This enjoyable little espionage story, by Eric Ambler (1909-98), was published in 1937. It's his second novel, and -- having read The Light of Day a few months ago, which is a product of the 1960s -- I can now definitely confirm that I like Ambler's earlier work better than his later offerings.

My audio-version was read by Simon Bubb, who did an absolutely brilliant job with the different accents and languages.

This, coupled with the fact that it's very suspenseful, meant it was an excellent story to listen to while cleaning (that supremely unpleasant duty that can be rendered marginally less tedious by means of audio-books). There's the occasional clunky bit, where the political background is sketched in. But these sections are never lengthy, and soon we're back to the ups-and-downs and narrow escapes of the classic thriller.

As is often the case with Ambler, we have a hero who's drawn into the plot inadvertently, and is in no way suited for the world of espionage. He's Mr. Kenton; he's 30; he's a freelance journalist; and we first encounter him heading by train to Vienna because he's lost all his money playing poker-dice, and is planning to tap a friend for some interim funds... When a dodgy-looking character calling himself Sachs offers him money to deliver some documents, he unwisely accepts. Not long afterwards, Sachs (whose real name is Borovansky, and who is actually a Russian double agent) is found murdered. And, of course, Suspect No. 1 is Kenton (who still has the papers).

Our journalist is actually not the first person we encounter in the novel, however. There's a Prologue, set in London, in which we meet Mr Balterghen, of the Pan-Eurasian Petroleum Company. He and his board members are trying to wring oil concession revisions out of the Romanian government. At the moment they're not prevailing, because there's pushback in Romania, spurred on by a newspaper keen to signal the misdeeds of "foreign capitalist exploiters". Balterghen blithely dismisses these barbs: "We are business men and we are anxious to do business with the Roumanian Government. We are not interested in politics." Then he announces that he has engaged the services of "a man with considerable experience in matters of this sort". That man is "Colonel Robinson".

Then a lot of things come to light. Borovanksy's papers are Russian contingency plans for an attack on Bessarabia (the disputed, oil-producing area between Russia and Romania, now mostly in Moldova, but then part of Romania). They are the sort of thing most governments will have buried in the depths of a filing cabinet somewhere. But in the wrong hands they will whip up anti-Russian feeling, and help the Fascist Iron Guard (friends of Nazi Germany) to assume power in Romania.


"There's no train to Bucharest until four this afternoon..." The pictures are from our brief stay in the Romanian capital in 2023

Keen to effect precisely this result are Baltighen's Colonel Robinson (real name Stefan Saridza) and his ghastly henchman, Captain Mailler. Their job is to deliver the military plans to Bastaki, a Romanian industrialist and supporter of hard-right Romanian politician Codreanu (useful quote: "What the Thyssens and Krupps did for Hitler, the Bastakis and Balterghens could do for Codreanu"). For Baltighen and his cronies, regime change in favour of a fascist government is a wholly acceptable way to ensure a good oil deal. Nothing new -- or old -- there.

Keen to thwart this outcome, on the other hand, are Andreas and Tamara Zaleshoff, a Switzerland-based brother-and-sister team of Russian spies, plus their various minders and lackeys.

Both "sides" are therefore keen to intercept poor Kenton.

So we're treated to a real cat-and-mouse game as our luckless journalist falls into one set of hands and then the other. Of course, the plot is often dependent on the most incredible strokes of good luck and coincidence. It's a spy novel, after all, not War and Peace. But it's very engaging (even if you're not pushing a mop around). And there are some memorable scenes (I'm thinking particularly of the one with Mr Hodgkin, the commercial traveller, who identifies the fugitive Kenton, but decides to help him; and -- of course -- that dramatic escape from the cable factory).

I won't give away the details of the ending, but the plot has a few really interesting features.

One is its political orientation. The thrillers of Ambler's day tended to be nationalistic and right-wing, full of noble Brits and dodgy foreigners. Ambler, on the other hand, presents us here with Russians who are morally dubious (Zaleshoff is far from soft), but distinctly more principled than those on the opposing team.

Conversely, many of the British characters are detestable. We have the board meeting at the beginning, where we're shown businessmen motivated solely by profit, and willing to sacrifice the stability of Europe to get it. Their hired man, Saridza/Robinson, is violent and utterly unscrupulous, the kind of strongman who gets extremely dirty things done on behalf of those who want to conserve the myth that their hands are clean.

His vicious gofer, Captain Mailler, is depicted as an out-and-out sadist. Interestingly, we're told he was a former Black and Tan. No further explanation is given, but contemporary readers would have been familiar with the force's "unsavoury reputation for brutality and violence in the Irish War of Independence", just 15 years before the publication of the book. As Thomas Jones points out, "It's tempting to see him as a satirical portrait of the archetypal hero of the moribund thrillers that Ambler was so determined to supersede, unmasked and revealed for the cryptofascist brute he really is."

Even Mr Hodgkin, though a sympathetic character who helps our hero, does so from essentially xenophobic motives (along the lines of: This Brit is a crook, but he's a Brit, and I'll back him rather than any of these damn foreigners, none of whom I like).



The action of the novel runs over the course of a few days in November 1936. As Ambler says in his memoir, this was "the year in which 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. Those were the things that I was trying, in my own fictional terms, to write about."

For Ambler, it's capitalism that is the arch-villain in all this, since profit-seeking elements are ready to climb into bed with anyone -- including out-and-out right-wingers allied to a country very likely to become Britain's enemy in the near future. This section of the novel is worth quoting at length: "It was the power of Business, not the deliberations of statesman, that shaped the destinies of nations. The Foreign Ministers of the great powers might make the actual declarations of their Governments' policies; but it was the Big Business men, the bankers and their dependents, the arms manufacturers, the oil companies, the big industrialists, who determined what those policies should be... The Big Business man was only one player in the game of international politics, but he was the player who made all the rules... One end of the game was being played in the rarefied atmosphere of board-rooms and shooting-parties; the other was played, with persons like Sachs as counters, in trains, in cheap hotels, in suburbs of big cities, in murky places away from the bright highways dedicated to the rosy-cheeked goddess of tourisme. Someone spoke in an office in Birmingham or Pittsburgh, or maybe on board a yacht off Cannes, and a few weeks later a Mills bomb burst in a printing works in Bucharest. Between those two events, unknown both to the man who had spoken and to the man who had pulled the pin from the bomb, was a misty hinterland in which the 'Colonel Robinsons' of the earth moved silently about their business."

Nothing has changed, really...

The other thing I liked about this book was its female spy, Tamara. Yes, Kenton goes a bit dewy-eyed over her, and she's not immune to his shambolic charm either. But she's given a proper job, and she does it well. There's none of the female stereotyping that mars so many later spy novels. Tamara is capable, cool-headed, feisty, and not at all subservient towards her brother. And she powers that Mercedes along like a racing-driver...

Jones reminds us of Ambler's influence: "For Graham Greene he was 'unquestionably our best thriller writer'. John le Carre once called him 'the source on which we all draw'."

I don't think it's hard to see why.