Word: ambler
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...your teeth and set your heels, tying them up before they escape and presenting the prize in a blue binder and a parade of marching IBM Selectric lines to show you've tamed them. Pretty stupid, thought I... and proceeded to get seized by a brutal addiction to Eric Ambler. I read every damn thing he wrote, practically (even a thesis has its tiny leaks), and I don't even have a magna to show...
Thesis anxiety or not, if Eric Ambler's fifteen or so books were not so wildly interesting I could have kicked the habit. Agatha Christie, who has all the psychological insight of second year algebra, couldn't have maintained interest like that, and if you've ever tried Rex Stout you'd know after three of four books that Nero Wolfe is really just a fat old fart. Almost every collection of one-author-one-genre books gets repetitive after a while: critics betray this by calling thrillers a "craft" or a pulp writer a "masterful technician," generally revealing that...
...baseball, commences a long argument about how there's nothing to really care about in this society anymore, and at least a good World Series brings people together in sharing the rarity of a strong and healthy emotion. With similar protesting-too-much, I want to claim that Eric Ambler is, well, almost literature. Riddled with the truths of human and historical behavior. Not just a decadently engrossing game...
...Ambler writes novels of, um, "international intrigue"--geographical thrillers, you might say. He evades repetitiveness because his genre can be made to have limitless possibilities. You can only murder so many duchesses in so many English manor houses, but Ambler has the whole world to spy in. And his leftist view of society (which is not incorruptible--more of that later) spurs him to take great pains letting the social conditions and political situations of his settings inform the way the plot works itself...
Take Dirty Story, for instance, which Ambler wrote in 1967. Two European mining consortiums have extensive interests in two African countries side by side. A secret expeditionary force from one country discovers valuable ore just beyond its borders. They hire mercenaries to lead African troops in an effort to rearrange the border. A down-and-out fugitive, our hero, is waylaid in French Somaliland (he is forced to leave Greece for getting mixed up in a pornography racket) with passport problems. He meets a "businessman" and when effusively drunk he brags of a non-existent background in soldiering. Before...