Cause for Alarm

The classic 1930s thrillers of Eric Ambler took the crudely patriotic certainties of John Buchan and gave them a salutary shake. Nick Marlow, the hero of Cause for Alarm is an engineer who likes to think of himself as a plain man, above politics; when he takes a sales job in Mussolini's Fascist Italy, it never occurs to him as relevant that his predecessor was killed by a hit-and-run driver or that the boring machines he sells might be used for the making of armaments. Nor does he regard the politics of his clerk as of interest, nor think of the rouged Yugoslav general Vagas as anything more than a friendly buffoon. Before he knows where he is, a web is tightening about him and the only reliable friend he has is Zaleshoff, an American businessman, oddly keen to educate him in the ways of the world ... This is a superb piece of propaganda fiction from the popular front era; the things that made it work then as a thriller--its hairs-breadth escapes, its chunks of spycraft, its atmospheric portrayal of dark city streets and dangerous high passes--are as fresh-minted as they ever were. --Roz Kaveney