Synopsis: 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, Latimer soon finds himself caught up in a shadowy web of assassination, espionage, drugs, and treachery.
Despite my going through an intense espionage thriller phase many years ago, I never even heard of Eric Ambler until the last few years. His books are often held up as some of the founding works of the genre. Before LeCarre, Fleming and Follett there was Ambler cooking up the memes that would become so familiar. So I finally read one and it was good. Not entirely surprising since I’ve read a lot of what came after, but it held my attention quite well.
One thing that stood out was the novel’s construction. We do not follow a spy directly, nor do we interact with his handlers or agency. The man in question isn’t really a spy at all, but more of a mercenary for hire who isn’t too picky about the job. Need an assassin? Call Dimitrios. Smuggler? Ah, Dimitrios is your man. A spy? No problem, Dimitrios can get it done. It is the ever-changing nature of his activities that have kept him out of harm’s way for so long and part of the reason our protagonist, Charles Latimer, is fascinated by him. Often he says to himself that he really should give up the chase and go back to his detective stories, but he can't; he's obsessed.
Latimer isn’t a cop or a spy-chaser, he’s a novelist. At first I thought he was being deliberately hooked into Dimitrios’s story in order to ferret him out, but that wasn’t the case. He was just interested and wanted to see how much he could really do as opposed to just writing about detectives and how they get their men. From each bit of information, he discovers more and meets people connected with Dimitrios. He’s a bit bumbling and innocent, but he has flashes of cunning and capitalizes on lucky breaks very well.
Mixed in with the intrigue is a lot of interesting history that gets overshadowed by the two world wars on either side of the decade. The villainous politicians and the violence they wrought added a lot of flavor to the story and firmly cemented its time and place.
As I said, Ambler has created memes of the genre that are no longer surprising, so I wasn’t as shocked by the actions and outcomes as a reader in the 1930s would have been. Despite that, I liked Latimer and his obsession and stuck with him until the end.
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