AMBLER, ERIC

born June 28, 1909, London, Eng. died Oct. 22, 1998, London British author and screenwriter widely regarded as one of the most distinguished writers of espionage and crime stories. Ambler was the son of music-hall entertainers. After studying engineering at London University, he worked as an advertising writer. It was while thus employed that he completed his first novel, The Dark Frontier (1936). Although set in a fictional Balkan state, this first novel exhibits the gritty realism that characterizes Ambler's work. His early novels, set in continental Europe, were permeated with the emotional atmosphere of the impending world war. His careful writing, intricate plots, and growing skill at creating vivid characterizations culminated in the sustained tension of The Mask of Dimitrios (1939; also published as A Coffin for Dimitrios) and Journey into Fear (1940), both later made into memorable films. During World War II Ambler wrote training films for the British army, a job that led to a postwar career as a screenwriter, adapting films from novels; he was nominated for an Academy Award for his script The Cruel Sea (1953). After this hiatus from novel writing, Judgment on Deltchev (1951) marked Ambler's return to thrillers. He also began writing thrillers with the British author Charles Rodda under the joint pseudonym Eliot Reed; Ambler continued this collaboration until 1958. Ambler began traveling widely, and his later novels were often set in the Middle East or East Asia, including The Light of Day (1962), which was adapted to the big screen as Topkapi (1964), and The Levanter (1972), which centres around a terrorist plot against Israel. His much-praised Doctor Frigo (1974) was set on a Caribbean island. For a time Ambler lived in the United States, where he met his second wife, film producer Joan Harrison, before he settled in Switzerland in the late 1960s. He returned to live in London for the last few years of his life. Ambler virtually single-handedly transformed the traditionally musty spy thriller. In contrast to earlier British spy stories, in which xenophobic, romantic heroes defeated vast conspiracies to dominate the world, Ambler wrote of ordinary, educated Englishmen thrust by chance or innocent curiosity into danger; Ambler's villains, too, were realistically drawn and were frequently violent fascists and Nazis. Ambler's fiction was a major influence on writers such as Graham Greene, John le Carr, and Len Deighton.