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)

Comments

  1. Great review and thanks for the mention. I'm so pleased you've looked at the Thomas Jones article - including references of that sort in the chapter endnotes of The Life of Crime was one of my key objectives - trying to give readers clues about interesting further sources of info, because there's a limit to what can be included in any one book, however weighty.

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    1. Thanks Martin, this one was a real treasure. And yes, your structure works so well with the main body, the endnotes, and the further links and references. I have read non-fiction books (on very varying, non-crime-fiction, topics) since and thought 'I wish they'd done Martin's scheme'!

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  2. I think you're probably right about Ambler, Moira. I've not read all of his work, but what I have read really suggests an author with a lovely personality. In this case, I really like the 'everyman caught in a web' theme here. And the writing style just really works well. Little wonder you liked this one so well. Oh, and agree 100% about Martin Edwards...

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    1. Indeed, Margot, Martin is an inspiration to us all! and I am thinking I must read more Ambler - Io have been quite random in my reading, I might start working my way through.

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    2. I really like the 'everyman caught in a web' theme here.

      No-one ever handled that theme better than Ambler. This is one of my favourite spy novels.

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    3. Yes, it's a good description isn't it. His heroes are lovely.

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  3. "I was interested that two people who plainly were not married could openly share a room in the pension"
    You must see the film or read the novel Hôtel du Nord then. set in Paris, but a similar attitude.
    Ambler's autobiography Here Lies - an appropriately ambiguous title - is interesting.

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    1. I've just looked up Hotel du Nord, it sounds excellent. And I would definitely like to read Ambler's autobiography, if only to see if he is as nice as he sounds.

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    2. Hotel du Nord is a great movie. A fine example of 1930s/40s French film noir, although they referred to the genre as poetic realism.

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    3. "Here Lies" - Dorothy Parker used that for one of her short story collections. The autobiography can be checked out online at the Open Library.

      https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3297216W/Here_Lies?edition=ia%3Ahereliesautobiog00ambl

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    4. dfordoom - I saw a few of those films in the past, and am now wondering if I did see this one back in the day. Barbara Pym (I think) makes gentle fun of the genre in one of her books, but I always loved those trench-coated beret-wearing women, and the handsome doomed men with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

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    5. Shay: thanks for the tipoff, I definitely want to read it.

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  4. Are the Mennonite archives quite the right place to find a picture for a book about the French Riviera?
    I'm anonymous above and seem to be trapped in my Rawdon Crawley alter-ego now! Apologies for confusion
    Roger

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    1. I absolutely guessed it was you, but don't know what you can do about Rawdon C!

      But come on, LOOK at that picture - did you ever see anyone looking more like an Ambler protagonist on the beach? I don't consider I need this defence 😉 but actually it is a French photo of close to the date, obviously someone else's files ended up with the Mennonites. (Citation: Lois Gunden Clemens Photograph Collection. France, 1941-1942.)
      Ten years of blogging on this topic means that I know all kinds of unlikely places to look 😉😉😉
      My favourite beach photo is in this post https://clothesinbooks.blogspot.com/2020/05/2-x-kate-atkinson.html - it couldn't be more British/30s, but comes from the unlikely source of the San Diego Air and Space Museum, a treasure trove of mine.

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    2. I agree about the picture's appropriateness - it was just the idea of you rootling through the Mennonite archives on the off-chance the right picture would be there which amused me. That the ideal picture was there is even more amusing.
      Jean Vigo's À propos de Nice - a few years earlier - 1930 - is a jaundiced look at Nice in the holiday season. 1930s French films - Renoir and Carné first and the others too - have dozens of interesting clothes in stills for that period - apart from their quality as films.
      My identity crisis seems to be over... for now...

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    3. I didn't realize Vigo had done more than Zero and L'Atalante, both of which I have seen. I just found Apropos de Nice on YouTube and watched it - life is so easy these days - very short and to the point, and oh he was so imaginative and his shots so clever. And an unexpected nude!

      I have used stills from films, but what I don't think of often enough is the idea of taking my own still, just screenshotting something if it shows what I'm looking for.

      The Carne film I love, though obv set in a different era, is Les Enfants du Paradis.

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    4. Carne's contemporary films from the 30s and 40s are also very good.

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    5. Duly noted. At one time I used to watch a lot of European films, and I'm not sure which ones I've seen. I need to find a list.

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  5. I read this novella a couple of summers ago and thoroughly enjoyed it, so it's lovely to be reminded of the details here. Ambler is so good at these 'innocent abroad'/'fish-out-of-water stories'. I must read more by him soon!

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    1. Thanks Jacqui - I just read your review and very much agree with your thoughts. I'm the same, intending to read more.

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  6. This is one of four books that I have read by Ambler, and I would like to read more, of course. The hotel setting is wonderful, remembering it makes me want to read it again. (This is my second submission of the comment, hope I am not duplicating it.)

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    1. Sorry about the problems Tracy, blooming Blogger!
      I had a big clearout when we moved house last year, and I think a couple of Amblers went then, and am regretting it now as I want to read & re-read more.
      Hotel settings always great aren't they?

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  7. Goodness, I always assumed Eric Ambler was a tough-guy crime writer, based, perhaps, on nothing more than the paperback covers from the...70s? 80s? I will certainly take an actual look now.

    Meanwhile, that passage about working one's passage... captivating.

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    1. They are proper spy thrillers, but much more human than many other writers. It's his characters rather than his plots that make him so endearing.

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