22 December 2016
The Light Of Day
by Eric Ambler
Reviewed by Neil Tidmarsh
Tired of trekking through the bleak landscape of Scandi’s Crimeland, with its flat and colourless prose, its grim narratives and its sudden, random peaks of over-the-top violence? Depressed by yet another girl-in-a-thriller who’s consumed with self-loathing and self-pity because she’s overweight/ alcoholic/ divorced/ bereaved?
If your answer is yes, you probably won’t be surprised when I tell you that the book I enjoyed the most this year wasn’t published in 2016, but over fifty years ago. Eric Ambler’s The Light Of Day first appeared in 1962, but was republished this year by the British Library as part of its Classic Thriller series. Alfred Hitchcock (“Mr Ambler is a phenomenon”) and Graham Green (“unquestionably our best thriller writer ever”) loved and admired Eric Ambler’s work, and this book shows you why: mystery, suspense and excitement from the first sentence to the last; an elegantly efficient prose; and vividly-drawn and unusual characters. Meet the entertainingly amoral and amusingly loathsome anti-hero, Arthur Abdel Simpson, a chancer trying to make a dishonest drachma in the seedier side of Athens; he finds himself in a tight spot when a group of really dangerous characters turns the tables on him and press-gangs him into doing their dirty work for them. Not least of the book’s mysteries is how Ambler manages to get you on the side of the unsavoury Arthur, to make you sympathise with him and cheer him on as the underdog; but Ambler does indeed manage it.
In some of his earlier books, Ambler’s tendency to display (somewhat gratuitously) his political sympathies and his engineering know-how sometimes has the unfortunate effect of slowing his story down. There is none of that here; the story flows smoothly, pure entertainment gripping you from beginning to end. Ambler’s golden age is supposed to have been in the 1930’s with such classics as The Mask of Demetrios and Epitaph For A Spy; but I would suggest that the works he published in the late 50’s and early 60’s are his masterpieces; The Night-Comers (1956) and Passage of Arms (1959) are even better than The Light Of Day.
Hats off to British Library publications; thanks to them, all three of these exemplary thrillers will soon be available once again.
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