A Coffin for Dimitrios

The Mask of Dimitrios Charles Latimer was a lecturer in political economy in England. In his mid-30s he began to write detective stories, and became successful enough to make a new career. While traveling abroad in Turkey he was introduced to the Chief of the Secret Police. Colonel Haki told him about finding a body, and Charles asked to visit the mortuary for the experience. Intrigued by the history of this Dimitrios, Charles decided to follow the trail and act as a detective. Dimitrios escaped Smyrna in August 1922 and went to Sofia, Belgrade, Paris, Lyons, and other places. The police knew of him, but can't prove anything. Then his body was found in Istanbul. Charles Latimer traveled to these places to try to learn something. One unforeseen fact is that it is dangerous for a literary person to get involved with criminals; they don't appreciate the interest shown in them! But a Mr. Peters offered to help him in his research by referring him to a retired businessman in Geneva. Charles Latimer should have found a cause for alarm when told he had valuable information, but didn't know what it was! But he continued his journey without any fear. Chapter IX tells how a spy gained the friendship and confidence of a clerk in a government ministry. The clerk needed the money after he lost at a rigged card game. Peters told how he smuggled heroin to France in a coffin, but that couldn't be done regularly. The end of Chapter XI reveals the secret of Latimer's knowledge. [This is similar to Graham Greene's story "The Third Man".] Mr. Peters will profit from this knowledge. Their last meeting ends with rough justice. Charles Latimer decides to set his next mystery in an English country village. The ending seems unreal, forced by the need for Latimer's survival.

To read or not to read the great spy novels of Eric Ambler? That is the question most people ignore because they are not familiar with Mr. Ambler and his particularly talent. Mr. Ambler has always had this problem. As Alfred Hitchcock noted in his introduction to Intrigue (an omnibus volume containing Journey into Fear, A Coffin for Dimitrios, Cause for Alarm and Background to Danger), "Perhaps this was the volume that brought Mr. Ambler to the attention of the public that make best-sellers. They had been singularly inattentive until its appearance -- I suppose only God knows why." He goes on to say, "They had not even heeded the critics, who had said, from the very first, that Mr. Ambler had given new life and fresh viewpoint to the art of the spy novel -- an art supposedly threadbare and certainly cliché-infested."So what's new and different about Eric Ambler writing? His heroes are ordinary people with whom almost any reader can identify, which puts you in the middle of a turmoil of emotions. His bad guys are characteristic of those who did the type of dirty deeds described in the book. His angels on the sidelines are equally realistic to the historical context. The backgrounds, histories and plot lines are finely nuanced into the actual evolution of the areas and events described during that time. In a way, these books are like historical fiction, except they describe deceit and betrayal rather than love and affection. From a distance of over 60 years, we read these books today as a way to step back into the darkest days of the past and relive them vividly. You can almost see and feel a dark hand raised to strike you in the back as you read one of his book's later pages. In a way, these stories are like a more realistic version of what Dashiell Hammett wrote as applied to European espionage. Since Mr. Ambler wrote, the thrillers have gotten much bigger in scope . . . and moved beyond reality. Usually, the future of the human race is at stake. The heroes make Superman look like a wimp in terms of their prowess and knowledge. There's usually a love interest who exceeds your vision of the ideal woman. Fast-paced violence and killing dominate most pages. There are lots of toys to describe and use in imaginative ways. The villains combine the worst faults of the 45 most undesirable people in world history and have gained enormous wealth and power while being totally crazy. The plot twists and turns like cruise missile every few seconds in unexpected directions. If you want a book like that, please do not read Mr. Ambler's work. You won't like it. If you want to taste, touch, smell, see and hear evil from close range and move through fear to defeat it, Mr. Ambler's your man. On to A Coffin for Dimitrios. During the pre-World War II era, it was common for ordinary citizens to be pressed into espionage activities, whether knowingly or not. Many people rate A Coffin for Dimitrios to be the greatest novel built around that t

Eric Ambler belongs to that fortunate and elegant group of writers whose works belong to both the written entertainment that we secretly enjoy and the world of serious writing which we feel obligated to venerate. John Le Carre and Graham Greene are others but Ambler was the first citizen of this twilight country marked by moral ambiguity and spare prose. It was Ambler who created the prototype and the Mask of Dimitrios remains his finest work. In what is the most sincere tribute till date, Ian Fleming mentions in one of his books that it is James Bond's favourite work.The Mask of Dimitrios is a sombre romp through England, Istanbul and most of the Levant, coming full circle in that city created for novelists, Paris. Dimitrios is a master spy but his adversary and pursuer, bored Oxford don and crime writer Latimer's investigations bring to light the creation and perfection of Dimitrios. It is the career of Dimitrios which forms the core of the book, closing with an eerily silent, bloody coda.What is so remarkable about that book is that every character is one we would want to meet sometime in a humdrum life, every locale the perfect antithesis of the cloistered, the mundane and the routine. It is everyman's fantasized adventure remarkably executed by everyman, the bookish, inwardly challenged, cynical Mr. Latimer.Latimer's travels bring him into contact with the unsavoury and the unknown. The Danish drug-smuggler Petersen, the retired spymaster in Switzerland and Ambler's tired triumph, the saturnine, morbidly jovial Colonel Haki, chief of secret police in Istanbul. Haki, womaniser and reader of detective novels, acts as Latimer's entry into a world forbidding enough to be attractive.This is not a book you can breeze through. This is a rewarding book and every word is worth many times the effort spent on it. This is the book which elelvated spy fiction from being comic books without pictures to an analysis of a slient ballet in which the dancers are not clear and the beauty of the movements is enhanced by the dark. This is the book which makes a mockery of the distinction between the thriller and the serious novel.This is an evocatiion of a past world, perhaps a wrold which never was. It must not be missed by any who are dissatisfied, who wish they would one day be dragged into a mystery, forced to deal with the people who have hitherto been ill-formed shadows in the mind.Read this book. It is imagination.

This book is also known as A Coffin for Dimitrios.

Ordinarily, I don't read thrillers, but since this was one of my mother's favorite books, I thought I would give it a try. What a surprise!Instead of some overblown macho stud like James Bond, the protagonist is Charles Latimer, a quiet English academic, who becomes intrigued by the death of an arch-felon, Dimitrios Makropoulos. He decides to find out more about this Dimitrios, and winds up traversing Europe from Istanbul to Paris.There are no gimmicks in Ambler's writing; he presents a mystery and unravels it. Supposedly, Ambler is responsible for the "modern" spy thriller. If so, he did it well, but the genre devolved after him. A Coffin for Dimitrios is a superb book whether it is classified a mystery, thriller, or whatever.