods. He doesn’t know anything. He thinks this world is this logical thing. All he knows is his minor university background. And thinks that everything should be logical, but nothing is logical. And what he has to learn is that the world does not care about him. He is insignificant. And should he disappear? The next morning, nobody would notice the difference. And that was one of the hallmarks of some of Eric Ambler’s protagonists, because they, most of them, had to learn all that kind of stuff for themselves and then figure out what to do about it. But yeah, he was very much emblematic. I mean, he doesn’t have a first name. It’s the same as Latimer. That’s it. It’s unimportant. What his first name is. Whose first name it doesn’t have a first name, Latimer, it is. It’s Charles.

Carolyn Daughters  21:30
Charles Latimer, you’re right.

Sarah Harrison  21:32
You’re right. I looked it up when we watched the movie, which we’ll talk about later, because they changed it to they started calling them Latimer lighten and then they didn’t mention Latimer again.

Neil Nyren  21:43
His name’s Charles Latimer, but then they don’t call him Charles again. I think it’s referenced only maybe one time at the very beginning of The Mask of Dimitrios (A Coffin for Dimitrios). And I had to look for that too after we watched the movie. It’s trying to keep it straight, but the focus is just on Latimer. And so you in the handbook on the craft of mystery writing called How to Write a mystery, you wrote the chapter the rules and when to break them. And so when you’re handing somebody, an author, a copy of A Coffin for Dimitrios (The Mask of Dimitrios) and talking through like, Hey, this is why this book stands the test of time. Here are some things I think you’re going to get from the book that you might be able to apply to your own writing. Like, what are some of these rules of mystery writing, number one and number two, like, when? When do you break them? So Somerset Maugham once said there are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are. I love him, but that doesn’t stop people from running the rules. Anyway, back in 1928 the American writer SSN Dine, he published 20 rules for writing detective stories. A year later, a British author named Ronald Knox wrote 10 commandments for detective fiction. Elmo Leonard has written his own rules, and Brian Garfield has written his own rules. And the thing is, if you’re a writer and you want to learn how to write crime in suspense fiction, it’s useful to have things like this. So this because you’re just starting out, you need to have some sense of what you’re doing, what the conventions are, what the sub genres are, what generations of crime writers have found work or doesn’t work. But still, there isn’t a single one of those rules that you cannot break or subvert in some way. I mean, just for instance, the biggest rule has always been like the difference between a mystery and a throw it is pretty basic. I mean, mysteries are usually about a puzzle and a crime is committed, and our protagonist has to sift through clues and suspects and all that and weave his way through into a solution of some sort. And it’s a more cerebral exercise, and his key question is like, who did it? But a thriller is about adrenaline. If something bad happens, the promise of more and even worse things are going to happen unless the protagonist can prevent it from happening. The stakes can be low, as in one person’s life, or it can be the fear of the entire world. And as that’s the sense that drives The Mask of Dimitrios (A Coffin for Dimitrios), The Chase, the scramble, and a key question, and always is what happens next? And many books are a pure mystery. Many books are pure thriller, but as you know from your own reading, most books have elements of both of these things. I mean, a pure traditional mystery. Can have lots of suspense in it, and thriller can have lots of puzzles that people need to work out and all that, and they everything just gets mixed together. And that’s really the first lesson on how genres explode and how rules are there. And it’s true for the sub genres too. It means like, no matter what it is like, noir, police, procedural, psychological for cozy, historical, military, etc, all the sub genres, they all have their own conventions, but there is not one of those conventions that cannot be blown up. I mean, take, for instance, a queen of the traditional mystery, Agatha, Christie, one of S.S. Van Dine’s rules was, there must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed, and then Murder on the Orient Express everybody was a culprit. She didn’t care. As far as I could see, nobody else cared. And that’s just one example that one of Ellery rules. In fact, his very first rule was never open a book with weather. But there is a book by Tony Hillerman that opens with a 247-word aria of weather describing this howling wind and the three main characters, and it’s so compelling, it’s better than any gunshot or explosion. It just sets everything up perfectly. One of the primary rules for us in publishing it always used to done with crime fiction, somebody’s going to be likable, because otherwise the reader is not going to identify. But then along came Gone Girl and blew it out to smithereens. Because, I mean, tell the truth, did you like either the husband or the wife in Gone Girl?

Carolyn Daughters  26:52
Neither one. They were both terrible.

Neil Nyren  26:56
Did you like that alcoholic woman, The Girl on the Train you did not like her, but these two books like transformed psychological suspense, so we don’t pay any interested in that anymore. Other writers have taken this various sub genres and they’ve mashed them up themselves, like Rex Stout took this traditional problem solving person in a persona of Nero Wolfe, and then paired him with Archie Goodwin, who was this wisecracking, traditional leg man, Private Eye, Hard Boiled Carl Hiaasen combined in an environmental thriller with film noir. Tom Clancy took the military thriller, and he married it to the political thriller, filled them all up with technology and invented the techno thriller. And still others have gone farther than that. I mean, they’ve taken the entire genre of crime fiction and they’ve paired it with science fiction, but have paired it with horror and paired it with the paranormal. I mean, people like Stephen King and Dean Koontz and Charlie Harrison just the obvious people. But like, there’s one book I always like to cite. It’s called The Seven and a half deaths of evil and hard castle, and that’s by a guy named Stuart Turton. And it’s a very traditional Christie, like isolated manor house of many suspects, type of mystery. But there is one key difference, the protagonist is stuck in an endless time loop, and every day he wakes up in the body of a different suspect, and he has to proceed from there. Now I don’t know how the author of the thought of that, but I’m so glad that he did. And when something like that works, when, when any book that breaks the rules work, there’s a special exhilaration in it, like, did he just do that? Can I do that? Yes, you can do that, and Eric Ambler definitely broke the rules. And as we said, He’s changing the face of suspense fiction ever since.

Sarah Harrison  29:11
That’s awesome. I love that you mentioned so many historic writers and where people are at and this history arc, since that’s what our podcast is all about. We pulled this quote from you, where you said, before Eric Ambler, international thrillers were dominated by such writers as John Buchan from The Thirty-Nine Steps, and there are many imitators. We read The Thirty-Nine Steps. We’re kind of a mixed genre. I would say as well. We’re mystery and thriller. So I’m glad you talked about that a little bit. We just recently read Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household. We loved that book. It’s really good. You mentioned Rex Stout. We did that a little while back. How do you see? What are the biggest distinctions for you in Ambler from these? Still really magnificent predecessors for me. I was like, I’ll just throw this out there. I was really taken away with the historicity of what he was going through here. A lot of authors have alluded to the historical context, but he went into so much depth that I felt like I haven’t studied history enough, really.

Neil Nyren  30:28
Sure you do. You do learn a lot. That’s true. And I think that’s one of his main contributions. Is that he is running about this period of time, it said, between the end of World War One, beginning World War Two. It was such an uneasy time in all of world history, but especially in European history, because they’re all living it every day. Nobody knew who was on whose side and what was going on, and there was no way to really understand what was going on unless it was put in front of you, put in context. And so he always puts in stuff in context, and he does that throughout his books to one degree or another. I mentioned just Journey into Fear, especially, that’s the book that immediately follows The Mask of Dimitrios (A Coffin for Dimitrios), and that is, is almost like a companion piece, because Colonel kaki is in that one as well. And the way that that set up is that this British guy who expert in munitions, is in Turkey to set up their armaments program. He surprises somebody who’s in his hotel room and gets shot at, so not wounded, and Colonel hockey comes to him and says, You got to get out of here. Because, don’t you think that the Italians and the Russians and the Germans all know that you are here. They Don’t Want You To reinforce Turkey’s armaments. They are going to kill you. And this guy says, gee, I’m just an engineer. No, no, no, you don’t understand. So I says, Well, I’m going to be taking the train, they said, so you can’t take the train. You would die before you get to Belgrade and you take the train. He says, you’re only home. There’s a cargo boat leaving this afternoon. The cargo boats going to Genoa. From Genoa, you’ll be almost at the French border. Then you’ll be fine, but you’ve got to go right now. And he says, and they have a few passengers on there, and the truth, they have, like, about nine passengers on it. What our hero does not know is that some of them are none of them are what they seem. Some of them are there to kill him. Some of them are there to prevent him being killed. And there are some surprises as well. But all this is put into the context of where these people are from and the stories that they bring with them, and when they make stops along the way, what’s happening in those countries. And you really understand what’s going on in a way that in Dimitrios, like these explanations of this Smyrna massacre, like I didn’t know anything about that, that it was like, Yeah, truly horrendous. And when you read that, and you also see the way that white slaving in a dope trade in Paris 1928. And the way that you could sub born a Yugoslav clerk in the Defense Department, how that could be something, if like, you just learn an enormous amount about what the world is really like? It isn’t just what is happening to to Latimer, is lots what’s happening in the world. And Eric Ambler just wants to tell you all about it.

Carolyn Daughters  33:54
In a 1981 New York Times interview, Eric Ambler wrote, or said, thrillers are respectable now, but back in the beginning, people weren’t quite sure about them, but they really say more the way people think and governments behave than many of the conventional novels 100 years from now, if they last, these books may offer some clues to what was going on in our world. And I have to say, I hadn’t thought about that until I read that quote and then applied it to The Mask of Dimitrios (A Coffin for Dimitrios), and thought, Okay, I’m seeing the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. I’m seeing the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I’m seeing new states like Yugoslavia and the chaos in between these two wars. And I think he has a really interesting point there.

Neil Nyren  34:41
Absolutely, it is. It’s all about the context. And Eric Ambler is after real politic instead of just made up fantasy stories. I mean, most of Robert Ludlum is really made up fantasy stories, you know. But that was the kind of stuff that interested him.

Carolyn Daughters  35:05
Can we talk a bit about some of the authors you’ve edited? Because it’s quite an incredible list. You have edited more than 300 New York Times bestsellers, Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, Ken Follett, Carl Hiaasen. You mentioned Martha Grimes. The list is, it’s we would probably just take up the whole rest of this time listing them all. Yeah, I mean, the first big author you worked with, were they big when you started working with them? Were they big after you worked with them, like, what was your transition like into this world of extremely popular New York Times, bestselling books and major authors?

Neil Nyren  35:52
Well, when you start out, you don’t, you don’t get started out with a big, famous author. You work your way up. I started with a love of authors like Eric Ambler, who wrote The Mask of Dimitrios. And a lot of that was working. By that, I mean, like with Carl Hiaasen, for instance, he and a writing partner were doing this. They were both at The Miami Herald at the time. They were just writing these interesting little throwers, which were good, they were great. They were perfectly fine, but they weren’t anything special. And then Carl got an idea something else he wanted to do. And I agreed to do it. And just about that time, I moved over to another publisher, and I brought it with me, and I said I’d like to bring this contract over with me. And she said, How much is it? Nice? As $10,000 and should Sure. And this book was provisionally called the Orange Bowl solution. And I said, I don’t think that’s the greatest of titles. And so you went back and thought about it, came back and said, How about if we call it tourist season. And I said, Carl, now you’re talking and like, then, not just those books. I mean, they developed slowly, and he didn’t become the bestseller until it was about a seventh or eighth book. But that’s the way a lot of things progress. With Clancy. Clancy, I got he this first book had for The Hunt for Red October, is published by the Naval Institute Press, which is his first novel they ever did. They’ve never novel before. And our paperback line Berkeley, like to do military stuff, and so they bought the paperback rights, and they made it known that, like, boy, they would certainly like to have him on their list and all that. And Tom actually gave when the second book came around the Naval Institute Press, he gave them the option to as long as they came within a certain amount of money in somebody else’s offer, then he would stay with them, but they could not compete with us. And so that was Red Storm Rising. And by that time, I had started editing a good number of thrillers. And so I was I that one was one that I was given. As they said, We think you’re a good match for Tom Clancy. And as it turned out, I was and I did all of his hard cover fiction novels that he wrote, not all the ones that comes instead. And that was always a lot of fun, hair raising at times, because usually played it very close to the vest in terms of schedules. And it was the sort of thing where eventually he was sending me them chapter by chapter, and I’d have to edit the chapter and send it to production so that they would have it, because, like, August was his date. August was Tom Clancy’s pub date, and sometimes I didn’t get the final chapter until July, which was, don’t know anything about publishing schedule, but that is very, very hard, because when we were publishing as hardcover books, there were no ebooks then, so that if you wanted to read the new time class, you went out and you bought the hardcover book. And at its peak, we were doing a first printing of 2 million copies and to be sending last minute chapters to the press for them to pump out 2 million copies by pub date and make it was I always scheduled my vacations around that I made sure I wasn’t going away on vacation anywhere during that period.

Carolyn Daughters  39:50
I want to get back to The Mask of Dimitrios, but I have to ask — 300 books, 300 New York Times bestsellers. You were editing multiple books a year. How many books could you edit?

Neil Nyren  40:00
Oh, lot it depended upon what the list was. I mean, I had as many as a dozen books, and I had lists that was only six or seven or eight books, but you can, you can multitask. That’s part of the skill of the editor. You pretty much have to do that. For someone like Clive Cussler, when we got him, he was already a very big, bestselling author. He’d been with a number of publishing houses, and he was writing a book every year or so, but just about that time, he started to branch out a bit. I don’t know whether it was his idea, or his agents idea, whatever. But, offshoots. And by the time he died, he was doing four books a year. Whoa, all of them, all of them with collaborators, except for the dirk pits, which he was just doing alone. But all the rest of you doing a collaborators. But he kept a very, very firm hand on these people, like he would make them, they would check out what the book was going to be. Then he’d make him send him a third of the book, and if he liked it, he said, great. If he didn’t, he would tear it apart. And that’s like, tell him start all over again. On he’s very conscious of his brand and what his readers like and he would do that for each third of the book. And when he finally said, yeah, that works. And that’s when I got them. I will tell you one story about Clive. So when I when I first met him, I actually flew out to Scott Dale to meet him, and pay my respects, and all that sort of thing. But then we invited him back into New York to meet some of the team, and we had a big lunch room, and he was seated next to me, and he leaned over and he said, I want to tell you a story that the house he had come from. He had been working with very famous editor whom I will not name, and when he sent his first manuscript into that person, it came back covered with pencil marks, very heavy editing, which did not please Clive. So what he did was he wrote on the first page to manuscript the word stout, then he wrote it on every other page of the manuscript and sent it all back. And a few days later, he gets this panicky call from New York and said, Clive Cussler, can you come in? We talk about this and all that. He says, No, it would be inconvenient, and that book was published the way that he wanted it published. Now I knew he had no ulterior motive in telling me that story, but I always made sure that the book was polished away. Did he want to? It doesn’t mean he didn’t.

Carolyn Daughters  43:10
Wink, wink, nod, nod, like I’m just going to share this harmless story that has no so just for readers. So when, when you do an editing Mark say, you strike through a word, and then you write stet in the margin. It means, ignore the edit.

Neil Nyren  43:24
Yeah, that is right. Of doing it and you took edit. It’s not like it was anti editing. If there was something that was inconsistent, or timelines not working out, or a character wasn’t in, you wanted to be told about that stuff, but his style. He did not want you to fancy up his style, so he called it gussing it up. So I never gussied up the style.

Sarah Harrison  43:51
That’s awesome. That’s a great story. You have so much interesting perspective on Eric Ambler and on the on the genre. I hope our listeners will come with us. We’ve run out of time for this episode, but we’re gonna do another episode if we can keep Neil with us.

Neil Nyren  44:09
I wasn’t even aware of the time passing.

Carolyn Daughters  44:14
Listeners, if you’ll stick with us, we’re gonna do another episode on The Mask of Dimitrios (A Coffin for Dimitrios).

Sarah Harrison 
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Carolyn Daughters
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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.