A Coffin for Dimitrios

I didn't quite know what I expected when I picked up Eric Ambler's "A Coffin for Dimitrios", but I certainly didn't expect a work in which identities are shucked off as easily as raincoats and documents — even perfectly authentic documents — can be purchased for a few thousand French francs. the book's characters move around Europe easily, even though German tanks will start rolling through Poland in just a few years, and we meet a number of characters whose nationality is — and remains — rather uncertain. Dimitrius himself is a Greek. Or perhaps a Muslim who was adopted by Greek parents who were living in Turkey before Smyrna went up in flames in 1922. But he speaks French — still the language of diplomacy in this book — as show more do most of the people he interacts with. Eric Ambler was, if I've got this right, mostly a writer of detective fiction, but, in this novel, seems to have foreshadowed postmodern ideas about the fluidity of identity by several decades. Not a bad trick, especially since this one is a joy to read in the best old-fashioned, almost unbearably correct British tradition. Who could have known?

It's clear from early on that the joke here — and there is one — is on the book's main character, Charles Latimore, a successful author of British detective stories who, on a lark, decides to find out how good he is at actual detective work. To his surprise and, occasionally, to his alarm, he is bested at almost every turn by almost every character he comes into contact with, all of whom seem eager to point out the many differences between the English detective fiction he writes and the way that the world actually works. Latimer's unwavering politeness and relative innocence stands in stark contrast to the world he finds himself moving through, which is full of ruthless operators whose motives are profoundly unromantic. "A Coffin for Dimitrios" functions, much of the time, as a sort of critique of the genre it belongs to, and how's that for forward-looking?

Before I finish up this review, though, I don't want to give anyone the idea that this is some sort of Don DeLillo production, full of bland "white writing" and pseudo-ironic observations. Literary fans of the seedy, swinging Paris that existed during the interwar period will find a lot to like here, although Ambler, to his credit, doesn't shy away from the fact that the horrors and disruptions caused by the First World War fueled a lot of these parties and paid for a lot of the cheap glamour that was about during that period. This book is a good reminder that displaced persons camps existed in Europe from the end of the First World War right through to the beginning of the Second. Lastly, I have to mention that I found the ending to this one to be supremely satisfying. "A Coffin for Dimitrius" is still a detective story, after all. show less

While visiting Turkey during the 1930s, author Charles Latimer is introduced to a Turkish police chief, and accompanies him to a mortuary to view a body fished out of the Bosphorus. Here, the policeman tells him about the body - it has been identified as that of a criminal of Greek extraction. Latimer is intrigued by the dossier, and sets out to find out more, retracing Dimitrios' footsteps from Smyrna in 1922 (where Dimitrios starts his criminal career with the robbery and murder of a money-lender and the framing of his accomplice for the murder) to Paris in 1939 where the explosive denouement takes place in an extraordinary flat of one of Dimitrios' former gang members.

Throughout the journey, Latimer comes to understand his own show more motives for tracing Dimitrios' journey. Initially thinking it would form a plot for his next detective novel, he develops an obsession with Dimitrios. From encounters in seedy bars and train carriages, from luxury villas to shabby hotels, the pre-war Balkans are skilfully drawn.

Recommended. show less

Excellent between-the-wars spy story that sets the bar for later entries into the genre. The tale has also given numerous parts of itself to other writers. A solid bit of Charade, that delightful 1963 Cary Grant-Audrey Hepburn spies-in-Paris story, came from this 1939 tale.

But the main thing about reading the book, the primary pleasure unavailable to viewers of the 1944 film The Mask of Dimitrios, is that the movie timeframe makes the story more or less a highlight reel. It also seemed a bit off to me to make this interwar story in the midst of WWII...not a great time for the Balkan/Parisian/Greek dealings or the staunchly anti-bankster tone of the book to be filmed. So, quite naturally, they were left out.

The book unfolds, if not show more slowly, then at a steady pace and one that simply could not be filmed in that time. Now it would be a 4-hour miniseries, and that would work well. The story's action takes place by reports and in flashbacks, yet such is Ambler's gift with the gab that it doesn't...didn't to me, anyway...feel draggy or reported.

Skip the three-star film, read the five-star book, and never look back. show less

Despite my going through an intense espionage thriller phase many years ago, I never even heard of Eric Ambler until the last few years. His books are often held up as some of the founding works of the genre. Before LeCarre, Fleming and Follett there was Ambler cooking up the memes that would become so familiar. So I finally read one and it was good. Not entirely surprising since I’ve read a lot of what came after, but it held my attention quite well.

One thing that stood out was the novel’s construction. We do not follow a spy directly, nor do we interact with his handlers or agency. The man in question isn’t really a spy at all, but more of a mercenary for hire who isn’t too picky about the job. Need an assassin? Call show more Dimitrios. Smuggler? Ah, Dimitrios is your man. A spy? No problem, Dimitrios can get it done. It is the ever-changing nature of his activities that have kept him out of harm’s way for so long and part of the reason our protagonist, Charles Latimer, is fascinated by him. Often he says to himself that he really should give up the chase and go back to his detective stories, but he can't; he's obsessed.

Latimer isn’t a cop or a spy-chaser, he’s a novelist. At first I thought he was being deliberately hooked into Dimitrios’s story in order to ferret him out, but that wasn’t the case. He was just interested and wanted to see how much he could really do as opposed to just writing about detectives and how they get their men. From each bit of information, he discovers more and meets people connected with Dimitrios. He’s a bit bumbling and innocent, but he has flashes of cunning and capitalizes on lucky breaks very well.

Mixed in with the intrigue is a lot of interesting history that gets overshadowed by the two world wars on either side of the decade. The villainous politicians and the violence they wrought added a lot of flavor to the story and firmly cemented its time and place.

As I said, Ambler has created memes of the genre that are no longer surprising, so I wasn’t as shocked by the actions and outcomes as a reader in the 1930s would have been. Despite that, I liked Latimer and his obsession and stuck with him until the end. show less

A disappointment. Often cited by Alan Furst and many others as the best novel to that covers the pre-war atmosphere of continental Europe. It starts off that way, but I never connected with the protagonist and found his motivation weak. The end of the novel is much more a dialogues between him and Mr. Peters, with little action or intrigue. Ambler's other pre-war novels are better.

An excellent and intelligent thriller depicting the crumbling mask of civilisation in the immediate pre-war era in continental Europe. Eric Ambler’s extremely atmospheric tale sees the English crime writer Charles Latimer travelling abroad in between novels. Witness to the corpse of a wanted criminal recovered from The Bosphorus, Latimer’s writerly curiosity gets the better of him as he sets out to discover the story that led the victim to his grisly end. Full of richly evocative period detail, international political intrigue, and a page-turning sequence of criminal revelations, Ambler succeeded in writing a belter of a novel that paved the way for many of the 20th century’s best regarded thriller and espionage authors.

Strong atmosphere, in Ambler's depiction of Europe in the late 1930s, combines with a political and almost anthropological subtext to elevate this adventure/spy novel into a serious evaluation of the world on the brink of hitherto unimagined violence. That, at least, is what I get from this story about the arch-criminal Dimitrios, a one-time fig-packer who works his way up the scale of sociopathology, going from theft, to robbery, to murder, to political assassination, and drug running. Yet he begins as what Marx would describe as a lumpen element, a fringe being who through force of will, cleverness, and ability to manipulate his fellows becomes a "respectable" crook on an international level.

The means to understanding Dimitrios and show more his associates is the trail Ambler's protagonist, Charles Latimer, follows through Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, and on to Paris. For him, Dimitrios becomes an obsession. Eventually, he is brought near to ruin because of it. In making Latimer a writer of mystery novels who becomes involved in a plot far more encompassing than anything he could have imagined in one of his stories, Ambler also turns his own work into a self-reflexive exercise. The process and results of writing come under scrutiny. And only at the end is Latimer and his reader allowed to escape down the tunnel and back to "reality."

Clever work, on the part of Ambler. You can also see how many of his later themes and tropes come about. Like many of his later settings, Ambler relies upon an exotic displacement to shock his reader. In this case, initially, it's one he will return to often, Turkey and Greece. And Latimer grows into something beyond his fearful origins into someone himself capable of a cold-blooded attitude, susceptible to criminal acts--isn't everyone, Ambler seems to be saying, especially if we become addicted to satisfying our wants. Like the drug addicts, which are also featured in this novel, Latimer slowly becomes hooked on the "pleasantness" of following his mystery to the end. And what he never would have been capable of, or thought allowable, at the beginning, becomes accepted and ordinary at the end. Because, like the addicts, Latimer now has a "habit" of his own. show less