Grove Koger

June 28 is the birthday of Eric Ambler, who was born in London in 1909. Usually categorized as a “spy novelist,” Ambler (whom you see in our second image) did write from time to time about people who spied, but it’s more accurate to think of him as writing novels of international intrigue. And it’s in that category that his masterpiece, A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939), fits most comfortably.

The title character, one Dimitrios Makropoulos (or is his last name Taladis? Talat?) was apparently born in 1899 in the Greek (now Turkish) city of Larissa on the western shores of Asia Minor. He began his adult life as a fig packer, but soon enough involved himself in a plot to assassinate “the Gazi”—better known as Mustafa Kemal Atatűrk, first President of the Republic of Turkey. Then, like so many Greeks living in Asia Minor, Dimitrios was displaced during the Second Greco-Turkish War (1921-1922) and soon became involved in the brutal assassination of Aleksandar Stamboliyski, prime minister of Bulgaria, in 1923. Subsequently he took up less spectacular endeavors—including procuring and smuggling drugs. But now, as the novel opens, his corpse has been found floating in Istanbul’s harbor.

British mystery writer Charles Latimer, who happens to be visiting Istanbul, is shown the corpse by Turkish police officer Colonel Haki, himself a devotee of that most cliched of forms, the country house mystery. Intrigued by what Haki has told him about Dimitrios, and more intrigued still by what Haki isn’t able to tell him about the criminal’s sordid life, Latimer sets out on an “experiment in detection.” He will fill in the gaps in that life story.

Latimer’s quest takes him from Istanbul to Athens, to the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, to Geneva, and finally to the back alleys of Paris—the Impasse des Huit Anges, to be exact—where the writer finally realizes that his “experiment” has been very foolish indeed. The French word impasse, by the way, means “dead end.”

At the conclusion of Coffin, we see the last of Latimer as his train speeds into a tunnel. And given the date of the novel’s publication—1939, remember—we know just what kind of dark tunnel the world itself was then entering. On September 1 of that year, for instance, Germany invaded Poland, and on November 30, the Soviet Union began its invasion of Finland. And on and on …

However, we’re to meet Latimer once more, thirty years later, in Ambler’s 1969 novel The Intercom Conspiracy. Ambler’s worldview has broadened as the times themselves have changed. And while Latimer himself has aged, his most dangerous characteristic—his curiosity—has remained the same. As I wrote in Salem Press’s Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction (2008), the novel’s “ingeniously unfolding plot concerns the aging heads of two European intelligence agencies who purchase an obscure newsletter in which they begin to publish classified information. Realizing that they are being blackmailed, the governments of the major powers buy out the publishers, who may now retire on their handsome profits. Less fortunate, alas, is Latimer, who this time has pursued the wrong mystery.”

By coincidence, Ambler won an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay for The Cruel Sea (1953), adapted from the novel by Nicholas Monsarrat, whom I wrote about in my June 13, 2023 post.

And by another coincidence, I had the opportunity to recommend Ambler’s books the other day, mentioning A Coffin for Dimitrios as well as The Light of Day (1962), which was filmed as Topkapi in 1964. The movie provided consummate actor (and fellow writer) Peter Ustinov an opportunity to steal the show right out from under the feet of leads Melina Mercouri and Maximilian Schell. But that’s another story for another day.

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