Tue 1 May 2012
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review: ERIC AMBLER – A Coffin for Dimitrios.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[6] Comments
by Marcia Muller
ERIC AMBLER – A Coffin for Dimitrios. Alfred A. Knopf, US, hardcover, 1939. First published in the UK as The Mask of Dimitrios: Hodder & Stoughton, hardcover, 1939. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback.
Eric Ambler has long been known as a master of international intrigue. His novels typically involve a more or less ordinary protagonist who has blundered into some sinister situation and has become enmeshed in it against his will. He must then extricate himself by appearing to take part in the intrigue, often as a reluctant agent for the authorities.
Ambler’s narrative style is straightforward and economical; his plots, whether simple or complex, are suspenseful; his action scenes are high points in the books.
A Coffin for Dimitrios is the story of a man with an obsession. Charles Latimer, a writer of detective novels, is on holiday in Istanbul when he meets Turkish Secret Police colonel Haki; Haki admires Latimer’s work and, like many policemen, has an idea for a novel, which he thinks Latimer should write.
The idea is old-hat, but the story Haki tells Latimer as an aside — about the criminal Dimitrios Makropoulis — fascinates the writer. Dimitrios, who has been fished out of the Bosphorus, dead of a knife wound, has been involved in murder, an assassination plot, pimping, and drug trafficking; now he lies in the morgue, and Latimer impulsively asks to view the body.
The viewing affects Latimer powerfully, and he becomes determined to trace the life of Dimitrios. His search takes him to Smyrna, Athens, Sofia, Geneva, and Paris. It reveals more facets of Dimitrios’s life than the police dossiers hold, and it throws Latimer into the company of a mysterious man named Peters who seems very interested in the fact that the writer saw Dimitrios’s body in the morgue. So interested, in fact, that he aids the investigation, and Latimer finds himself in a situation stranger and more dangerous than any in his own detective stories.
This is an intriguing and suspenseful novel with an ironic twist at the end that causes us to reflect on how little we really learn from life’s experiences. More or less faithful to it is the moody 1944 film version starring Zachary Scott, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre, which appeared under the original British title of the novel, The Mask of Dimitrios. The film’s screenplay was authored by another mystery writer, Frank Gruber.
Charles Latimer reappears in one other novel, The Intercom Conspiracy (1969).
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
May 1st, 2012 at 5:57 pm
Ambler has never really been a ‘big’ name as far as the general public is concerned, although he is rightly revered amongst thriller aficionados. DIMITRIOS is one of those books that I read years ago, but can still remember bits of it. The author’s drily cynical style is perfect for the novel, and the ending, like you say is beautifully ironic. I love the fact that the film version has good looking Scott as the vile Dimitrios, whilst Lorre and Greenstreet are the nominal heroes.
May 1st, 2012 at 8:36 pm
When I first joined the Dollar Mystery Guild, which would have been the mid- to late-50s, two of the omnibus collections i bought right away were of Eric Ambler novels, and they blew my mind away.
Here’s the list, in chronological order:
Background to Danger
Cause for Alarm
Epitaph for a Spy
A Coffin for Dimitrios
Journey Into Fear
Judgment on Deltchev
The Schirmer Inheritance
Passage of Arms
The first five were the best, as far as I was concerned, all of them written before 1940. The next two more were from 1951 and ’52, with PASSAGE OF ARMS trailing the way, clocking in at 1959.
As you, I no longer remember the details, only bits here and there, but the idea of ordinary guys getting caught up in all kinds of international (wartime) trouble has stuck with me all these years.
I never cared for any of Ambler’s later work, or at least not as much. Times had changed and the magic was gone, as far as I was concerned, but those first five books? Wonderful!
May 2nd, 2012 at 12:45 am
Eric Ambler was a rather big name in German speaking countries for years. I am not sure if he still is. One of his best novels is “Doctor Frigo”. But Ambler has a problem to create convincing female characters.
May 2nd, 2012 at 8:59 am
I read the early Amblers, including the 50s and 60s works, in English in the late 80s, and greatly enjoyed them.
His tone of ‘byebye-to-the-fairy-tale-world’ made a lot of the plots believable.
The Doc
May 2nd, 2012 at 9:54 am
One of the early books, I don’t remember which one, has an early scene in which the leading character, an innocent bystander in what is about to happen next, is in a train or a boat getting ready to depart.
That’s all I remember, except for the sounds of people and other noises all around him, and the smell of the engine and his other surroundings, and the feeling of excitement at being in a strange place and about to travel to another — and more, the sheer tension in the air.
Which when it comes down to it is a lot to remember that has very little to do with the plot. It was Ambler’s attempt to put the reader right in the middle of the his story and what was happening, and at that he succeeded very well. (Even though, as I suspect, I may have remembered the scene totally wrong, but it’s still with me.)
May 2nd, 2012 at 2:11 pm
Ambler’s early works are considered to be much better than his later ones. I met him once when he was at the MWA dinner to receive the Grand Master Award and I cornered him in the auditorium to get an autograph. He was being interviewed by a reporter from the New York Times who managed to refer to his being approached by an autograph seeker in the column the next week. (My fleeting brush with fame!)