Word: ambler
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Although individuals could show human values, anyone in a large group was only a pawn in the game. Even the liberal Dubcek figure in Deltchev turns out to be bogus--a political opportunist. Given the climate of the times, Ambler found himself a pawn as well: I found an old early fifties 25-cent paperback which screams...
...Ambler heroes, who tend to be British engineers or American journalists with names like Carter and Latimer, always blunder into situations beyond their control, just as the reader falls from the world of the rational browser into the depths of frenzied addition. Alfred Hitchcock has written about one famous Ambler beginning, that of Background To Danger (1937). Kenton is a British journalist in Germany who has lost all his money in a poker game. He takes a train to Vienna to borrow some from a man he knows there. But on the train he shares a compartment with...
Kenton is courted by many spies in Background To Danger, but the one whom he trusts is Zaleshoff, a Soviet agent. Zaleshoff is probably the most sympathetic character in all of Ambler's work--a shrewd and courageous servant of his government in the fight against fascism. If it were not for his sister-and-colleague (the beautiful Tamara) deflating his ego and making him look constantly ridiculous (women in Ambler are often girl Fridays who see through the melodramatic illusions of men), Zaleshoff might be a bit much. But he is the wonderful stuff of a racidal's fantasy...
...Ambler was the popular novelist of the left during the thirties, although two well-known movies made from this period, Journey Into Fear (with Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles) and Mask of Dimitrios (with Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet), weeded subversion out. But then Ambler changed. After 1940 he didn't write a book for eleven years. He was in charge of propaganda films for the British Army until 1946, and spent a few years writing screenplays (e.g., Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea). In 1951 a disillusioned Ambler, returned with Judgement on Deltchev, about a political trial in Eastern Europe...
Soon after Ambler wrote State of Siege, set in Southeast Asia, where he made it clear that he at least sympathized with indigenous leftist forces in the third world. But before long that hope, too, was gone. Ambler's heroes now tend to look out for number one, and more and more of them are international hybrids lost in a sea of vicious superpowers...