Customer Reviews

Uncommon Danger

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Kenton, a free lance journalist is in need of cash and travels from Nuremburg to Linz to get it. On the train he meets Sachs, who claims he is a Jew, fleeing Nazi Germany with bonds and securities. He says a nazi spy is after him and will pay Kenton handsomely to carry the bonds over the border and more when he hands them back at the Hotel Josef.When Kenton arrives,Sachs has been brutally murdered and the story really begins....
Written in 1937, it is the political background as much as the thriller itself that absorbs. Amber, at the time, sympathized with communism, and in the story his sympathies are very much against fascism and brutal capitalism,though Amber airs his first doubts-doubts that led him to abandon the communist party-over the 1936 show trials.
As a thriller, this has it all! Spies,intrigue, car chases and what I always call the 'Batman Moment'. When it would have been simpler to shoot Kenton and Zaleshoff dead and be done with it, our arch villians opt to shut them in a hermetically sealed vulcanizing tank to suffer an agonizing death by affixiation! Will they survive?
I'm not a thriller 'fan' or reader,but I really did enjoy this romp! Great entertainment.

Eric Ambler has built up a reputation for creating what is today considered the espionage story 'stereotype': men meeting on dim cobbled street corners, late at night, in a central European locale dressed in suits under belted trenchcoats and fedoras, smoking cigarettes after ever third syllable uttered ... or the rank amateur, caught up in a situation far larger than they are equipped to handle and -- somehow -- managing to hold their own against the professionals.

This novel has elements -- and first-time stereotypes -- like these within its pages. Desmond Kenton is strapped for cash and accepts a small job from a strange man he meets on-board a train. Simple put, he is to deliver a parcel -- which this man will give him -- to the man on the train! Although it sounds ludicrous, the payment certainly does not and Kenton accepts. The problem starts when Kenton tries to deliver the parcel and he soon learns not to trust strangers.

Ambler is a master storyteller and weaves a fast-paced plot with an eye for detail and a desire to mislead. There are times when the reader feels like Kenton and cannot distinguish friend from foe.