Eric Ambler: A Literary Biography

by Peter Lewis

‘Authoritative and highly readable, Peter Lewis' recently revised literary biography of Eric Ambler remains the definitive guide to the work of one of Britain's most influential thriller writers’ - Martin Edwards, author of The Golden Age of Murder Eric Ambler is widely regarded as one of the most important thriller writers of the twentieth century. In the 1930s he set out to give respectability to a genre that he rightly recognised needed to be rescued from its status as pulp fiction. With six landmark novels published between 1936 and 1940, Ambler laid the foundations for the post-war generation of writers who raised the spy novel to a form of literature. Like Graham Greene, Ambler used the ingredients of a thriller to create a series of novels that investigated many aspects of modern life, from totalitarian political regimes to white-collar crime. And with those books, he transformed the scale and scope of the genre... But who was the man behind the work? Edgar Allan Poe Award-winning author Peter Lewis gives us the first full-length study of Amber’s life and work. It brings us to the heart of the grand master of intrigue through insightful discussions of such popular novels as Epitaph for a Spy, A Coffin for Dimitrios, The Light of Day, (on which the well-known film Topkapi is based), and The Siege of the Villa Lipp – among many others. By examining the individual books, Peter Lewis shows us how Ambler’s work changed throughout his life – while remaining always topical. As this book argues, no novelist did more to dissolve the boundaries that separated “popular” from “serious” fiction. Praise for Peter Lewis ‘Peter Lewis's book about Eric Ambler is a literate, considerate inspection of the 18 novels of the British writer who transformed the spy thriller from macho, jingoistic, potboiler into a vehicle worthy of genuine literary talent.’ - The Booklist Peter Lewis is a prize-winning author whose book about John le Carré received the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe award from the Mystery Writers of America as the best critical/non-fiction title of its year. His subsequent book about Eric Ambler was shortlisted for another non-fiction Edgar Allan Poe award as well as for an Anthony Award.

356 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 6, 1994

Reviews

[Mandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one for the Ambler enthusiast rather than someone who hasn’t read his work, and as I have only tried a couple of his books and didn’t really enjoy them I’m obviously not the intended audience for this admittedly well-researched and thorough literary biography. A worthy rather than enjoyable book, no doubt anyone who has read most of Ambler’s oeuvre will be more enthusiastic than I am but it is by anyone’s standards pretty dry reading. A useful and illuminating exploration of Ambler’s life and writing, however.

[Edmund Chattoe-Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is well worth the price of admission for an Ambler fan in information terms but it does have two odd features. Firstly the book is basically a set of summaries of Ambler's novels with a reasonable amount of historical and critical commentary (and a useful bibliography). But the size of the summaries would really suit someone who had no intention of reading Ambler at all while a fan will hardly need this amount of description. The other oddity is that the book all but just stops after Ambler's last novel (and therefore doesn't deal with his short stories or autobiography except in passing). There are barely two sides of summing up or attempt to draw final conclusions based on what has been said before (for example about the "morality" of the books and the prewar/post war split into idealistic and cynical perspectives.) A trick was also definitely missed which would really have added value for the Ambler fan. Ambler wrote five books as "Eliot Reed" with Charles Rodda. These are relatively hard to get hold of and much less well known. Lewis mentions them and explains the varying levels of Ambler involvement but even for the ones he only plotted, it might be useful to know if Ambler stuck with his usual themes or branched out and all that Lewis says about the one with the most Ambler involvement - Skytip (which a fan might well want to investigate if s/he looks at these at all) is that it is "weak". While this is a useful book, I fear it was designed mainly not to be too demanding for a fan author to produce!