A Review of Epitaph for a Spy by Eric Ambler

Hold it! I think your going to like this picture

Reading what for me is the latest installment from Eric Ambler (originally published in 1938), I can’t help thinking of a Hitchcock movie. Not any particular one—perhaps The Many Who Knew Too Much with Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day or North by Northwest with Cary Grant would be exemplars—where ordinary persons become entangled with espionage. In this case, a person loosed from the protections of citizenship by the shifting sands of European nationhood suffers a problem, a big problem, when someone accidentally mistakenly takes his camera. The police become involved, and Mr. Vadassy must try to sort things out. However, he’s not a spy or an especially clever fellow, at least in this type of affair. He’s an ESL teacher. He must try to figure out who took his camera and the photos that led the French counter-espionage authorities to him. He must identify the culprit, in much like an Agatha Christie novel, from a small group of guests at a quaint resort hotel on the French Riviera. Vadassy is no Bourne, no Bond, not even a Smiley. He’s just a guy forced into a devilishly difficult task. 

Although this novel didn’t prove my favorite Ambler, it still has the atmosphere of pre-war Europe, the innocent plunged into fearful terrain, and the clean, clear writing and plotting that make Ambler a pro. The little society of the resort and the machinations of the authorities that try to make Vadassy their agent, prove more complex and baffling than a mere mortal can hope to manage. Thus builds the tension to the end, and in the end . . . well, you’ll have to read it to learn about that.

Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon

Author Joseph Kanon’s Istanbul Passage is a fine thriller, full of the intrigue of espionage and the attendant moral quandaries that the best writers in the field, Greene, Ambler, and Le Carre, do so well. Set in post-WWII Istanbul, the Second World War has only recently ended, but already the intrigues of the Cold War have commenced. Germany and Eastern Europe have unearthed not only Jewish refugees hoping for a secure future by passing to Palestine (then a British protectorate), but also war criminals, some of whom know things valuable to the U.S., the Soviets, and maybe even the Turks, who are caught between the two new superpowers.

The central character is an expatriate American businessman turned sometime spy. Leon Bauer is mostly a courier, but then on “one last mission” things go astray. Far astray. Now Leon, who speaks Turkish and knows his way around the famed city, must use wits and guile that he’d never had to use before to try to turn things toward . . . what? Leon isn’t just presented with issues of tactics, but some troubling moral questions, too. Whom is he helping? Who’s trying to get him? Why should he help a likely war criminal? Besides the atmospherics of Istanbul and Ottoman intrigue, Kanon keeps his readers wondering about what will happen next, whom to trust not to trust, and what Leon can do to preserve some sense of moral rectitude that we know that he seeks. 

#JLF 2013 speaker Kanon whom I heard in Durbar Hall. Thanks again, JLF!

I was a little reluctant about this book because I’d seen a film version of this book, The Good German which didn’t work for me (or many other viewers either, it seems). But while the film didn’t work for a variety of reasons, I know now how the book could. Kanon has staked out an era (the immediate post-war) that is fertile for intrigue and moral quandaries, much as Le Carre did with the Cold War and Alan Furst (with less moral tension) in the immediate pre-war and early war period. He’s worth another read.

News from Berlin by Otto de Kat

When I began News from Berlin I expected something along the lines of Alan Furst (whom I’ve enjoyed), but it turned out to be something slightly different and a bit richer, too. I read this book because de Kat participated in the Jaipur Literature Festival. I’m glad I did. 

Unlike Furst, who follows a central character through the perils of time immediately before and at the beginning of the Second World War, in this novel de Kat focuses on a family. The father is a Dutch diplomat in Switzerland, the wife volunteers at a hospital in London, and their adult daughter is married to a member of the German Foreign Ministry. The son-in-law is not a Nazi; in fact, he’s unsympathetic to the Nazi regime and certainly watched by the Gestapo. The novel begins in early June 1941. The war has begun. France fell quickly; Britain just barely survived. The U.S. remains officially on the sidelines while Hitler and Stalin have a non-aggression pact. For the family, life seems balanced if tenuous. But then the daughter passes on a secret to her father about a major German action coming soon. The knowledge becomes like an infectious disease passed (intentionally) from daughter to father to mother, endangering the thin tissue of each receiver’s existence and relationships without reducing (as hoped) the burden on the person passing  on the moral and practical demands that the secret requires of them.

De Kat’s focus, however, is more than espionage and the moral dilemmas of wartime. It also focuses on the members of the family, their relationships with each other and those closest to them. The delicate balance of relationships changes as each comes into contact with the other. New realities reveal themselves and confound the characters perhaps as much as their burdensome secret. History in the family, as in life, intrudes and shapes the present in ways that the characters can’t escape and can only vaguely comprehend. 

Writers like Graham Greene, Eric Amber (I’m now reading another Ambler), and Alan Furst have written a great deal set in this time period. While titanic military and political forces met in epic struggles, individuals and families—at least those lucky enough to live—continue to try to live and maintain a semblance of ordinary life when the time is not ordinary at all. To me, that's what makes this period so fruitful for novelists and historians (such as John Lukacs) and why I’m so drawn to it. Now I add Otto de Kat to the honor role of writers who explore this dark and frightening time not so long ago.

An Entertaining Visit to Greeneland: Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent

In 1938, Graham Greene was busy writing two novels. The better-known book became his classic, The Power and the Glory, about the Mexican whiskey priest. But Greene feared that The Power and the Glory would not sell, and he needed money to support his family. Therefore, in the mornings, he wrote one of his “entertainments”, The Confidential Agent. As an entertainment, The Confidential Agent qualifies as a thriller. It has a fast-moving plot, reversals of fortune, and plenty of action. In this regard, Greene’s tale is like those of his contemporary, Eric Ambler, and later writers such as Alan Furst, who inhabit the same shady and treacherous underworld of pre-World War II Europe.

But this is Graham Greene. This is Greeneland.

So while The Confidential Agent meets all of the requirements of a thriller, nevertheless, it has that twinge of angst for which Graham Greene is famous. For instance, the protagonist is never given a name, only the initial “D.”. In this, we perceive shades of Kafka. Further, D. is haunted by the past. The civil war in his home country (the Spanish Civil War?) killed his wife and left him in prison, expecting execution. Having escaped captivity, D. is assigned a mission to England by his embattled government. But D’s past pulls at him all the while. His memories, his wounds, and the adversaries have traveled with him to try to thwart his mission to buy coal on behalf of his government. D. is not a James Bond or even a George Smiley. He’s an amateur, a scholar of the medieval French text The Song of Roland. He’s intimidated by the thought of personal violence even though he has suffered his share.

I don’t know if there’s any Graham Greene book that I wouldn’t recommend. Graham Greene’s “entertainments” are weightier than many other writers’ most ambitious works. Greene establishes characters quickly and deeply. Although one can describe the tale as “action-packed”,   you  are taken by fleeting and seemingly minor characters such as Else the cleaning girl at the hotel and the gang members of the mining town. Thus, if you’re looking for something both entertaining and more considerate, you will likely enjoy Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent. 

P.S. If you happened to get the Vintage books edition, be sure and read the introduction by Scottish (crime) writer Ian Rankin. For a further appreciation of Greene, check out Pico Iyer’s The Man Inside My Head.