AMBLER, Eric

“The important thing to know about an assassination or attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.”

Eric Clifford Ambler was an English author of spy thriller novels.  He was brought up within the entertainment industry, studied engineering and had an apprenticeship with an engineering company, but his love was for words and how to use them. He moved into advertising and, whilst working as a copywriter, started writing The Dark Frontier (1936).  This first novel parodied the conventions of the contemporary British thriller, but he also started to develop what was to become his trademark gritty realism.  With the publication of his second novel, Uncommon Danger in 1937, Ambler utilized his genuine ideologies, and created protagonists who were ordinary people thrust by circumstances into danger. This signature style became Ambler’s literary calling card and his subsequent books have been credited with completely transforming and revitalising the genre.

He paused his novel writing career during WWII during which time he wrote training films for the British Army, a job that led to a postwar opportunities as a screenwriter, adapting films from novels; he was nominated for an Oscar for his script The Cruel Sea (1953). 

His fiction was a major influence on such writers as Greene, Le Carre and Deighton, and in 1960 he was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award for Passage of Arms.

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