THE HANDSTAND

june 2005

WRITING AND THE DEADLY BALM OF ERIC AMBLER

Joe Ambrose


Like the dope-fiend, who cannot move from place to place without taking with him a plentiful supply of his deadly balm I never venture far without a sufficiency of reading matter. Somerset Maugham

 

I became interested in Eric Ambler when some English paperback house did a reissue of his best known books, The Mask of Dimitrios, and Judgment of Deltchev. I’m into those old Sydney Greenstreet/John Houston/Orson Welles/Mittel Europe noir thrillers, and Ambler contributed more than his fair share to that whole niche of literary culture. Ambler is one of those scarce-enough great writers who declined with age. There must be a lesson for all of us in this.

 

I read Judgment in Deltchez one night in Fes after watching Gladiator in French in one of about ten perfectly preserved French Art Deco cinemas in Fes’s Nouvelle Ville. That was a year ago. Now I’ve been reading the furtive sweaty fiction of Eric Ambler on three continents.

Ambler’s work divides into two distinct phases and periods; the stuff he wrote before he retired and what he did after he came back.

 

In the thirties he wrote Deltchev, Dimitrios, and other Hitchcock/Graham Greene type visions of European life under threat, full of men without passports crushed by dictatorships and liberal corruption, sinister Turkish police chiefs who knew everything about fine wines and the refined arts of physical torture. The narrators, like the young Ambler, were often chaps from England with a grounding in engineering, electricity, or some other new world of science. This was smooth hip material, very zeitgeist, very politically aware, very astute. No wonder the noir directors ate it up and made Ambler a bankable Hollywood name.

 

Then, just like it happened to everyone else, World War II happened to Eric Ambler. This writer on twisted loyalties, state police, nascent corporate life, and cynicism in high office found himself playing an active role in his nation’s intelligence skullduggery. After the War, ironically, he didn’t reinvest his fiction with the vast range of material he undoubtedly came across in intelligence. Instead he disappeared off into the glitzy world of moviemaking where he no doubt became even richer than he already was.

 

Then there was a fiction comeback when Eric grew older, when his cool barometer and his shit detector were no longer working properly. By the early sixties he was banging out a thriller a year. They sold and sold and sold, often converted into lousy movies or TV serializations, occasionally giving rise to the likes of Topaki. Anyone who ever watched TV on a Sunday afternoon has seen Topaki.

 

There was a seedy side to Phase Two Ambler. The early books dealt with the dilemmas of young men who were fit, impoverished, or alienated. When Ambler grew middle aged he wrote about middle aged fellows with dodgy money in the bank who had their fair bit of fit pussy and chicanery. Some of these later efforts, like The Night Comers and Journey Into Fear, were tight pieces of fiction. He was no longer in the same league as Graham Greene or Len Deighton; later Ambler is like early Frederick Forsythe. The heroes can be somewhat shifty, semi-comic, English men, sometimes overweight but always with a taste for brassy women. Later Ambler is nastily anti-Islamic, though sharp as ever in his perception of exactly what Islamic fundamentalism was, given that I’m talking about novels written in the early sixties.

 

Where once he delivered books eagerly awaited by intelligent Hollywood, now his work seemed to be packed full of putative starring roles or lucrative cameo appearances for cynical Swinging Sixties quality hacks like Richard Harris, Sophia Loren, Michael Caine, or Rod Taylor. There was a lot of square stuff about the younger generation going to go go parties, older chaps in dinner jackets getting ready for cocktail parties attended by air hostesses and traveling salesmen. The women can be Asiatic bitches trying to fulfill the sexual needs of two masters. One is a badly paid but decent local husband while the other is the Peter Ustinov-fat Danish manager at the local canning factory. Women are treated like real human beings in the early Ambler. Post War Ambler is loaded down with sexism, crudely displayed in some of his paperback covers. There are oriental babes, Scandinavian babes, Communist spy babes, London sluts, and Hollywood bitches. The heroes are still men without passports or papers only now they provide roles best suited to Robert Morley or David Niven, not Peter Lorre or Humphrey Bogart.

 

I sometimes think that the delicacy and accuracy with which mysoginistic writers observe women is underestimated. It is certainly an obsession with women, and perhaps it is the converse, parallel, rather than the opposite of love. I would hate to be one of those handsome male writers of boring sensitive shit read almost exclusively by dumb bitches with large wardrobes who are that little bit too smart for their local writing circle. I’m thinking of male model scribblers like Paul Auster or Bruce Chatwyn.

 

One of my personal benchmarks for fiction is the manner in which it deals with women. You can tell a good writer, male or female, by looking at the way he or she handles women. Despite many economic and political changes, it remains the case that the life of a man is so much easier to write about than that of a woman.

 

Writers tend to be good at hotels. They end up spending more time in them than any other sector of society (other that similarly dysfunctional brothers like businessmen and traveling salesmen.) What with available hall porters, whores in the foyer, sluts on the loose, inevitable voyeurism, hotels are the very stuff of writing. And not just the Chelsea. My favorite Charlotte Rampling movie is The Night Porter. Back in those days Dirk Bogarde was cooler than ever. Later he grew old and came on all homo.

 

Me and Frank Digger were involved with a second hand book business in Dublin in the Eighties. One day this rich old American, very fat and smart, a Charles Durning type, came in. A Real Irish-American Clancy Brothers sort of an individual. He was buying good writers but he only wanted the cheapest most tattered editions that we had. Frank got talking with him and asked him why. Because he had a system for reading while traveling. He’d pick up cheap editions in thrift stores and at places like ours as he made his way around the world. He was a big reader, he reckoned it was the best form of relaxation while traveling, he liked to do at least fifty pages a day. Every night before he went to sleep, he explained, he tore out all the pages he’d read that day, thus lightening his heavy load as he moved on. This was real Time and Motion stuff.

 

I didn’t do all that much traveling in those days - in fact I’d never been out of Ireland - but now I do travel all the time so I utilize a slightly moderated version of that Yank’s philosophy. I agree with him that reading is about the most secure anchor a real travelers can carry with him. I do buy the cheapest editions I can lay my hands on but I tend to dispose of the whole book at the end of reading , rather than tear it apart as I go. I remember looking back guiltily, having left an old Penguin copy of Gun for Hire by Graham Greene on a beach on Portugal’s Atlantic coast. Some of the cheap hotels you stay in like to hold on to English language editions for the next lonesome drifter passing through town.

 

My pal the writer and performer Kirk Lake told me one day, when I was buying a load of cheap disposable paperbacks before I took off on my travels, when he noticed an Ambler in my pile, that his girlfriend had been Ambler’s nurse during his last lonely years in Notting Hill. She told Kirk that he was a very sweet man to work for.