Stephen McWilliams
Dublin, Ireland

Years before Ian Fleming, John le Carré, and Alistair MacLean were popular, there was another spy novelist they all admired. His name was Eric Ambler and, in the late 1930s, just as Europe’s core temperature was heating up for war, Hodder and Stoughton published half a dozen of his earliest thrillers. His language was functional, while his heroes had yet to acquire a depth more evident in his post-war offerings. But his intelligent plots, analytical knowledge of spy craft, and ability to depict exotic places were second only to his capture of the ubiquitous sense of foreboding in Europe. Graham Greene cited him as “unquestionably our best thriller writer,” while le Carré viewed him as “the source on which we all draw.”¹

Ambler focused on realism. His antagonists, whether politically active or cynically passive, were always believable. His protagonists were typically youngish men, lower-middle-class, strapped for cash, pragmatic, and sometimes a little short-tempered, who had blundered inadvertently into a world of organized crime or espionage. They had ordinary jobs—Kenton in Uncommon Danger (1937) was a journalist; Latimer in The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) was a writer; Marlow in Cause for Alarm (1938) and Graham in Journey into Fear (1940) were both engineers. Only Vadassy in Epitaph for a Spy (1938) differed slightly in that he was a stateless Hungarian refugee (a hint at greater complexity in novels yet to be written). The protagonists rarely held any strong political views, unlike the left-leaning Ambler himself.

Born in 1909 in southeast London, Ambler was the eldest child of music hall puppeteers. As a young boy, he harbored an ambition to become a playwright. At sixteen, he enrolled in Northampton Polytechnic in Islington on an engineering scholarship, but this academic career was short-lived. When he dropped out, the brief interlude that was the 1926 General Strike was followed by employment at the Edison and Swan Electric Light Company. Among his various tasks was the penning of a press release aimed at selling off a batch of poor-quality bulbs for car headlamps, something he mastered so well that the company considered making more. In due course, Ambler acquired a job as an advertising copywriter. Fiction was clearly his forte.

At the outbreak of war, Ambler joined the British Army as a private. In 1941, he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery but, as his knack for photography became evident, he was seconded to the Army Film and Photographic Unit. He ended the war as its assistant director at the rank of lieutenant colonel. His interest in film continued thereafter and he even received an Academy Award nomination for his work on Charles Friend’s The Cruel Sea (1953), which starred Jack Hawkins, Donald Sinden, and Denholm Elliott. He began writing novels again in the 1950s, not least Passage of Arms (1959), which won the Gold Dagger Award. The Light of Day (1962) won the 1964 Edgar Award for Best Novel. He divorced his wife of twenty years, Louise Crombie, in 1958 and married Joan Harrison the same year. He died in 1998.

Ambler’s novels contained plenty of action and were by-and-large set in interesting locations and times. Some were adapted for the silver screen and it is easy to see how he would have had this in mind as he set out to write each new story. But they were also psychological thrillers with a strong sense of tension and foreboding. Ambler clearly gave some thought to the character of a plausible villain. Journey into Fear features the urbane Colonel Haki of the Turkish Secret Police (a recurring character in Ambler’s novels) advising the protagonist Graham about the dangerousness of a contract killer named Banat. “Have you studied abnormal psychology?” Haki asks Graham, who replies that he has not. “It is very interesting,” Haki says. “Apart from detective stories, Krafft-Ebing and Stekel are my favourite reading. I have my own theory about men such as Banat. I believe they are perverts with an idée fixe about the father whom they identify not with a virile god… but with their own impotence. When they kill, they are thus killing their own weakness.”²

But it is in The Mask of Dimitrios that Ambler truly shines as he describes a psychopath. Although the concept dates back to ancient Greece when Theophrastus (a student of Aristotle) wrote about psychopathic traits in a certain type of individual he named “the unscrupulous man,” the modern view of psychopathy really began with the American psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley. In his magnum opus The Mask of Sanity (1941), Cleckley was the first clinician to narrow the hitherto unwieldy definition to sixteen specific characteristics.³ Based on this, the Canadian psychologist Robert D. Hare further developed the concept with the clinically useful “Psychopathy Checklist” (1980; PCL-R, 1991).⁴ This inventory contains twenty items divided into antisocial, interpersonal, affective, and lifestyle traits, which a forensic psychologist will use to score an individual based on a detailed assessment.

But The Mask of Dimitrios was published two years before The Mask of Sanity and decades before PCL-R, suggesting Ambler was ahead of his time. In his novel, Charles Latimer, a bored academic-turned-detective-novelist, visits Istanbul and is introduced to Colonel Haki. The colonel asks Latimer if he would like to learn about a real-life villain, one whose body has just been fished out of the Bosphorus. His interest piqued, Latimer sets out on a perilous quest to uncover the truth about the eponymous villain.

Throughout the novel, Ambler describes some antisocial psychopathic traits in Dimitrios. We know little about his childhood other than that he was born Dimitrios Makropuolos in 1889 in Larissa, Greece of unknown parentage, and thus cannot comment on the traits of early behavioral problems or juvenile delinquency. But there is clear evidence of the other three: poor behavioral controls, recidivism, and criminal versatility. Indeed, rather than specializing in just one type of crime (as non-psychopathic criminals sometimes do), Dimitrios has committed fraud, forgery, robbery, blackmail, drug smuggling, human trafficking, attempted assassination, and murder.

Early in the story, Colonel Haki tells Latimer about a robbery and murder committed by Dimitrios in 1922 for which he allowed another man to take the blame. “A deunme named Sholem was found in his room with his throat cut; he was a money lender and kept his money under the floorboards,” the colonel recounts. “These were ripped up and the money had been taken.”⁵ The man wrongly convicted of (and later executed for) Sholem’s murder describes Dimitrios in a statement: “His face is very still and he speaks very little… Many men are afraid of him, but I do not understand this as he is not strong and I could break him with my two hands.”⁶

Similarly, Madame Preveza, the seasoned landlady of La Vierge St Marie in Paris, recalls first meeting Dimitrios in her youth: “I have known many men, but I have been afraid of only two men in my life,” she says. “One of them was the man I married and the other was Dimitrios… If a person really understands you, you fear him.” She adds, “Dimitrios understood me better than I understood myself, but he did not love me. I do not think he could love anyone.”⁷ Most psychopaths are excellent amateur psychologists who can spot and exploit weakness in others, and Madame Preveza describes this perfectly in Dimitrios.

We learn that, in 1923, Dimitrios was involved in a plot to kill Bulgarian Prime Minister Stambulisky on behalf of the Eurasian Credit Trust. In 1926, Dimitrios engaged in espionage on behalf of France as he tried to acquire secret naval documents through a government clerk in Belgrade. Bulić, as the clerk was called, soon discovered the true colors of the “Freiherr” (who Dimitrios masqueraded as) when he tried to withdraw from the arrangement. “If Bulić had begun to entertain doubts about the bona fides of the ‘Freiherr’ those doubts were now made certainties; for when he shouted ‘dirty spy’, the ‘Freiherr’s’ easy charm deserted him. Bulić was kicked in the abdomen and then, as he bent forward retching, in the face. Gasping for breath and with pain and bleeding from the mouth, he was flung into a chair while Dimitrios explained coldly that the only risk he ran was in not doing as he was told.”⁸

By 1927, Dimitrios had progressed to the smuggling and distribution of heroin. To evade arrest, he reported his six criminal associates to the police, who were all convicted and sent to prison. By 1930, he was involved in human trafficking. Meanwhile, the novel carries several accounts of actual or attempted murder. Amid all this, we see in Dimitrios evidence of grandiosity, superficial charm, pathological lying, and manipulation for personal gain (the interpersonaltraits of psychopathy). We see emotional shallowness, lack of empathy, lack of remorse, and a tendency to blame others for his own transgressions (the affective traits). Dimitrios is also described as having a parasitic lifestyle, impulsivity, irresponsibility, a need for excitement, a lack of realistic long terms goals, and implied promiscuous sexual behavior (the lifestyle traits).

Latimer eventually concludes that “it is just because I am shocked by him that I am trying to understand, to explain him. I do not believe in the inhuman, professional devil that one reads about in crime stories; and yet everything that I have heard about in Dimitrios suggests that he consistently acted with quite revolting inhumanity—not just once or twice, but consistently.”⁹

References

1. Jones T. “Introduction.” In Ambler E. Uncommon Danger. London: Penguin Classics, 2009.
2. Ambler E. Journey into Fear. London: Penguin Classics, 2009, 45.
3. Cleckley, H. The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So-Called Psychopathic Personality. St. Louis: Mosby, 1941.
4. Hare Robert D. “Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R).” Toronto: Multi-Health Systems Inc, 1991.
5. Ambler E. The Mask of Dimitrios. London: Penguin Classics, 2009, 12.
6. Ambler E, Mask of Dimitrios, 32.
7. Ambler E, Mask of Dimitrios, 74.
8. Ambler E, Mask of Dimitrios, 126.
9. Ambler E, Mask of Dimitrios, 149.