The Dark Frontier.

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.