Eric Ambler was a British author of spy thrillers whose first novel, The Dark Frontier, started out as an attempt to satirize the genre. Written while he was a copywriter for an ad agency in London, The Dark Frontier morphed as it went along into a more serious spy novel, one that proved highly influential and set him on a new career as novelist and later screenwriter. His works influenced many later practitioners of the form, including (according to Wikipedia) Graham Greene and John Le Carré.
Dr. Henry Barstow is a mild-mannered British physicist who ends up drafted into a bit of international intrigue involving the eastern European nation of Ixania, which appears to be attempting to build a weapon of mass destruction. The plot partially foreshadows (and perhaps influenced?) that of North by Northwest, but this time, Barstow suffers a head injury, after which he decides Barstow is just a cover story, and he’s really Conway Carruthers, international man of mystery and scientist-adventurer who believes that the Ixanians are a threat to world peace. He sets about trying to stop them from developing this weapon while working with the Ixanian resistance and avoiding the arms dealer who tried to rope him into the conflict in the first place.
You can see the tonal shift in the novel a little before its midpoint. The first half feels jocular, even silly, as Ambler sets up the most absurd situation for a quiet, nerdy scientist, right down to the point where he gets bonked on the head. When he wakes up and thinks he’s James Bond, it would have been so easy for Ambler to turn him into Austin Powers, bumbling his way through intrigue after intrigue and narrowly avoiding getting himself or his comrades killed. Not long after Barstow’s transformation into Carruthers, however, the novel’s tone and pace change, and suddenly we are in full-on spy novel mode, with great action scenes, including chases and shootouts, and some Bond-esque cleverness (Fleming was another writer who credited Ambler for influencing his own work). The parodic humor of the first half is almost completely absent in the second half, even to the point where you might think Barstow really is Carruthers, something Ambler seems to be playing with over the last few chapters.
I’m not a connoisseur of the spy novel, but I have enjoyed most of the ones I’ve read, including Greene’s “entertainments” (notably The Confidential Man), Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands, Dennis Wheatley’s Black August, and others. I didn’t write it up because I was on vacation for nearly two weeks when I read it, but I also liked Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, which is told from the first person and follows the spy after the incident as he tries to run from multiple international authorities. The protagonist, who is never named, is hunting in a nameless eastern European country and aims his rifle at the dictator but doesn’t pull the trigger. He’s caught by the secret police, who try to kill him but fail, after which he goes on the run, making his way back to England, where the authorities can’t help him because he’s a suspected assassin, so he continues to hide in Dorset while the agents of the dictator, who’ve learned he’s still alive, hunt for him. It’s a little slow in parts because Household is so bent on a realistic depiction of his character’s predicament, but also has some great action sequences and chase scenes, with a tremendous denouement that I didn’t see coming.
The Dark Frontier is more fun than that, without skimping on the action stuff, although in the end its dichotomous nature works against it a little too much. I picked this after reading something about Ambler’s role in the history of the spy novel, figuring his first one was the place to start, but after reading this book – and enjoying it, just to be clear – I felt like this was a tune-up, and maybe some of his subsequent novels, where he has his purpose in mind from the beginning, would be even better.
Next up: Just about done with Jess Grose’s Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood.
is one of Greene’s entertainments, a serious spy novel that revolves around a bit of mistaken identity to delve into existential questions of identity and memory and the morality of crime and murder in wartime. It is tremendously entertaining, with an everyman protagonist who becomes a hunted man when he inadvertently wins a cake intended for an actual spy at a local fair, and well-paced, while avoiding the sense of empty calories you might find in a more formulaic, pulp-fiction spy story.
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, by Richard Price. 
, by Don Robertson. 
, by Elaine Dundy. 
, by Khaled Hosseini. 
, by Larry McMurtry. 
, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. 
, by José Maria de Eça de Queirós. 
, by Hunter S. Thompson. 
, by John Le Carré. 
, by Graham Greene. 
, by Kazuo Ishiguro. 
, by John Steinbeck. 
, by Dawn Powell. I love this book; in fact, I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Dawn Powell, an underrated American writer and novelist whose works were all out of print when she died a pauper in 1965. Even now, her name isn’t known enough and her works remain insufficiently read. Powell’s pen was incisive and her ear for dialogue pitch-perfect, never better than in this un-subtle depiction of TIME magazine founder Henry Luce and his wife Clare Boothe Luce, who is depicted here as the scheming, ruthless Amanda Keeler, whose plans are thrown off course by her naïve childhood friend Vicky Haven.
, by Susanna Clarke. 
, by Stella Gibbons. 
is now $25.75, almost 60% off, on amazon, less than half what I paid for it years ago). And he started with a classic sketch comedy series with the inimitable Stephen Fry, many clips of which can be found online, such as this 
, he’s a damn good writer, too.
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, which Le Carré wrote before TTSS, relies on more traditional sources of tension, with the spy of the book’s title finding himself behind enemy lines and eventually in some jeopardy, although it is still relatively light on action. It’s a better place to start than 
by the author writing under the pseudonym Torsten Krol.
is a spy novel that, as the title implies, focuses heavily on the human cost of espionage, particularly the psychological cost, as it follows MI6 agent Maurice Castle through his own reexamination of his motives and loyalties to an amoral institution that might be more dangerous than the people they’re allegedly fighting.
, which appears on both the Modern Library and TIME 100 lists and is one of two books that seem to be at the head of the Nobel Prize-winner’s canon.
is on the Guardian 100 and served as the inspiration for the excellent early Hitchcock film of the same name, although Hitchcock, as was his wont, rewrote a good chunk of the plot, including the meaning of the title phrase, so if you’ve seen the film much of the book will still be new to you. It’s a straight-up spy story with an emphasis on action: The protagonist finds himself privy to an international plot and by the start of the second chapter is on the lam from both the authorities and the nefarious plotters seeking to destabilize Europe and spark a world war.
, holds that honor). It’s a good airplane read or just the solution for a dreary day, as an unnamed man quoted in the book’s introduction put it: “It was one of those days when the only thing to do was read John Buchan.”
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