Eric Ambler is widely regarded as one of the most important thriller writers of the twentieth century. In the 1930s he set out to give respectability to a genre that he rightly recognized needed to be rescued from its status as pulp fiction. With six landmark novels published between 1936 and 1940, Ambler laid the foundations for the postwar generation of writers who raised the spy novel to a form of literature. Like Graham Greene, Ambler used the...