Judgment on Deltchev

Eric Ambler’s career as a novelist has two distinct phases. The first began in the mid-1930s with tense thrillers set in a Europe still coping with the effects of the First World War, not the least of which was the rise of dictatorships and authoritarian movements and the hulking influence of Soviet Russia. The second, in which Ambler resumed writing fiction after a break taken during the Second World War, began in the early 1950s and continued until his death.

Judgment on Deltchev is the first of this second phase, Ambler’s first novel since Journey into Fear eleven years before.

Published in 1951, Judgment on Deltchev takes place in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. Foster, an English playwright, has been hired as a kind of stunt correspondent to attend the trial of “Papa” Deltchev in an unnamed Eastern European country. Prior to the war, Deltchev had been a mildly leftwing agrarian. During the war he had refused to collaborate with the Nazi occupiers. Following the war he attempted to prevent Soviet takeover and the installation of a Communist puppet government. Having failed, he is accused of conspiring with foreign powers against his own people.

The novel begins as Foster arrives. His contact is Georghi Pashik, a shabby, unkempt international press agent whom Foster immediately dislikes. Foster feels guilty, telling himself that he is only repulsed by Pashik’s smell. But Pashik is shifty, passive aggressive, and manipulative, and his air of forced geniality both irritates and conceals much. It is not the first time Foster will delude himself.

The trial is a transparent fraud—a show trial. Foster, alive to the need of the new Stalinist regime to demolish Deltchev with lies and agitprop in order to prevent him being seen as a martyr, observes the scripted denunciations for a few days. At first Foster is impressed by Deltchev’s resolution in the face of mistreatment—he has been denied his diabetes medication by his jailers—but he gradually stops attending. Something about the trial suggests something in the charges is true. That bothers him. Further, it slowly becomes clear to Foster that the real story is outside the courtroom.

Foster meets Deltchev’s family: an impressive, haughty wife and a beautiful daughter, both under constant military guard. The daughter asks him to deliver a private message to a friend. When Foster arrives at the address, he finds a corpse, and someone else who has been stalking him.

Who is the dead man? Why was he killed? What has Foster gotten himself into? Intrigue, betrayal, an assassination plot—against whom? by whom?—the last remainders of a pre-war military secret society bent on revenge, spies for the regime among the other journalists, the lurking, looming influence of the Soviets, the inescapable threat of imprisonment, torture, and deportation, Pashik’s deceptive behavior, and attempts on Foster’s own life further complicate his simple reporting assignment.

Judgment on Deltchev is a good book. Well paced, suspenseful, its plausibly drawn fictitious environment creates an oppressive atmosphere of paranoia that steadily builds, from the first chapter, through expert foreshadowing. It is striking that Ambler, after a decade away from novels, returned so immediately to form. That first phase of Ambler’s career described above, it must be said, produced the classics—Journey into Fear, Epitaph for a Spy, The Mask of Dimitrios. The second phase begun by Judgment on Deltchev never quite approaches those heights of tension and excitement. And yet, from this novel on, they have something those earlier novels did not: perspective.

In Ambler’s novels of the 1930s, Soviet agents sometimes appear as allies. Never quite straightforwardly good guys, they still help the protagonists and are presented sympathetically—unlike the Nazi and Fascist agents or the cosmopolitan gangsters who oppose them. These characters are conventional anti-Fascist elements of the time. But as for so many others, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the partition of Poland clarified things for Ambler. Participation in the war and observation of Stalin’s brutal swallowing of Eastern Europe strengthened his convictions. Judgment on Deltchev reckons with the lies, envy, backstabbing, and tyranny imposed upon millions, ostensibly in their names, and the hollow legal theatre that consolidated these regimes.

The books following this one, the second-phase books, often have a more sweeping scope, suggesting the upheaval of entire regions—the wreck of post-war Germany and Greece in The Schirmer Inheritance and post-war Malaya and Indonesia in Passage of Arms, the Middle East of Palestinian terrorism in The Levanter—and taking place across longer, more intricate timelines. They also have an extra guardedness about them, seldom ending neatly, often with the protagonist’s name smeared as part of an agitprop campaign. The scale of the danger, somehow, has increased. This perspective, gained over Ambler’s decade away from his novels, enriches Judgment on Deltchev and even those later novels that quite don’t measure up to his greatest.

In Here Lies, Ambler reflects on his “happy return to writing thrillers” in this book. American reviews were mixed—readers there just wanted a rehash of The Mask of Dimitrios, apparently. His fellow Britons had a different reaction

In England, the letters I received about the book were all more or less abusive. I was a traitor in the class war struggle, a Titoist lackey and an American imperialist cat’s-paw. One message was a single piece of used toilet paper. The single piece was a delicate touch, I thought; it spoke of careful premeditation.

Ambler had struck a nerve. He was doing something right.

Judgment on Deltchev feels a lot like one of Ambler’s earlier thrillers—the everyman protagonist who gets in over his head in a complicated foreign place—but crossed with Darkness at Noon and a dash of Animal Farm in earnestness and import. This is not just a good thriller, it has a clear-eyed vision of a time and place about which too many still deceive themselves.

The Ambler paradox

Last night I finished reading Judgment on Deltchev, Eric Ambler’s first postwar novel and a masterpiece of plotting, tension, and especially foreshadowing. (Seriously—if I ever teach creative writing in any capacity, I will assign this or another of Ambler’s early thrillers to teach foreshadowing.) It also has many of Ambler’s sharp, wry observations.

Here’s one from near the end. The narrator, Foster, an English playwright commissioned to report on a show trial unfolding in an unnamed Balkan country, finds himself entangled like many another Ambler protagonist in the preexisting schemes of people much more nefarious and capable than he is. Gradually he becomes a pawn.

In a passage foreshadowing some of what is to come, Foster notes that the Stalinist puppet regime, later, will scapegoat him, condemning him as an agent of British intelligence (among other things), an accusation he finds painfully hard to deny:

With the newspapers it was not difficult; I did as I had been asked and referred them to the Foreign Office. With friends and acquaintances it was less simple. It is, I find, extraordinarily embarrassing to be described in print as a member of the British secret service. The trouble is that you cannot afterwards convince people that you are not. They reason that if you are a member you will still presumably have to say that you are not. You are suspect. If you say nothing, of course, you admit all. Your denials become peevish. It is very tiresome.

A bit of coy reverse psychology suggests itself but is both dangerous and unattractive for the fundamentally honest man:

Probably the only really effective denial would be a solemn, knowing acknowledgment that there might be some truth in the rumour. But I can never bring myself to it. Foreign Office or no Foreign Office, I have to explain what really happened.

There’s a threshold of secrecy and paranoia beyond which all denials are confirmations. This kind of ambiguity offers security for the professional but proves an inescapable trap for the passerby who blunders into this world. It’s a dangerous place for the mind and soul. Witness the conspiracy theorists who go down the rabbit hole deep enough to get into this everything-proves-my-theory mindset. Per Forster, “it is very tiresome.”

It is also a great device for creating irony and tension. Ambler’s thrillers are built on the overlapping realities of the professional intriguer and the bourgeois amateur, and his characters, ordinary people tainted by their contact with these other worlds, have to live with the paradox that their good-faith denials sink them deeper in suspicion. More than one of his narrators uses the telling of the story to try to clear their name and strike back at critics.

The first of Ambler’s novels that I read was The Mask of Dimitrios (aka A Coffin for Dimitrios) early last year. Here’s a similarly trenchant set of observations I quoted from that book at the time, and here’s my full review. Back in the spring I also read and reviewed The Levanter, which features another strong dose of the paradox.

The Levanter

Among his many skills, Eric Ambler excelled at two of the basic varieties of thriller: the breakneck and the slow burn. In one, the pace picks up quickly and puts the characters through an unrelenting series of escalating obstacles. In the other, a single obstacle may steadily build in threat and intensity until a final catastrophe. Both rely on a mastery of pacing. Ambler had it, and The Levanter offers a good example of the latter, the slow burn.

A later work in Ambler’s long career, The Levanter takes place over about two months in 1970. Three different characters narrate portions of the story: Lewis Prescott, an American reporter who has stumbled into the events after the fact; Teresa Malandra, the secretary and mistress of an English industrialist; and Michael Howell, the industrialist himself, third-generation heir of Agence Howell, a manufacturing and shipping firm with connections all over the Mediterranean and Middle East.

When the story begins, Howell has successfully navigated several of the perils of decolonization in Syria, working with the emerging socialist government to avoid losing his family’s business to various nationalization schemes. This involves working closely with corrupt government officials, including Syrian military intelligence and a government go-between with connections to Second-World powers: Maoist China, East Germany, the Soviet Union.

Busy enough keeping the family business afloat and its reputation untarnished following a series of failed production schemes imposed by the government, Howell is surprised to discover, thanks to Teresa, large unexplained orders of chemicals buried in the company accounts. With government pressure and hostility building, he decides to investigate the moment he finds out. This means a late night trip with Teresa to one of the plants dedicated to producing consumer batteries.

Howell finds the factory, which is supposed to be closed, open, brightly lit, and with teams of men working on producing fulminate of mercury—explosives. Armed men accost him and Teresa, and when the night watchman arrives he reveals himself as Salah Ghaled, the notorious leader of a hardline Palestinian terrorist organization too extreme even for Arafat and the PLO.

Ghaled and his men need Howell alive. His men are making detonators for bombs and trying to get incomplete Soviet rockets into a usable condition. Howell will be useful for them. Ghaled forces him and Teresa to swear their allegiance to his organization and to sign confessions of complicity in the murder of a former member—an internal hit Ghaled publicly blames on the Israelis. He then has Howell order the manufacture of missing parts and arrange shipping aboard a company cargo ship. Thrust deeper into Ghaled’s plot, little by little Howell pieces together what Ghaled is planning.

On Herzl Day, an upcoming Israeli national holiday, Ghaled aims to detonate dozens of remotely armed bombs hidden in Tel Aviv. Hence the detonators. He plans to coordinate the bombing with his rockets, launched from offshore and aimed at the coast, a strip of popular beach lined with hotels, restaurants, and homes. The Agence Howell ship will carry him on to Egypt the same day, where he will hold a press conference claiming responsibility and making the usual Palestinian talking points. Howell is horrified.

He also realizes that, since not only Ghaled but other key members of his organization all got jobs at Agence Howell through government influence, his government contacts are in on the plot. He cannot turn to the authorities. In desperation he uses a business trip to inform Israeli intelligence, but his contact is skeptical and offers little help unless Howell can provide more information than he has. If Ghaled is to be stopped, it may be up to Howell himself.

The other Ambler slow-burn thriller that The Levanter resembles most is Cause for Alarm, in which an English engineer working in Mussolini’s Italy just before the outbreak of World War II slowly uncovers sinister goings-on within the tidy order of his factory. In both novels, Ambler puts a lot of effort into making the industrial and commercial setting feel believable well before introducing espionage and terrorism. There’s a lot of looking through ledgers and blueprints, making sure products are up to spec, and arranging shipping and payments. This would be dull in any other writer’s hands. Ambler, through a careful, steady drip of foreshadowing and underestimated threats, instead uses such workaday details to build suspense.

Where The Levanter bests Cause for Alarm, though, is in its use of setting. Ambler exceled at evoking the real-life cosmopolitan, polyglot worlds of international crossroads, from the Aegean and the Balkans in The Mask of Dimitrios to postwar Malaysia and Indonesia in Passage of Arms. The Levanter, with ties to both the Cold War and the unending multidirectional conflicts of the Middle East, is no exception. Ghaled, one of Ambler’s most vivid and believable villains, is a European-educated Palestinian Islamist who is as resentful toward the PLO, the Baathists, and the Jordanian monarchy as he is hostile toward Israel. His education and Marxist ideology are European and his weapons Russian, Chinese, and East German. The Agence Howell has dealings all over the Eastern Mediterranean and its ships and factories have multiethnic crews and captains. Teresa is Italian and Howell himself, despite his seemingly English name and business sense, is mostly Armenian and Cypriot. He and Ghaled are, in dramatically different senses, both men without a country, the one a businessman and the other a zealot.

In addition to a realistic and authentically complicated setting, The Levanter is also cleverly written. I mentioned above that it is narrated by Howell, Teresa, and Prescott, an American reporter who otherwise plays no role in the events of the story. The muddle of Howell’s predicament, the leverage Ghaled and the Syrian government use against him, and the outcome of the story lead to media controversy, a controversy fully exploited by Palestinian activists. The novel is Howell’s attempt, with Prescott’s encouragement, to set the record straight. His testy, finger-wagging narration proves both fun to read and disturbing—how would I, or any of us, were we forced into a bind like this, ever hope to exonerate ourselves?

The Levanter is not Ambler’s best or most exciting thriller, but it is one of his most involving and, above all, one of the most plausible. The overwhelming feeling it imparts throughout is that if something like this were to happen, this is exactly how it would happen. Its emphasis is not on action and gadgetry, though both play a role, but on cunning, desperation, bloodlust, and the weakness of human nature. Though set in 1970, the world it takes place in and the characters who people it still feel recognizable and all too real.

Stories or themes?

Eric Ambler (1909-98)

I’ve wondered for some time whether stories are studied and taught the right way. I’ve been thinking about this more lately as I’ve read a lot of critiques of the modern literary establishment and English education, especially at the college level, and I’ve come back again and again to an approach that has bothered me for years: the emphasis on “themes” in fiction.

A few years ago, in reflecting on my first reading of Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, I quoted a PBS documentary’s summary of the story: “a dark maritime adventure that ends in a violent battle between blacks and whites in the South Seas.”

“Well,” I wrote, “that is kind of what happens.” Kind of. But not really. Not if you’ve read the story Poe actually wrote, all the complexity and horror of which is here reduced to a talking point.

I had a similar experience this week as I looked for articles on the great spy novelist Eric Ambler. One that I turned up, an introductory guide to Ambler’s life and work, should prove genuinely helpful to the newcomer, but when it recommends six “key” novels it includes the following “themes” for five of them:

• Epitaph for a Spy: “The vulnerability of the individual in a bureaucratic world.”

• Cause for Alarm: “The dangers of apolitical individuals in a politically charged world.”

• The Mask of Dimitrios: “The intersection of crime and politics, and the corrupting power of ambition.”

• Journey into Fear: “The thin line between courage and fear, and the impact of war on individuals.”

• The Intercom Conspiracy: “The futility of espionage in an increasingly chaotic world.”

Well… that is kind of what those are about. Kind of.

You’ll have noticed a few things about these themes. First, they are formulaic. Three of the five fall into a “the _____ of _____ in a _____ world” pattern, like a Mad Lib. These are all rich, complex, intricately constructed novels that place their characters in crises that admit of no easy answers. Boiling these stories—or any stories—down to something as simplistic and digestible as these themes should arouse our suspicions. Already particularity and nuance are being sanded off and forgotten as we prepare to slot each story into a pre-prepared box.

Second, these themes are vague. As it happens, I’ve read three of these five novels and started one of the others yesterday, and just about any of these “themes” could be applied to any of the novels.

Granted, all of this comes from one internet guide to a single author’s work, but based on my own experience and reading they are broadly representative of the way theme is extracted from story in textbook after textbook, class after class, essay after essay. The complex, diffuse, and imaginative is reduced to the simple, comprehensible, and ready-made. The narrator of Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” disturbs us, but we know what to do with “fear” or “guilt” or even “insanity.” Treasure Island is a rollicking adventure, but that’s not enough to make it an important book, so it becomes primarily a depiction of the danger of greed. This is also simpler, easier to understand, and—not insignificantly—to test.

More perniciously yet, at the college level the hunt for themes tends to mean subjecting stories to ideological scrutiny in order—to paraphrase Roger Ebert—to extract political messaging from them via liposuction without anesthesia. Thus assertions like this, which I once saw online: “The Last of the Mohicans is about the taboo on sex between whites and Native Americans.” Most of the time this comes from an overtly left-wing “tenured radical” perspective, but there is a right-wing version of it, too. Just this week a random stranger on Substack, commenting on something I had shared, wrote that Blood Meridian “depicts the southwest as irredeemably corrupt” and is therefore “a wokester wankfest.”

Again—is that really what The Last of the Mohicans or Blood Meridian are “about”? These books aren’t adventures set in particular times and places and happening to specific characters? Is all that matters the barely hidden pathologies or the political messaging?

It seems to me that the dangers of overemphasizing theme in the study of literature are:

• Gnosticism, by which I mean the suggestion that the “real” meaning of the story is hidden behind the words and events of the story, which leads students to either ignore the particulars or be frustrated with literature in toto.

• Didacticism, especially through the implication that good stories must have some broad meaning that should impart a lesson, describe life, or otherwise be useful to the student. If they cannot detect such, it must not be a good story.

• Political hijacking, which is easily the most high-profile, outrageous, and abominable form of this but is therefore also the easiest to identify and resist.

• The aesthetic smoothie, in which students are taught to look for big themes so thoroughly that all literature eventually loses its particularity and runs together into a bland abstraction puree. Last of the Mohicans and Blood Meridian are apposite here; one could say that both are “about” something like “the violence of whites and Native Americans on the frontier,” but are these books really as similar as this suggests?

This is by no means exhaustive, just the things that occur immediately to me and that I have found most frustrating.

But the final result of all of these is boredom. This is a boring, dull way to study fiction, especially when you’re introducing the young to great stories, and risks leading them away from simply enjoying reading. Great storytellers and their stories are powerful because they are specific. “Themes” are not.

Note that we don’t recommend books to each other this way. To return to one of my original examples, Epitaph for a Spy, would you rather read a book about “The vulnerability of the individual in a bureaucratic world,” something that could as easily be said of Kafka, Max Barry, or a one-star Google review of the local DMV, or a book about “A teacher on vacation who is mistaken for a spy by the police and forced to help catch the real spy”?

None of this is to say one shouldn’t look for, study, or teach themes in stories. Sensing and understanding a story’s theme is an important part of interpreting it, but themes should arise from the specific, concrete, particular details of the story, and placing as much emphasis on theme as we tend to do inverts that, elevating broad, big picture abstractions above the particulars that make a story what it is. Until we can treat stories as stories first again—and until we can just enjoy them—I think we should downplay theme.