Word: ambler
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Passage of Arms, by Eric Ambler. The latest amble into fear, a fable of gunrunning in Indonesia, is more lighthearted than the author's customary cloak-and-Luger exercises, but just as entertaining...
PASSAGE OF ARMS (246 pp.)-Eric Ambler-Knopf...
...typical Eric Ambler reader-a man who, in his own fancy, wears a belted raincoat and knows an automatic from a revolver-places himself in the author's hands as he would commit himself to those of a trusted bartender. He is entirely confident of the craftsman's skill and gratefully aware that such competence is increasingly rare. The latest Ambler amble (his first in four years) is less umbrous than such cloak-and-Luger exercises as A Coffin for Dimitrios and The Schirmer Inheritance, but it should be no disappointment...
...locale is that intrigue-ridden region that the Orient Express never quite reached-the Orient. As he is so fond of doing, British Author Ambler begins with a fragile seed of evil: a cache of arms established in Malaya by Communist terrorists after World War II. The terrorists are killed in an ambush, and the arms dump is lost. But a thoughtful Indian plantation clerk deduces that it must exist, and to satisfy his curiosity begins to search for it. Months later the clerk finds the weapons, still unrusted, and he feels that it would be a pity to turn...
Before his fate is settled, a sharp-witted U.S. vice consul takes a hand, and this plot twist may cause flutters of optimism at the Department of State. Novelist Ambler's consular chap, a quiet American but no chump, may well be the U.S.'s first foreign representative to receive polite fictional treatment since Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd...