The Schirmer Inheritance

This seems to be less well-known than many of Ambler's other stories, but in my opinion is one of his best. It involves interesting insight into how people survived in the Balkans during WWII - and the dastardly things they did to those who didn't. I thought that the ending was very interesting and worth waiting for.

As one with guerrilla warfare experience,this story rings a bell. The descriptions of professionals and others in the disintegrating Greek Communist Vafiades-led ELAS Guerrillas of the late 1940s is striking. The plot twists are excellent, a are the brilliant thumbnail descrriptions of chaaracters, an Ambler forte. As a longtime Ambler devote, I feel this is his best mystery novel. Ringokid6

Ambler had developed the modern spy novel in the 1930s, then took time off from novel writing for army service in WWII. During the war, several of his early novels were made into Hollywood films he detested. When he resumed his output of novels in the early 50s, it would seem he had determined to exercise a degree of control over the eventual movies his stories might become by writing with a simple, vivid, forcefulness that no movie adapter could misinterpret or screw up. The prologue to Schirmer Inheritance is breathtaking in the speed and skill in which you are swept up into the story of the wounded Prussian cavalry sergeant, Franz Schirmer, who deserts during a retreat from a battle against Napolean. Fast forward 140 years to a Philadelphia law firm which is attempting to find heirs to the considerable estate of an elderly, childless woman, who turns out to be a descendant of the Prussian sergeant. A young associate at the firm is sent off to Germany to look for relatives and discovers that the only possible relative was last seen alive in 1945 in a Wehrmacht truck convey which was attacked on a Greek mountain road by partisans. No survivors were ever found including the NCO in charge of the convoy, Sgt. Franz Schirmer. The lawyer travels to Greece and Yugoslavia to try to get more definite proof of death which will satisfy the Pennsylvania Probate Court. The plot twists are ingenious without seeming contrived. The writing, as I said, is vivid. Schirmer Inheritance should be read in every college course on the modern English novel as a model of excitement with economy.

The Schirmer Inheritance is Eric Ambler at his best. The introduction recounts the story of a German sergeant who deserts during the Franco-Prussian War and changes his name to conceal this desertion. Ambler then takes us to modern times and the tortuous complications that this seemingly-trivial event has on the search for the heir to an unclaimed fortune. Along the way we encounter the many interesting vignettes and insights into human behavior that typify Ambler's stories. If such revelatory insights coupled with compelling twists and turns of plot are more important to you than explicit sex and violence, then you too may find Eric Ambler to be THE master of intrigue as well as one of the finest novelists of this century in any genre. You may also decide, like I have, that The Schirmer Inheritance may well be his masterpiece.