A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler

The Citizen Kane of spy novels

Eric Ambler (1909-1998) is a highly respected British author of spy novels whose career spanned almost half a century. A Coffin for Dimitrios, often regarded as his finest work, was published in 1939. The book has also been published as The Mask of Dimitrios, which is the title of the 1944 film adaptation starring Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet.

Englishman Charles Latimer is a former professor of political economy turned successful writer of mystery novels. While vacationing in Istanbul he meets a Colonel Haki of the Turkish police, who happens to be a fan of his work. As the two get to talking, Haki tells Latimer about an infamous criminal named Dimitrios whose body was discovered in the Bosporus Strait. Given Latimer’s interest in crime and detective work, Haki asks Latimer if he’d like to go to the morgue to view the body. Latimer agrees. The more the writer learns about Dimitrios’s criminal career, the more intrigued he becomes. He decides to investigate Dimitrios’s past, with the idea that he might discover something that would be useful for a future novel. Latimer retraces Dimitrios’s known whereabouts, traveling from city to city looking through police records and interviewing people with some knowledge of the notorious criminal. Along the way, Latimer finds that someone else has been following the same trail and making similar inquiries into Dimitrios’s past.

The plot of the book calls to mind the classic film Citizen Kane in that the title character is dead in the opening scene, and the rest of the book is a series of glimpses into his past. Through his investigation of Dimitrios’s life, Latimer uncovers a history of espionage, drug dealing, human trafficking, and murder. These crimes are revealed almost as a series of short stories, told to Latimer by various law enforcement personnel and unsavory characters. Ambler ties these fictional flashbacks into real-life political intrigue of Europe’s interwar period. The drawback to this series of flashbacks, however, is that Latimer is never really in any danger until at least two-thirds of the way through the book. He’s not really doing any ingenious detective work, either, but rather just listening to stories that are voluntarily related to him.

There are two kinds of spy thrillers. One includes those of the highly skilled, expertly trained, killing-machine sort of hero (e.g. James Bond, Jason Bourne). The other is that of the regular guy who accidentally gets involved in an espionage plot (e.g. just about every Alfred Hitchcock movie). A Coffin for Dimitrios falls into the latter category. The problem with the regular-guy approach, however, is that if you’re regular guy is too regular, he ends up being just boring. Such is the case with Latimer, who doesn’t have much of a personality at all. He is also still somewhat bound by the literary conventions of the English gentleman, which means he’s predictably going to do the right thing. It would be interesting to see what an author like Georges Simenon could have done with this premise by adding some ungentlemanly moral ambiguity.

Overall, however, I enjoyed this novel enough to make me want to read some more of Ambler’s work. This is an intelligent, realistic espionage thriller in the vein of John Le Carré’s work. It’s not simplistic potboiler pulp fiction, but it reads very briskly and lively and doesn’t get bogged down in too much political details (unlike, perhaps, some of Le Carré’s work). If you like those old Hitchcockian thrillers of the ‘40s and ‘50s, there’s a good chance you’ll like this.