The Wrong Man
The world of Eric Ambler
The Dark Frontier, Uncommon Danger, Epitaph for a Spy, Cause for Alarm, The Mask of Dimitrios, Journey into Fear, Judgment on Deltchev, The Schirmer Inheritance, The Night-Comers, Passage of Arms, The Light of Day, The Ability to Kill, A Kind of Anger, Dirty Story, The Intercom Conspiracy, The Levanter, Doctor Frigo, Send No More Roses, The Care of Time, Here Lies, Waiting for Orders and The Story so Far by Eric Ambler
In the first chapter of his lightly fictionalised autobiography, Here Lies, Eric Ambler describes the aftermath of a car accident he suffered in his seventies.
Crawling out of his new car at the bottom of a Swiss ravine, Ambler tried and failed to explain to a policeman who found him what had happened. He had been told by the car salesman that the engine was coated in a protective material, which would smoke harmlessly a little as the engine warmed up. Ambler realised as he woke up in the wreckage, a mess of cuts and bruises, that the coating had instead vaporised and steadily gassed him into unconsciousness. His car had toppled over the side of a mountain with the driver incapacitated. It was sheer good luck that the author was not killed.
But in explaining this situation to the policeman, Ambler’s French failed him. He had meant to say that he was asphyxiated, but instead could only tell that he was unconscious. The policeman, with a checklist to hand, refused to believe that the man before him had not simply fallen asleep, and gave Ambler, as he scrambled up the cliffside a mass of injuries, a moralising lecture on the solemn requirements of getting sufficient rest and taking extra care on these mountain roads. Dangerous place for a foreigner, monsieur. A dangerous place for a foreigner like you. Everybody ought to go careful in a place like this.
A small story perhaps. But an important one. Eric Ambler’s works are mostly about men like him: ordinary men, many of them harmless engineers by training, thrown completely unknowingly into choppy waters. Ambler had a strange career. He was an engineer, did a couple of dead-end type jobs. As a press agent for a film star, in his own words; then a copywriter producing pabulum for idiots. A lot of pointless travel for work. Sitting around, having ideas. He was in the forces during the Second World War after his first blush of literary success and celebrity. And then he moved to Holywood, wrote some imperishable films and many other that were here today and gone tomorrow, and took up novel-writing again quite late in his career, turning out a steady rate of above-average books which did not date and which seemed truly of their time even into the 1970s, forty years after he first published anything.
The first six of those novels are masterpieces, great classics that no one since, no writer born in the past seventy years has approached. The Dark Frontier is inventive and light on its feet, with a central gimmick so enjoyable I won’t mention it. Uncommon Danger introduces Zaleshoff and his sister Tamara, sympathetic Soviet agents — this was before the Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact — who find that the protagonists goals are not so remote from their own. And Epitaph for a Spy, a beautiful novel, elegantly done, wonderfully made. Cause for Alarm, in which Zaleshoff and his sister Tamara return, and which has one of the most remarkable scenes in a snow-bound Italian—Yugoslav border. And The Mask of Dimitrios and Journey into Fear, great exemplars of their art — both of them tight-wound instruments, rounding off a productive few years producing gold every year to a deadline.
After the war, Ambler did not write fiction under his own name for a time. He wrote forgotten and unremembered books under a joint pseudonym with a co-author, and he wrote films. But his return to solo fiction in 1951, with Judgment on Deltchev, may be his best novel. Ambler’s description of sitting in on an an Eastern European show trial is haunting, chilling.
Ambler is better than other writers like Graham Greene because he understood that you cannot simply pantomime moral complexity by genuflecting to a Catholic guilt. You must show what pointless, capricious life is really like.
Eric Ambler understood something that became clear in his century but which we ought not to forget in ours. That political and legal regimes do not care about individuals. Individuals are the obstacles to be avoided, or run through. The individual is always anxious around the state, because the state cannot love him, cannot care even a moment for his life.
In an unfree world, the world we inhabit, all men are the wrong man. One unexpected request, one odd letter, one false accusation, one strange development — that’s all it takes. No one is innocent until proven guilty in the world we have — the world of mass, ubiquitous surveillance, of Pegasus and Predator and Paragon, of official cruelty directed at members of unpopular groups, of dissolving the people and importing another. The policemen all hold checklists they have to complete. You are an obstacle to their doing so. And they will act accordingly.