This is by Eric Ambler (1909-98), and it came out in 1962.

He is an author with a very curious life story. The child of entertainers, he studied engineering for a while, and briefly worked in that field. Then he turned to writing advertising copy, and finally to writing novels. During the war he joined the army (when the recruiting officer heard that he was a writer, he famously asked: "Yes, but is there anything you can actually do?"). Eventually he was seconded to the Army Film Unit. There he worked with Peter Ustinov, who later starred in the 1964 film version of The Light of Day, entitled Topkapi. This was the film that apparently later inspired the Mission Impossible television series and movie franchise, and -- it is said -- the high jinks of a notorious thief who broke into a New York museum, and stole the world's largest sapphire... After the war, Ambler initially continued with cinema work, but resumed his novels in 1951.

I came to The Light of Day via a Five Books recommendation from M.C. Beaton (of Agatha Raisin fame).

But a more specific motivation was that it's largely set in Istanbul. Our narrator, Arthur Abdel Simpson, lives in Athens. But he has a complicated history (which comes to light only gradually and partially). Born in Cairo of an Egyptian mother and a long-dead British father, something of a ne'er-do-well, and therefore persona non grata in various jurisdictions, he is of indeterminate nationality, and therefore vulnerable. He lives off various small hustles, but this particular time he bites off more than he can chew, and his potential victim, Walter K. Harper, turns the tables, and forces him to become part of a nefarious plot. Which involves his driving a car to Istanbul, no questions asked. His route: Athens, Salonika, Edirne, Istanbul...

The problem is that when he gets to the Turkish border, his passport is out of date. "Frankly," he says, "I find all this paper regimentation we have to go through nowadays extremely boring." Hear, hear! Arthur, old chap, it's a good job you didn't live to see our era...

Anyway, he is grilled by various Turkish officials. And when he is asked whether he has driven this way before, he explains he only comes with tourists: "They like to visit Olympus, Salonika and Alexandropolis on their way to Istanbul." As you might well want to do...

Arthur's predicament only gets worse, however, when the officials find various weapons hidden inside the doors of the car. He is arrested... But the Turks, jumpy about potential insurgencies and assassination plots, decide to involve him in a bit of undercover work. He'll carry on with the job Harper has given him, but he'll report back regularly to his handlers. He's unkeen, of course ("I think that if I were asked to single out one specific group of men, one type, one category, as being the most suspicious, unbelieving, unreasonable, petty, inhuman, sadistic, double-crossing set of bastards in any language, I would say without any hesitation 'the people who run counter-espionage departments'"), but they know all about his difficulties with various authorities, and so he's not in a position to refuse.

He's shifty, our Arthur. He tells his Turkish interrogator: "My only wish is to tell you all I can, to bring everything out of the darkness into the light of day." But you know he just can't help being duplicitous. Even those words are borrowed from the confession that Harper dictated to him (with the aim of ensuring Arthur's obedient cooperation). So you know that there are a lot of undercurrents of duress and frustration here. You don't take anything at face value, and you're pretty confident that very little is going to see the light of day by the end...


On the wall of the room where Arthur is questioned, there's "a telephone and a framed lithograph of Kemal Ataturk"

Back in 2006, I'd already read Epitaph for a Spy, a much earlier Ambler novel, published in 1938. I enjoyed it immensely, and described it in my diary like this: "A great page-turner. A spy-story set in late-30s France. And the goodie comes out of it safe and sound. As late-30s heroes often do. Reassuring."

To be honest, I enjoyed The Light of Day less. Arthur, our feckless hero, is self-deprecating and often amusing, and you do find yourself wanting him to outwit the team of baddies that has roped him in (I won't say to what, because that would be a massive spoiler). But he was too unlikeable -- verging too close on the cringeworthy -- to really engage me.


A map of the area of Istanbul the story becomes particularly concerned with

This kind of hero is a hallmark of Ambler's development, it seems. His heroes were always "very unexceptional sorts, the quintessence of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances". But whereas his 1930s leads were simply "incompetents", and their 1950s equivalents "still amateurs but comparatively upright and authoritative", the 1960s brought a change, with leads who are "a rogue's gallery of minor criminals" (such as Arthur). According to this source, the change was prompted by a very specific life event -- a house fire that destroyed the first manuscript of the book, even though it was in a safe that was supposed to be fire-proof:

"Ambler recounts the incident in The Story So Far:

"'In London I began to think about The Light of Day again, but not with the idea of recalling and reproducing what I had written before.

"'I have never really planned a book, certainly not on paper; I have usually seen it first, as a journey to be made by characters who are all regurgitated and reassembled bits of me. Sometimes, as the journey progresses, I get tired of it. If the characters fail to live up to their promise, even after much rewriting, and the telling of the story becomes laboured, I discard the whole project. The decision to do so is not taken lightly and, lest I should at some later date weaken and try to revive a duck already pronounced dead, I have usually destroyed the manuscript.

"'Now, the decision to destroy had been made for me and although the duck was undoubtedly dead, I did not like the way it had died. Naturally I looked for someone to blame, someone to publish. I found only myself, the crass believer in fairy tales, the clown who bought fireproof safes. Very well! The Light of Day would rise again but it would become an autobiographical novel and, worse, a comedy.

"'Arthur Abdel Simpson, pimp, pander, guide, pornographer and sneak thief was my stand-in for the part of the clown hero and he served me very well. Of course, I am not the first writer to work his way out of depression by turning to comedy, but I have been one of the lucky ones. Readers of genre fiction do not like a writer with whom they have come to feel safe suddenly changing his tone of voice. Normally friendly reviewers were inclined to dismiss The Light of Day as an aberration. In Europe, however, I gained readers."


This park, which we often visited in 2022, is close to the baddies' target area

It is true that there is a strong element of farce in the book. We have childish sniping between Arthur and Geven, the cook (at one point, the two of them end up sharing a bathroom, and Arthur comments morosely: "Patience was necessary in order to flush the toilet successfully, and he had given up too soon"). There are comedic scenes where Arthur has to hide in unlikely places and survive embarrassing situations to avoid detection; and to find out a key bit of information, he climbs up onto a "larger than life-size Vestal virgin with bird-droppings all over her", and clings on to her draperies. Arthur is definitely more a reluctant Johnny English than a reluctant James Bond.

Some of the descriptions probably weren't meant to be amusing, but are so to contemporary ears. This, for example: "There's an Air France jet to Rome... Seats available. Boarding in twenty minutes..." Ah, those were the days... Now it would take you more than twenty minutes to shuffle your way through security...

Other features worth noting:

-- It's interesting how the Turkish authorities see everything through the lens of a political crime (and even the incorrigible Geven is convinced his masters are Russian spies). Often evil-doing is way more prosaic, as Arthur is well placed to realize.

-- Another key theme -- a sober one beneath the froth of the comedy -- is statelessness. Josef Vadassy, the hero of my previous Ambler (Epitaph for a Spy, remember), is a refugee and effectively belongs nowhere. This is a predicament that recurs in Ambler's novels, and is replicated in Arthur's precarious and ambiguous position.



Ambler has had enormous influence, and is credited as a trail-blazer by the likes of John Le Carre, Len Deighton, Frederick Forsyth, and Graham Greene. There had been thrillers before he came on the scene. But their implausibility and strong undercurrent of jingoism made Ambler determined to strike out in a different direction.

He was obviously successful. "In a 1981 interview with the New York Times, he had this to say: '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.'"

Ambler himself was influenced by Somerset Maugham's Ashenden. But the later writer drills down deeper into details (in the interests of plausibility), and rather than have his leads serve a government, he presents us with amateur heroes who are often political innocents caught up in games much bigger than they.

There are a couple more of his oeuvre that I will definitely be following up.