Eric Clifford Ambler OBE (28 June 1909 – 23 October 1998) was an English author of thrillers, in particular spy novels. Also working as a screenwriter, Ambler used the pseudonym Eliot Reed for books written with Charles Rodda. Ambler is notable for his novel The Light of Day (1962), which won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel in 1964 and which was adapted into film as Topkapi (1964).
Life
Ambler was born in Charlton, South-East London, into a family of entertainers who ran a puppet show, with which he helped in his early years. Both parents also worked as music hall artists. He later studied engineering at the Northampton Polytechnic Institute in Islington (now City, University of London) and served a traineeship with an engineering company. However, his upbringing as an entertainer proved dominant, and he soon moved to writing plays and other works.
By the early 1930s, he was a copywriter at an advertising agency in London. After resigning, he moved to Paris, where he met and in 1939 married Louise Crombie, an American fashion correspondent.
Ambler was then politically a staunch antifascist and, like many others, tended to regard the Soviet Union as the only real counterweight to fascist aggression. He expressed this viewpoint in some of his early books. These included Soviet agents who were depicted positively and as sympathetic characters, the undoubted allies of the protagonist.
Like numerous like-minded people in different countries, Ambler was shocked and disillusioned by the German–Soviet Pact of 1939. More than a decade later, his postwar anticommunist novel Judgment on Deltchev (1951), based on the Stalinist purge trials in Eastern Europe, resulted in him being reviled by many former Communist Party and other progressive associates.
When the Second World War broke out, Ambler entered the army as a private soldier. He was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1941. He was soon reassigned to photographic units. He ended the war as a lieutenant-colonel and an assistant director of the Army Film and Photographic Unit.
After the war, he worked in the civilian film industry as a screenwriter, receiving an Academy Award nomination for his work on the film The Cruel Sea (1953), adapted from the novel by Nicholas Monsarrat.
He did not resume writing under his own name until 1951, when he entered the second of his two distinct periods in his writing. He was elected to the Detection Club in 1952, the first member to primarily write thrillers rather than traditional Golden Age detective novels.
Ambler divorced Crombie in May 1958. The protagonist usually begins out of his depth, but eventually manages to surprise himself as well as the professionals with decisive actions that outwit his far more experienced opponents.
That plot is used, for example, in Journey into Fear, Epitaph for a Spy, The Mask of Dimitrios, The Night-Comers/State of Siege, Passage of Arms, The Light of Day, Dirty Story, The Levanter and Doctor Frigo.
Another recurring plot element is statelessness and exile: characters who are exiled from their homelands or who face the danger of being exiled and not granted residence in any country.
Ambler was also a successful screenwriter and lived in Los Angeles in his later years. Other classic movies based on his work include Journey into Fear (1943), starring Joseph Cotten, and an original screenplay, The October Man (1947).
He wrote the screenplay for A Night to Remember about the sinking of the Titanic, along with many other screenplays, particularly those concerning stories and adventures at sea. He created the 1960 American detective TV series Checkmate.
Reception and influence
Many authors of international thrillers have acknowledged a debt to Ambler, including Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, John le Carré, Julian Symons, and Frederick Forsyth.