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Maras Affair
Charles Burton, journalist, cannot get work past Iron Curtain censors and knows he should leave the country. However, he is in love with his secretary, Anna Maras, and she is in danger. Then the President is assassinated and one of Burton’s office workers is found dead. He decides to smuggle Anna out of the country, but her reluctance impedes him, as does being sought by secret police and counter-revolutionaries alike.
202 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1963
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About the author
Eric Ambler
111 books491 followersSuspense novels of noted English writer Eric Ambler include
Passage of Arms
(1959).
Eric Ambler began his career in the early 1930s and quickly established a reputation as a thriller of extraordinary depth and originality. People often credit him as the inventor of the modern political thriller, and John Le Carré once described him as "the source on which we all draw."
Ambler began his working life at an engineering firm and then at an advertising agency and meanwhile in his spare time worked on his ambition, plays. He first published in 1936 and turned full-time as his reputation. During the war, people seconded him to the film unit of the Army, where he among other projects authored The Way Ahead with Peter Ustinov.
He moved to Hollywood in 1957 and during eleven years to 1968 scripted some memorable films, A Night to Remember and The Cruel Sea, which won him an Oscar nomination.
In a career, spanning more than six decades, Eric Ambler authored 19 books, the crime writers' association awarded him its gold dagger award in 1960. Joan Harrison married him and co-wrote many screenplays of Alfred Hitchcock, who in fact organized their wedding.
Eric Ambler began his career in the early 1930s and quickly established a reputation as a thriller of extraordinary depth and originality. People often credit him as the inventor of the modern political thriller, and John Le Carré once described him as "the source on which we all draw."
Ambler began his working life at an engineering firm and then at an advertising agency and meanwhile in his spare time worked on his ambition, plays. He first published in 1936 and turned full-time as his reputation. During the war, people seconded him to the film unit of the Army, where he among other projects authored The Way Ahead with Peter Ustinov.
He moved to Hollywood in 1957 and during eleven years to 1968 scripted some memorable films, A Night to Remember and The Cruel Sea, which won him an Oscar nomination.
In a career, spanning more than six decades, Eric Ambler authored 19 books, the crime writers' association awarded him its gold dagger award in 1960. Joan Harrison married him and co-wrote many screenplays of Alfred Hitchcock, who in fact organized their wedding.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 4, 2020
This was my first foray into espionage thrillers; Eric Ambler was recommended to me as an author to try as he writes pageturning stories that grab the attention.
After finishing The Maras Affair, I do agree with that assessment — the story did keep my attention, and it was enjoyable to read. That being said, world events were a big deal for Ambler, as they are for many authors I suppose — but Ambler did not provide any background. This was written in 1953, so the Cold War heavily influenced this story... but as someone who wasn’t alive in that time period, trying to figure out what was happening (and why) at some parts of the story was difficult.
This takes place in an unnamed country, assumed to be somewhere in the East, some Slavic country based on the names. Exact location is unimportant, which bothered me initially but as the story continued I realized that it was turning out okay even with an undisclosed locale.
Overall — a decent read. My only real complaint is the assumption that you, the reader, knows all about world events in the 1950s and so don’t require any background at all to the current political clime and related tensions.
After finishing The Maras Affair, I do agree with that assessment — the story did keep my attention, and it was enjoyable to read. That being said, world events were a big deal for Ambler, as they are for many authors I suppose — but Ambler did not provide any background. This was written in 1953, so the Cold War heavily influenced this story... but as someone who wasn’t alive in that time period, trying to figure out what was happening (and why) at some parts of the story was difficult.
This takes place in an unnamed country, assumed to be somewhere in the East, some Slavic country based on the names. Exact location is unimportant, which bothered me initially but as the story continued I realized that it was turning out okay even with an undisclosed locale.
Overall — a decent read. My only real complaint is the assumption that you, the reader, knows all about world events in the 1950s and so don’t require any background at all to the current political clime and related tensions.
November 9, 2011
I’m a big admirer of Eric Ambler. His Coffin for Dimitrios (later changed to The Mask of Dimitrios, possibly to tie in with the excellent Jean Negulesco film) is one of my favourite books, and I think he nailed the pre-war period expertly in his first few books. He made a speciality for a long time out of dark thrillers in foreign countries, with his main character a lone amateur against the forces of crime, police, governments and corrupt politicians and, later, corporations. This is one of the novels Ambler wrote in collaboration with Charles Rhodda, under the name Elliot Reed. It was published 1953. He’d had a ten-year break from writing novels while he worked on Hollywood screenplays – he did The Cruel Sea, among others – though the non-collaboration Judgement on Deltchev was out in 1951.
As in Judgement on Deltchev, the Cold War is very much on Ambler’s mind in this story. It’s big on atmosphere, and relatively simple, as are most of his novels: Burton is an American working as his newspaper’s correspondent in an un-named post-war communist country that borders Austria – the geography suggests Hungary, though the names of characters and places suggests a Slavic country – and he falls for his beautiful assistant, local girl Anna Maras. She may or may not be involved in the resistance to the regime. Other characters he comes into contact with certainly are. He has to play things steadily between dissidents and radicals who are willing to use him, and the Ministries of the Interior, of Propaganda, and the Police, who all have suspicious eyes on him. Burton tries to use the connections he has made to get her out of the country, though she has her own connections keeping her there, including her aged father. The story has the usual Ambler characteristics: Burton is an ordinary joe rather than, say, an agent of some kind, a beautiful but rather neurotic love interest, an antagonist in the form of a sinister police chief, and a whole host of seedy characters who are more or less expendable. The story is great, but I don’t know what happened to the writing in this one; a lot of it seems very throwaway, as if Ambler, or his partner, got bored with the whole thing and wanted to get it done as quickly as possible. They may well have. It had that effect on my reading, anyway.
I was very impressed by one element of it, and that was the way in which Ambler created this fictional communist state, all done, of course, by the use of names; those he chose are generically Slavic enough to make it his country, plausibly, any of the Eastern Bloc countries (except Hungary, funnily enough, as that is the one suggested by the proximity of Austira). There is a series of books out at the moment in which an author has tried to do the same thing, but rather abysmally, with a whole mishmash of names that just don’t go together. (I wrote a story called Monstrous Men [it appeared in Ambit 200 in 2010] set in an un-named communist country, but I chickened out and just used initial letters instead of names, hence my admiration for this achievement of Ambler’s.)
As in Judgement on Deltchev, the Cold War is very much on Ambler’s mind in this story. It’s big on atmosphere, and relatively simple, as are most of his novels: Burton is an American working as his newspaper’s correspondent in an un-named post-war communist country that borders Austria – the geography suggests Hungary, though the names of characters and places suggests a Slavic country – and he falls for his beautiful assistant, local girl Anna Maras. She may or may not be involved in the resistance to the regime. Other characters he comes into contact with certainly are. He has to play things steadily between dissidents and radicals who are willing to use him, and the Ministries of the Interior, of Propaganda, and the Police, who all have suspicious eyes on him. Burton tries to use the connections he has made to get her out of the country, though she has her own connections keeping her there, including her aged father. The story has the usual Ambler characteristics: Burton is an ordinary joe rather than, say, an agent of some kind, a beautiful but rather neurotic love interest, an antagonist in the form of a sinister police chief, and a whole host of seedy characters who are more or less expendable. The story is great, but I don’t know what happened to the writing in this one; a lot of it seems very throwaway, as if Ambler, or his partner, got bored with the whole thing and wanted to get it done as quickly as possible. They may well have. It had that effect on my reading, anyway.
I was very impressed by one element of it, and that was the way in which Ambler created this fictional communist state, all done, of course, by the use of names; those he chose are generically Slavic enough to make it his country, plausibly, any of the Eastern Bloc countries (except Hungary, funnily enough, as that is the one suggested by the proximity of Austira). There is a series of books out at the moment in which an author has tried to do the same thing, but rather abysmally, with a whole mishmash of names that just don’t go together. (I wrote a story called Monstrous Men [it appeared in Ambit 200 in 2010] set in an un-named communist country, but I chickened out and just used initial letters instead of names, hence my admiration for this achievement of Ambler’s.)
March 26, 2024
This part of the Ambler oeuvre is a bit of an oddity. Five such books were written with Charles Rhodda as "Eliot Reed". His literary biographers are quite dismissive of both the extent of his involvement and the resulting books but, as an Ambler fan, I can't really see why. All five books were hard to get and expensive for a long time until House of Stratus reprinted them all (and seem to have bankrupted themselves in the process, along with other worthwhile ventures such as getting the more obscure Jennings books back into print). Set in a mythical Eastern European country this is a story about a US journalist trying to get a local woman he comes to love out across the border. Treated as an Ambler, this would be far from his best (and non fans shouldn't start here) but it is still quite sufficiently Amblerish for a fan like me to be glad of it (and to want to seek out the other four Reed/Rhodda titles: Charter to Danger, Passport to Panic, Tender to Danger and Skytip.)
February 17, 2019
Amber is on par with my favorite espionage writer, Alan Faust. You are never advised of where exactly the action is occurring except to understand somewhere in Eastern Europe. The suspense builds, the writing flows well and the story is compelling.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews