Eric Ambler, where have you been all my life?

His is a name I knew only as an author who provided source material for a great Orson Welles movie, Journey Into Fear, was rated by a bunch of writers who I like but who is now largely unread. Yet here we are with a fantastic set of Penguin Ambler reissues, of which The Mask Of Dimitrios is my first, and I feel such a fool for not having read him before. In the same way Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler brought realism to the detective novel so Eric Ambler did to spy fiction. It turns out he is every bit a part of the making of the spy novel as Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham and John Le Carre. This is a serious gap I now intend to fill in fairly short order.

The Mask Of Dimitrios sees successful, bored, effette crime novelist Charles Latimer travel to Istanbul in search of sensation to rid him of his torpor. There he meets the sinister head of the Secret Police, Colonel Haki, who tells Latimer all about the mysterious Dimitrios, an international master criminal whose body has just been fished from the Bosphorous. Fascinated by this brief encounter, Latimer decides to uncover the real Dimitrios by retracing his criminal career through the Balkans and across Europe. What follows is a Europe-by-train thriller, in which an innocent abroad is gradually dragged into a fantastically louche, atmospheric and murky world of backstreet bars, gaslit alleyways, nightclub owners, prostitutes, strange Europeans with guns and all manner of shady members of the demi-monde.

At bars in Belgrade, Sofia, Athens, Geneva and Paris, Latimer meets former adversaries, cohorts and victims. Each brings the mysterious Dimitrios a bit more to life but none  has more than a fragment of the whole picture. Dimitrios, it transpires, is a con man a thief, a murderer, a drug runner, a pimp and a spy for hire, at once an international drug smuggler and the big time muscle behind mittel European political conspiracies. Dimitrios is a mysterious cypher. Until Latimer pulls the pieces together and for Latimer Dimitrios is made all too real.

Written in the months leading up to the outbreak of War in 1939 this is fantastically atmospheric stuff with plenty to say about the complexities of Europe. But most of all it is great fun. The characters, the settings, the individual scenes all leap off the page and it is easy to imagine an Orson Welles or a Sydney Greenstreet  in the dark alleyways and bars in a sweaty linen suit before a clanging nighttime train ride clutching a briefcase full of money in one hand and a revolver in the other.

This is a story of dark mysterious Europe butting up against upright, uptight, genteel England, of naivete and cynicism, of the complex reality of international crime and politics. Still a subject worthy of serious genre fiction and The Mask Of Dimitrios is still an absolute page turner of a read to boot.

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