Epitaph for a Spy
by Eric Ambler
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Book Summary Information
Author: Eric AmblerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-02-05
ISBN: 0375713247
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Epitaph for a Spy
Book Review: Ambler Finding His Writer's Voice
Summary: 4 Stars
Eric Ambler was one of the great writers of spy novels, in a league with John Le Carre, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, Graham Greene, and Alan Furst. He began writing in 1936, and this rather tame outing was written in 1937 when Ambler was still searching for his voice and his plots. It is certainly not top drawer Ambler. Until the end it has very little action, little suspense, and the denouement is not particularly clever.
As is often the case in this genre, an amateur has to come up with answers. Ambler is a good stylist and writes vivid descriptive passages that remind me of Joseph Conrad. There's an old-fashioned feel to the book in tone and attitude, but it hasn't aged awfully well, and I wouldn't keep it for a future rereading
Recruited against his will by the secret police, the lay spy Josef Vadassy has to find the real spy among a group of hotel guests. Vadassy's camera is the focal point of the story. He has to probe into the hotel people looking for motivations and secrets. He discovers a number of secrets, and we learn about the political undercurrents of Europe before WWII. Because the narrator is a novice, he does a lot of dumb things which make him relate to the ordinary reader untrained in detection or spycraft.
The technique is to find an ordinary guy, put him under pressure, in a sense blackmail him into cooperating, place him under time restraints, and set him loose to do the dirty work of uncovering the culprit. Ambler gets his readers on board because he gives the narrator and each suspect a personality. "You could never get at the whole man any more than you could see four faces of a cube." A man's mind was "unfathomable, unaccountable."
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