Epitaph for a Spy by Eric Ambler

published 1938

I once read a comment on Mozart’s music – that it was like the music coming from the lighted windows of a house you were no longer invited to. It’s not how I feel about Mozart, but it kept coming back to me as I read this book. The protagonist Joseph is a wonderful observer in that line:

I watched them all fascinated. It was like seeing dancers through a window that shut out the music. There was a mad solemnity about their antics…

There was about her playing a curious, faded brilliance, like that of a paste buckle in a hamper of old ball dresses.

Sometimes when you are reading an author you come to the conclusion they must have been a lovely person, and that’s what I think about Eric Ambler. He writes would-be tough crime thrillers, and maybe they should be described as noir. But he seems so nice, and to have a love for the human race, a patience and understanding - while still doing great tense scenes with chases and fights and escapes.

Martin Edwards mentioned this one in his recent The Life of Crime, quoting a description by Thomas Jones from the Guardian. It is ‘a sly variation on the traditional English country-house murder mystery – a crime has been committed; one of the guests must be guilty; the mystery has to be solved within a limited time frame – but displaced to a hotel on the French Riviera and with espionage the crime rather than murder.’

A short satisfactory description (worthy of Martin himself, who does fantastic four-line summaries of so many books in The Life of Crime), and so obviously I set off to read it – what could be more tempting?

Joseph Vadassy, of mixed European heritage, works in Paris and is holidaying in the South of France. After leaving some photos to be developed, he is arrested for spying: the roll had pictures of the French naval dockyards nearby. It is obvious that there has been a mistake, someone has swapped the cameras or the film, and that this must have been happened in the small hotel/pension where he is staying. He is sent back by the police (under threat of deportation) to find the true culprit, with a very short deadline.

And so he lives life in the hotel, he chats to everyone, he does some rather inept investigating. During the course of this, he hears the backstories of various other guests – each fascinating, and beautifully done, and each worthy of its own novel. The guests chat and drink, and go to the writing-room: they go swimming and lounge on the beach and play Russian billiards and ‘tennis pong’. The charm is close to overwhelming, with an undercurrent of melancholy. Most of them have unsatisfactory lives in some way, they are just getting by, and we know they are sliding towards WW2. So does Ambler - he was well-informed and prescient (given the 1938 publication date) and there are some interesting references to and stories about Germany.

Vadassy is endearingly useless at trying to work out what is going on, and in some ways it doesn’t matter. The atmosphere of the small hotel is so well done, I could visualize everyone out having their drinks on the terrace, the groups of chatter, the man who spreads the gossip, the discussion of whether there has been cheating in the small games. You can see why it was adapted for TV in the 1950s and 60s – someone should make a new programme, to be watched while sipping vermouth-citron and dubonnet sec, which everyone does continually throughout the book.

There are lots of funny self-deprecating lines from our narrator. But still – he is the only one who can speak to everyone, there are language differences among the guests and he is the translator, a source of much gentle amusement as he chooses how exactly to relay various comments.

He is being followed by a policeman, and as he is at a café he orders a drink for his bodyguard, but then the cost of this drink (one franc 25, including a tip) becomes very contentious, with an endless argument alongside everything else going on (and rather compromising the discreet stalking). ‘He lumbered along at my elbow hissing in my ear... I had commanded the limonade gaseuse, he kept repeating, it was my duty to pay for it.’

At one point Joseph contemplates running away from his difficulties, perhaps he will jump a boat and go to sea? This is a wonderful passage which demonstrates everything I love about Ambler:

At this point doubts started to creep in. One was always reading of young men running away to sea, of people shipping as deck-hands and working their passages. There seemed to be no special qualifications needed. No ropes had to be spliced. No rigging had to be climbed. All you did was paint the anchor, chip rust off the deck plating and say ‘aye, aye, sir’, when addressed by an officer. It was a tough life and you met tough men. There were weevils in the ship’s biscuits and you had little to eat but skilly. Quarrels were settled with bare fists and you went about naked to the waist. But one of the crew always had a concertina and there were sing-songs when the day’s work was done. In after life you wrote a book about it. Yet would it work out quite like that for me? I was inclined to think that it wouldn’t.

And this aphorism which we may grimly recognize:

To be unjustly accused is, more often than not, merely bewildering. To be caught out when one is really guilty is infuriating. I was very angry.

I was interested that two people who plainly were not married could openly share a room in the pension – people sniggered but the proprietor did not refuse them. One gathers that it would have been a different matter in the UK at that time – there was a lot of pretending to be married, and fake wedding rings, and false names in the register. (Well, at least according to novels of the time… ) The woman is describes as ‘an emaciated blonde in satin beach pyjamas and imitation pearl earrings the size of grapes’. At another point ‘Mademoiselle Martin, swathed in a semi-transparent pale blue peignoir, was sitting on the bed manicuring her nails’. No stereotypes being challenged, to be fair.

The ending is somewhat like John Le Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – a triggering event happens, and then we are waiting to see who will respond and give themselves away. Then there is a dramatic chase, people running round rooftops and bullets clanging off the fire escapes, and then resolution. (Though I couldn’t quite make sense of the fate of one of the characters)

An absolute gem of a book, very much recommended: I read it in May, and it has been lingering in my heart and mind ever since.

Martin Edwards highlights a fascinating informative and helpful article in the Guardian in 2009, by Thomas Jones, about Ambler – well worth a read if you are interested in him

Ladies in beachwear from a French fashion magazine of the era.

Man by the beach, Mennonite Archives

Photo from Cornell University Library shows Nice (the book is set in an imaginary small town nearby)