Word: ambler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...went on for months, this falling asleep at four in the morning in a fiendish cloud of cigarette smoke, a rubble of beer bottles, light glaring and an Eric Ambler paperback folded across my nose. It wasn't until I'd finished gobbling the 11th or 12th Ambler goodie that I realized what had been going on. Not what was going on with the books--spy novels are easy enough to figure, God knows--but what was going on with me. I finally caught on to the twisted logic grown up between the Ambler fetish and my dropping...
...merely an oversized gathering of spy stories. But there is far more seething below the surface of espionage and counterintelligence. According to British Journalist Anthony Cave Brown, the conflict was a looking-glass war whose cruel and brilliant espionage far outran the fabrications of le Carré and Eric Ambler...
...Eric Ambler has been charting the Middle East menace for years, sketching shabby cityscapes on the backs of greasy menu cards. The torpid and unheroic heroes of Ambler's books, however, scuttle wretchedly about, energized by greed and knowledge that their visas have expired. If repressive authority enters, it is in the person of an oxlike police corporal whose face bulges out of the top of a gray wool uniform that looks as if it had been boiled...
There is none of Ambler's brilliant seediness in the new breed of wild Eastern suspense books. Plots and characters of a dozen or more titles all derive from the same headlines - during the fall of 1972 - when Black September terrorists murdered 1 1 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Villainous Palestinians, flinty Israeli secret police and slightly less heroic American and English spooks never seem to lack technical expertise, first-class plane fare or a large supply of plastic explosives and Kalashnikovs (the Russian submachine guns favored by thriller writers...
...horrors planned by the fictional bad guys are no more grandiose than those that actually do occur. Yet some how, one of Ambler's losers, worrying about how to get through a grubby border station and about the things that will happen to him if he does not succeed, generates more uneasiness in the reader than any of the new terrorist melodramas. Is the problem that guerrilla theater is bad art, too charged with bombast to seem real, even when real people are dying? Like Western heads of state, thriller writers do not seem to know what to make...