by Ron Singer.
My wife and I often practice what might be called “literary parallel play.” That is, we read the same book at roughly the same time. Since we normally have only one copy, our reading is not strictly “parallel.” If one of us starts a book while the other is already reading a different one, the second reader may wait, or we may go with a hybrid model. That is, at first, the second reader may wait, but then, if the first reader’s reports are too glowing, the second may attempt to usurp some of the prerogative by saying, for instance, “Can I read it while you’re doing the dishes/cooking dinner/taking a shower?” You get the idea: our marriage contract has a reading clause.
About a week ago, we (re-)read Epitaph for a Spy. I got the idea because, having started to re-read the same author’s Cause for Alarm, I found that I remembered its plot too well. Knowing that Ambler’s five earliest books, written before World War II, were considered the “classics,” I read in “About the Author,” on a back page of Cause for Alarm, that one of the five was Epitaph for a Spy.” Since that title seemed the least familiar of the five, I looked for it in an online library catalogue.
A few days later, I took it off the shelves of that library. Although, to my disappointment, the date of publication was listed as 1952, by reading the Author’s Note, I discovered that the book was written in 1937. Still at the library, I (re-) read the first few pages, and was excited to find them totally unfamiliar. Either I had somehow skipped this one, or I had completely forgotten the plot. So I checked out the book, a small paperback, and brought it home.
My wife was sure we had read Epitaph, or at least part of it, and that it was not one of Ambler’s best. That night, as I continued reading, I began to agree with her negative appraisal. Since I hate “spoilers,” all I will say is that Epithet seemed to be an Agatha Christie wrapped in a spy novel. Further in, the book also included elements of a holocaust memoir and of a James Bond adventure. The narrator/protagonist, the usual Ambler innocent trapped in a geopolitical imbroglio, was too dense to carry the intended suspense, which centered around the question of who had taken two compromising photographs of military installations, which he was accused of taking. In trying to sort out the possible suspects, he seemed to go back and forth, hatching one inane plan after another. The book became too much like life.
As I read on, parallel play kicked in. The harbinger was my wife’s announcement that she needed “some good junk to read.” Having just finished a serious geopolitical book, Neil Ascherson’s Black Sea, she started the Ambler, poaching it after dinner one evening, while I was doing the dishes. As she ploughed through the opening pages, I had the self-satisfied thought that one reason she loved me was that I kept her in books: I was a good provider. (As usual, she had asked my permission, and when I finished the dishes, she ceded the book.)
Over several sessions, she finished Epitaph, and her verdict was similar to mine. Not to pile it on, but we agreed that “the greatest spy novelist of all time” (San Francisco Chronicle) had written only a single masterpiece, A Coffin for Dimitrios, and a bunch of others that ranged from poor to pretty good.
In his Footnote (Endnote, really) to Epitaph for a Spy, Ambler found it paradoxical that, while detectives were a relatively recent phenomenon (there were none before the nineteenth century), and there seemed always to have been spies, the number of great detective novels was much larger than the number of comparably great novels of espionage. Since we try to be fair-minded, we acknowledged that Ambler may have laid the groundwork for future masterpieces, such as John le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Another interesting fact is that Ambler wrote this Note in 1951. As I mentioned, although he completed Epitaph for a Spy in 1937, it was not published until 1952. We have not yet discovered the reason for the fifteen-year hiatus, but it is tempting to see Epitaph as, in a sense, belonging with the author’s lesser, cold-war novels (although, to be fair, Judgment on Deltschev, 1951, is no slouch!). Comparisons, they say, are invidious or, as my wife says, “something men seem to like.”
Our next re-reading, btw, will be the existential novels of the German-speaking Jewish-Czech author (not Franz Kafka, but), Leo Perutz. We agree, so far, at least, that Perutz’s best is By Night under the Stone Bridge, originally published in 1953, the year after Epitaph for a Spy. According to a back-cover blurb, taken from a publication called Preview, “the book has the resonance of a minor classic.” We’ll see about that.