It was the first Eric Ambler book I have read. I like historical and spy stories and this was both. The main character, Vadassy, gets mixed up in the hunt for a spy while staying at a resort in southern France just prior to World War II. The character is unique in that he is a man without a country, a teacher of foreign languages, who happens to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and finds himself accused of espionage because of he is a foreigner. Ambler's prose can be dry at times but he keeps the story moving. I felt he somewhat rushed the ending. Vadassy never figures out what is going around him by myself and this was mildly irritating. It alright to be an innocent embroiled in a mystery but at some point he should get a clue of what's going on.

Despite the weak spots, I still enjoyed the book. It gives a glimmer of Europe pre-World War II and the politics that were emerging. It also shows parallels with today's treatment of people we don't trust because we don't understand their backgrounds. I will read more eric Ambler. ( )

In Eric Ambler's Epitaph For a Spy Josef Vadassy finds himself in a precarious position. He has been arrested for espionage and, though he is innocent, the evidence against him appears to be rock solid. He has no legal standing. A Hungarian by birth and stateless by circumstances: "nowhere left for me to go. Yugoslavia would arrest me. Hungary would not admit me. Neither would Germany or Italy." He can stay in France only at the sufferance of the Government. He has no choice when French Naval Intelligence operative, Michel Beghin, requires him to discover the real spy who has used a camera identical to Vadassy to photograph secret naval installations along the French coast where Josef is vacationing. There are twelve occupants listed by Beghin who are staying in the pension house with Vadassy. He is to determine which one owns the same camera as his. This will be difficult for Josef, who is reticent by nature, but he does have the advantage of speaking several languages.
Epitaph For a Spy is set just before WWII. Soon spies will reach into each hidden corner of the globe.

Not a fun spy thriller cos Vadassy is quite a bumbling spy catcher. Can't blame him since he is an amateur. But what is interesting is the book's depiction of human nature. Vadassy received instructions from Beghin but he didn't carry them out to the T, thinking that they would alert the spy. However, this is precisely what Beghin wanted! But Vadassy didn't know Beghin's real intentions so he couldn't be blamed. ( )

Suspense aplenty fills the pages of Epitaph for a Spy. In fact, it's the most solidly constructed suspense I've yet read in Ambler's novels. The story itself is a fusion of the classical detective tale and Ambler's own inspired spy thriller format. As he says in his footnote at the end, he tries to bring an element of realism to this story of a stateless language teacher, Josef Vadassy, caught up in a case of espionage while on vacation along the French Riviera. The book also introduces Ambler's unsuspecting Everyman, an unprepared innocent, caught in a web of danger leading to events beyond his control.

Apparently, this was Ambler's third novel. And not only the characterization of the Everyman is fully developed at this point, but so is a recurring theme in his work. Namely, Ambler has a habit of having his climaxes take place on rooftops or elevated buildings. I remember it from Topkapi, of course, as well as in Journey into Fear, The Mask of Dimitrios, Cause for Alarm, Uncommon Danger, and State of Siege.

Ambler is a particularly enjoyable storyteller. I regret that I'm quickly running out of unread books of his. ( )

I was aware that Eric Ambler was an author of thrillers, but somehow I totally missed that he wrote spy novels. As it turns out, he not only did but it even was him and not, as I’d always assumed, John le Carré who first injected literary ambitions into the genre, and all later authors then built on his efforts.

Having said that, Epitaph for a Spy is quite different from anything Le Carré (really the only author of spy novels I have read so far) was to do later: Ambler’s protagonist, Josef Vassady, is not a professional spy but gets involved in espionage through a mixture of accident and blackmail. And the reader soon (rather sooner than Vassaly himself) finds at that he is really, really bad at it – he does try hard, but bungles one amateurish attempt after the other. His task (or what he assumes to be his task) is to ferret out a spy among the handful of residents of a small hotel in a French seaside resort and as our protagonist conceives and spectacularly fails to execute one hare-brained scheme after another, quite a bit of hilarity ensues.

Epitaph for a Spy is mainly a comedy which draws its humour chiefly from the way Vassady attempts to apply plans he seems to not so much have come up with himself but snatched from a variety of James-Bond-like spy novels to what is at hear a realistic setting. Obviously (obviously, that is, for everyone buy Vassaly) this can`t work, and doesn’t and ends up being quite funny. We’re dealing with a parody of the spy novel genre then, and Ambler ridicules it by repeatedly showing how none of the common clichés of that genre would hold up if anyone actually tried them out.

But while the parody unfolds, it turns out that none of the hotel’s guest, who seemed a bit bizarre but overall quite charming, is quite what they claimed to be, that in fact some of them are quite sinister figures and as the novel progresses its canny humour takes on an increasingly creepy undertone.
The novel was first published in 1938 and Ambler obviously was very aware of what was going on politically at the time and very critical from what is clearly a very left-wing perspective. The introduction of my edition is quick to emphasise how he was not a communist, but that is pretty much a mandatory disclaimer (see most of the introductions to the novels by Sjöwall/Wahlöö) and personally I am inclined to think Ambler’s astonishing clearsightedness owes rather a lot to his political leanings.

However that may be, the longer the novel progresses, the more the political situation keeps seeping into its atmosphere which grows increasingly menacing even as the narrative retains its comical aspects. But even as the Vassady continues his bumbling Ambler raises the reader’s awareness that the novel’s protagonist does not act out of his own volition but is forced into playing a spy and that his situation is becoming more and more desperate as his target keeps eluding him. And we also learn some of the resort guests’ background stories some of which are also quite grim. And there is a twist at the end which come almost as an aside and is not even part of the main plot which is quite chilling and ends the novel on a very bleak outlook for the future. And I think it is precisely this balancing act between the comical and the menacing which makes Epitaph for a Spy remarkable – Ambler handles this very deftly and uses the increasing tension between those two elements to both drive his plot and create a unique atmosphere for his novel.