Description

INSCRIBED BY ERIC AMBLER

AMBLER, Eric. Epitaph for a Spy. London: Hodder & Stoughton, (1938). Octavo, original pale blue cloth, original dust jacket.

First edition of Ambler’s third novel, inscribed on the title page, “To Ernest Carr with all good wishes from Eric Ambler.” A fine copy.

“Eric Ambler is a master of narrative; he tells his story economically but with all the detail necessary to establish its authenticity effectively; and his stories, which can be either complex or simple, have the essential ingredient of the successful thriller: suspense? The picture of an ordinary man in the hands of the police had emerged in Epitaph for a Spy. In this story an innocent man is arrested and charged with espionage, since negatives apparently taken by his camera show a forbidden military area. But someone in his pension took the photographs: and the problem is which of them. The tension mounts steadily, and finally there is a rooftop chase; Ambler is at his best when the resolution of the plot erupts into swift action. The attitudes of Beghin, the man from the Sûreté-Générale, and the local police Commissaire are cold, the atmosphere for the innocent yet vulnerable man caught up in espionage is nightmarish, and the complications convincing” (Reilly, 32). Made into the film Hotel Reserve with James Mason in 1944. This copy possibly inscribed to Australian politician and newspaperman Ernest Shoobridge Carr. Fine condition.