The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler

I’ve picked up the recentish Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Mask of Dimitrios in stations and airports a few times, but have never been ready and willing to complete the transaction. But then, I saw a secondhand copy of a sleazily-designed 1970s small size paperback, and I knew that Eric Ambler and I were finally ready to align…

First of all, let’s be clear here: this isn’t great literature. This isn’t beautiful prose that echoes with poetry and philosophy and meaning. And so I’m not judging it on those terms, no way.

What this is, yeah, is a 1939 jet-setting¹ internationally-set thriller about a thriller writer whizzing around Europe in the last moments before the incoming collapse into globalised warfare, as he pursues the ghost, the memory, the spectre, of a criminal mastermind whose body he has been shown in an Istanbul morgue by a Turkish detective who’s a fan of his books.

So what I’m saying, yes, is that this is silly. Is that this is not a hefty book exploring what it means to live in a time of turmoil, what it means to be defined by the art one produces, how a fictionalist can be rotted from the inside out by his own intellectual focus, how the intersections of multiple privileges can leave a person with a catastrophically misguided sense of their own self-importance and even invincibility…

I mean, it is kinda about all of those things, but more importantly than that, much more importantly than this, it’s an action-packed, trashy thriller that moves from tense set piece to tense set piece with barely a break in between for boozy meals.

The thriller writer has the grim, grimey, sexlessness of George Smiley, but the gluttonous greed of James Bond… he has the swampy, weighty, over-confidence of the Old Etonian assassin, but the lack of experience in matters of danger of the kinda person who gets sucked into helping the British and dying for it in Le Carré’s novels…

There’s the playful cheekiness of a Graham Greene “entertainment” thriller, and there’s the blunt violence and shock gore of [insert another thriller writer here if I can think of one].

I read it mostly in a single sitting sat on a beach, which is how books like this are meant to be consumed. Read quickly, enticed and enraptured and seduced by their own silly, over the top cheekiness, with a drink in hand and no shirt on.

There are small plotholes (or possibly intentional red herrings?), there are twists (some of them a little too obvious, some of them not), there are fun descriptions of European travel at a moment in time when travel was possible before it wouldn’t be again for a while, there are swift references to terrible moments of historic crimes and massacres that fluff up backstories of flimsily-built villains…

There are huge amounts of detail about some parts of the lives of characters, though often very little detail about the moments that made them into the people they are, which is both frustrating, but also indicative of the level of quality that we have here, and the level of attention and readerly rigour one should approach it with.

Why did the thriller writer leave his previous career as a university lecturer and why are his books so popular they’re being read by very senior Turkish police officers? How did the international criminal the thriller writer is researching/following switch from petty thefts to political assassinations to major drug smuggling? It doesn’t matter. He just did.

And that’s fine. That’s fun.

This isn’t a book that’s setting out to teach you anything, or convey any deep meanings of life and humanity. No. It’s a book that’s trying to be a deeply enjoyable way to spend a few hours while commuting, while on a beach, at the end of the day…

It’s neatly done, it’s evocative, it’s descriptive, and it’s bags of fun. Is it a literary masterpiece? No. But it know it isn’t, and thus achieves everything it sets out to do.

I will absolutely read more Eric Ambler if/when I next need some solid action trash to pass a bit of time. Good? Maybe not, but certainly good enough.

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1. Actually most of the international travel in the novel is done by train overland, but there isn’t a single word verb for that. ↩︎