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“ONE OF THE FOREMOST ARCHITECTS OF ESPIONAGE FICTION”: FINE FIRST EDITION OF UNCOMMON DANGER, INSCRIBED BY ERIC AMBLER

AMBLER, Eric. Uncommon Danger. London: Hodder and Stoughton, (1937). 12mo, original blue cloth, original dust jacket.

First edition of Ambler’s second novel, in scarce original dust jacket, inscribed by the author on the title page, “To Ernest —— from Eric Ambler with best wishes.”

Ambler’s second novel—”short, fast-paced, intensely gripping” (The Guardian)—was written, the author later explained, in “the year in which Italy invaded Abyssinia, civil war broke out in Spain and Hitler ordered the German army to reoccupy the Rhineland… a year of yet more refugees and of marriages arranged to confer passports. It was also the year in which the League of Nations was at last seen plainly to be impotent. Those were the things that I was trying, in my own fictional terms, to write about.” “One of the foremost architects of espionage fiction” (California Literary Review), Ambler was part of a “new school of spy novelists” who created “psychologically complex characters” and “sought to course the genre toward a greater reality—and a darker morality—and to generally raise the genre’s literary and aesthetic seriousness” (Woods, Neutral Ground, 53). Basis for the 1943 film Background to Danger (Ambler’s working title for the novel, and the title under which it was published in the United States in 1937). Reilly, 30.

A superb inscribed copy of a scarce Ambler first edition, scarce in dust jacket.