A strong and surprisingly modern spy story. An engineer finds a job representing a British firm in Milan in the late thirties. He becomes more and more caught up in the world of espionage. A decent but naive man, he muddles through and survives.
An enjoyable read. ( )

In Eric Ambler’s “Cause for Alarm� (1938), we get the familiar situation: an innocent bystander thrust into the twisted world of espionage. Nick Marlowe is an engineer, not exactly a stable job in the 1930s, when owners in manufacturing were laying off both blue and white collar workers. After being fired and with marriage on the horizon, Nick takes a job in Italy. He learned Italian from a university housemate, which is a plausible explanation that gives a reader requiring verisimilitude hope. Nick also figures that he can stick Milan for a year in order to save some dough. This logic is exactly the reasoning lots of English teachers follow when contemplating jobs in places such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (“It’s only a year and there’s nothing there to spend money on….�).

Nick arrives in Fascist Italy and soon discovers the truth of his predecessor’s untimely demise. He is approached by two spies, one from Hitler’s side and the other from Stalin’s. The general on the Nazi side is repellent. The agent on the Soviet side is the lively Russian-American Andreas Zaleshoff. This novel feels utterly real, has well-drawn characters, and the action is more like an adventure novel than a mystery.