20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Blueprint for a Spy, March 2, 2003
By A Customer
Eric Ambler belongs to that fortunate and elegant group of writers whose works belong to both the written entertainment that we secretly enjoy and the world of serious writing which we feel obligated to venerate. John Le Carre and Graham Greene are others but Ambler was the first citizen of this twilight country marked by moral ambiguity and spare prose. It was Ambler who created the prototype and the Mask of Dimitrios remains his finest work. In what is the most sincere tribute till date, Ian Fleming mentions in one of his books that it is James Bond's favourite work.
The Mask of Dimitrios is a sombre romp through England, Istanbul and most of the Levant, coming full circle in that city created for novelists, Paris. Dimitrios is a master spy but his adversary and pursuer, bored Oxford don and crime writer Latimer's investigations bring to light the creation and perfection of Dimitrios. It is the career of Dimitrios which forms the core of the book, closing with an eerily silent, bloody coda.
What is so remarkable about that book is that every character is one we would want to meet sometime in a humdrum life, every locale the perfect antithesis of the cloistered, the mundane and the routine. It is everyman's fantasized adventure remarkably executed by everyman, the bookish, inwardly challenged, cynical Mr. Latimer.
Latimer's travels bring him into contact with the unsavoury and the unknown. The Danish drug-smuggler Petersen, the retired spymaster in Switzerland and Ambler's tired triumph, the saturnine, morbidly jovial Colonel Haki, chief of secret police in Istanbul. Haki, womaniser and reader of detective novels, acts as Latimer's entry into a world forbidding enough to be attractive.
This is not a book you can breeze through. This is a rewarding book and every word is worth many times the effort spent on it. This is the book which elelvated spy fiction from being comic books without pictures to an analysis of a slient ballet in which the dancers are not clear and the beauty of the movements is enhanced by the dark.
This is the book which makes a mockery of the distinction between the thriller and the serious novel.This is an evocatiion of a past world, perhaps a wrold which never was. It must not be missed by any who are dissatisfied, who wish they would one day be dragged into a mystery, forced to deal with the people who have hitherto been ill-formed shadows in the mind.
Read this book. It is imagination.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If You've Seen The Film, Get The Book, August 4, 2008
This book was made into an excellent film starring Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. (Never, to my knowledge, available on DVD, but still out on VHS on Amazon.) I saw the film first, before I stumbled onto the paperback in a used book store one day. The film is very good; the book is better. I urge you to get and read it.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Stylish thriller, July 1, 2009
A tip from Tory Education spokesman Michael Gove led me to sample Eric Ambler. He is one of the finest, and most neglected thriller writers of the 20th Century.
The Mask of Dimitrios is perhaps his best known book. It is a spare, stylish thriller that takes place amongst the seedy bars and crepuscular hotels amidst the dangers of 1930s Europe. The protagonist, Charles Latimer, is not a professional spy. He is a former university lecturer, now a writer of detective stories who is interested in the world around him. He is also something of a connoisseur of food and drink, ensuring he always has an appropriate aperitif before dinner.
He comes across the mysterious Dimitrios when Mr Haki procures a dossier about the infamous criminal, whose body has been dredged out of the Bosphorous. Thinking he can garner material for a new novel, Latimer retraces Dimitrios's steps across Europe and uncovers several former acquaintances. Things are not what they seem, and Latimer realises through unravelling several false facades and shifting alliances that loyalties are not always reliable, and alliegances can shift easily.
The Mask of Dimitrios is not simply a corkscrew plot thriller. Nested in the spare and elegant prose style are a wealth of pithy reflections and ruminations on life - from the political events of the era such as 1922 Greco-Turkish war, to an analysis of drug addiction, to memorable pen portraits and images of the 1930s: the gas lit theatres and dingy hotels, Ambler's prose does far more than tell a story.
The Mask of Dimitrios offers a window into the anxieties and mores of the 1930s better than most histories of the period. An era when, As Ambler puts it late on in the book 'The logic of Michaelangelo's David, Beethoven's Quartets and Einstein's physics had been replaced by that of the Stock Exchange Year Book and Hitler's Mein Kampf'.
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