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When new author Eric Ambler submitted his manuscript to a succession of British publishers, it was returned with the usual polite refusals: 'no engaging leading character', ‘too much research dressed up as fiction', 'a good story, efficiently written, but we don't see it as best-seller material'. He tried again but the young Turks of British publishing – or in today's world I suppose I should say the young Sultanas of the harem – spat back his next novel, as they did the next: 'fine writing', they routinely said, 'impressive grasp – but there are too few thrills, too little sex, and too many fascinating but irrelevant diversions'. The saddened Eric Ambler, turned down a third time, accepted their verdict and retired. Thus the world lost and never knew one of the 20th century's finest thriller writers.

Or would have done, had Ambler begun his career today. In our modern market-driven world, Ambler's preference for intelligent, meticulously presented, shockingly informative stories is out of step with current trends. He doesn't write police procedurals, or PI tales, or slash and dash stories, or arcane and ludicrous conspiracies. Instead he introduces criminals of a type unlike those you have read about before, but who are instantly believable. They may be gun-runners, financial fraudsters, small-time con men or jewellery thieves – they may, given the period in which Ambler wrote, have learnt their craft in the murky shadows of the Second World War – but they will be different to and more roundly drawn than other writer's villains, and will be different and distinct from Ambler's characters in previous tales. His 'able criminal' in Send No More Roses, for example, is an ascetic extortioner with a dry accountant's brain, a non-violent but chillingly clinical man to whom human lives are either assets or liabilities that can easily be moved from one ledger column to another. His bumbling hero in The Light of Day, on the other hand, is a wishful-thinking small-time chancer, a lifetime victim whose only hope lies in his being more at home than are his more capable adversaries in the muddy crevices of failure at the bottom of the heap. While the 'able criminal' has what he calls 'the imagination and business planning skills needed to evolve a new way of investing time and money in order to make a profit', Arthur Simpson in The Light of Day finds himself forced to become the likely fall guy in a major gem heist. The 'able criminal' prepares a foolproof plan to buy up and take over a run-down Pacific island which he intends to convert into an international tax haven – 'the most remarkable, the most prosperous sovereign state in the entire South Pacific'. Arthur Simpson, meanwhile, has spent several years on a forlorn quest to upgrade his questionable foreign papers to a fully legitimate British passport. Arthur Simpson, my Sultana points out, is no tough-guy hero – and Arthur wouldn't disagree. He is a frightened man, he says, and it shows: 'The outside of the body can be washed of sweat and grease; but inside there are other substances. Some of these smell. How do you wash away the smells of the inside of the body?'

Simpson, unusually for an Ambler hero, returns in Dirty Story. After his Turkish adventure he is holed up in Greece, still in need of a decent passport and still vulnerable to 'persuasion'. Hoping to make a modest living retailing pornographic books (not even good pornographic books), he is cornered and pressurised into taking part in a lethal mercenary engagement in central Africa. Ambler's inside knowledge of the mercenary's trade, incidentally, would make Frederick Forsythe blink. And it's true, as Sultana herself complains, that in some of his books the master storyteller sacrifices plot for 'too much research dressed up as fiction' – but does it detract, I wonder? In Send No More Roses, you'll learn more than you're entitled to learn about international money laundering in the 1970s, just as in Passage of Arms you'll put down the book with a GCSE in old-fashioned gun-running. I'd agree with Sultana that, in Doctor Frigo, Ambler hits you with such a barrage of political punches that you put down the book feeling you've just shared a small room for far too long with Peter Mandelson. (Your virtue remains intact, but he does your brain in.)

The typical Ambler hero is a man out of his depth and all alone in a dangerous riptide. Mr Graham in Journey into Fear is an engineer on a business trip to Istanbul (Ambler himself had been an engineer). The company that employs him is in the arms business. Before long he has become a quarry so convinced he won't survive that he begins to look forward to his own death. 'Death, he told himself, would not be so bad. A moment of astonishment and it would be over.' Charles Latimer, in The Mask of Dimitrios, is a crime writer who decides, purely for research, to delve more deeply into the past of the vanished Dimitrios, a murderous and powerful real-life criminal in whom the police have ceased to take an interest. Don't go there, Charles, stick to fiction. In Ambler's hands, a mere accountant can create tension. But is that surprising to anyone who has been interviewed by a tax man? Send No More Roses begins: 'They stopped the car by the gateway in the wall on the lower coast road. Then, after a moment or two, the three of them climbed out stiffly, their shirts clinging to their backs. It had been a long hot drive. From the end of the terrace I could see them clearly through the binoculars.' As a scene-setter, that is splendidly economical. Chapter two introduces a typical Ambler conceit, the unreliable narrator: 'Professor Krom's account of the events I am describing differs radically from mine; it does so, I believe, chiefly because his was written while he was still too disturbed by his experiences at the Villa Esmeralda to think clearly. He is, after all, an elderly man unaccustomed to explosions.'

It shouldn't be thought, as a publishing Sultana might indeed think, that Ambler cannot handle violence. Better than that, he exploits the fear of violence. His petty criminals know they are insignificant and dispensable – that their very dispensability may be a crucial element in their employer's master plan – while his masterminds, on the other hand, know that as sure as man is mortal, they and their kind remain as inviolable as they have always been. Ambler is a highly intelligent and informed trickster. His best-selling Mask of Dimitrios relies on a trick so unexpected that I happily recycled it into my own slightly less best-selling Oh No, Not My Baby. By the time Ambler reveals the trick, he has taken you on a labyrinthine journey of deception – as did my book, let me whisper, in its own small way. But with Ambler, unlike Russell James, you are tempted to ask why an author so well-versed in the hidden trade routes and techniques of international fraud would ever bother with writing crime novels. In The Light of Day, later filmed as Topkapi, Ambler explained how to break into and avoid the electronic alarms of one of the world's most tightly protected jewellery museums. Being Ambler, we have later learned, he didn't invent a museum and give it an imaginary alarm system containing one author-constructed flaw – oh no, he used a real museum and described its actual alarm system. (And yes, I did the same in Daylight, but the treasure my hero stole from Leningrad's Winter Palace was protected – it really was, I saw it – by little more than a drooping length of red fancy rope and the public's fear of the Soviet authorities.) Back to Ambler. Apparently, so correct was his ruse that the authorities in the museum quickly updated their alarm system.

This is a clue to his appeal. By the time Penguin began jacketing books in green and white, the allure of crime stories was on a par with that of crossword puzzles (invented, as we know them, in the 1920s), and the allure of puzzles was at its highest among law-abiding intellectuals and professors. For example, I knew the man who founded Israel's philatelic service. He adored and collected those green and white crime novels. Like many of his generation he revered Ambler. Here was an author who not only could write and spin a plot but was so extraordinarily well informed – and more, he was prepared to share his knowledge with the reader. Today's readers like to learn new ways of killing people. They like to stand witness at the mortuary slab. Perhaps these areas of specialist knowledge are as interesting as the simpler skills of robbery and fraud, but are they as healthy? Speaking for myself, I say you can keep your reeking formaldehyde; I prefer the open air. I would rather imagine myself in a Maltese back-street bar, in an Armenian cargo boat, or lying beside the skylight on the roof of an Istanbul museum. I would rather risk my imaginary hide for a precious jewel, or come home late one night after several unexplainable days away, to be greeted by my slightly crumpled but desirable and worried mistress. I would like, in short, to have had an adventure. I might be bruised, I might be grimy, but instead of slime beneath my fingernails I would have decent honest dirt. I would have touched the real world.

Ambler's Legacy

Let's begin with a few credentials. Eric Ambler won four CWA Daggers (Gold or Silver) – for Passage of Arms in 1959, The Light of Day in 1962, Dirty Story in 1967 and The Levanter in 1972. Each of these – and other books – became book club choices. In 1986, he was awarded the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement. He won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America and was named a Grand Master by them in 1975. His film script for The Cruel Sea was nominated for an Academy Award, and from 1944 to 1970, off and on, he worked in the film business – working with Alexander Korda in the UK and later with more big names in Hollywood.

Ambler’s Books

• 1936 – The Dark Frontier
• 1937 – Uncommon Danger (US title Background to Danger), filmed as Background to Danger in 1943, directed by Raoul Walsh and starring George Raft
• 1938 – Epitaph for a Spy, filmed as Hotel Reserve in 1944 and starring James Mason
• 1938 – Cause for Alarm
• 1939 – The Mask of Dimitrios (US title A Coffin for Dimitrios), filmed in 1944, directed by Jean Negulesco and starring Zachary Scott, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre
• 1940 – Journey into Fear, filmed in 1942, directed by Norman Foster and produced by Orson Welles' Mercury company, starring Joseph Cotten and Dolores Del Rio; remake in 1976 starring Zero Mostel and Shelley Winters
• 1950 – Skytip (written under the name Eliot Reed, in collaboration with Charles Rodda)
• 1951 – Judgment on Deltchev
• 1951 – Tender to Danger (written under the name Eliot Reed, in collaboration with Charles Rodda)
• 1953 – The Maras Affair (written under the name Eliot Reed, in collaboration with Charles Rodda)
• 1953 – The Schirmer Inheritance
• 1954 – Charter to Danger (written under the name Eliot Reed, in collaboration with Charles Rodda)
• 1956 – The Night Comers (US title A State of Siege)
• 1958 – Passport to Panic (written under the name Eliot Reed, in collaboration with Charles Rodda)
• 1959 – Passage to Arms
• 1962 – The Light of the Day (republished as a film tie-in 1964 as Topkapi), filmed as Topkapi 1964, directed by Jules Dassin, written by Monja Danischewsky, starring Melina Mercouri, Peter Ustinov, Maximilian Schell, Robert Morley and Akim Tamiroff
• 1963 – The Ability to Kill and Other Pieces
• 1964 – A Kind of Anger
• 1964 – To Catch a Spy (edited anthology)
• 1967 – Dirty Story (US title This Gun for Hire)
• 1969 – The Intercom Conspiracy
• 1972 – The Levanter
• 1974 – Doctor Frigo
• 1977 – Send No More Roses (US title The Siege of the Villa Lipp)
• 1981 – The Care of Time
• 1985 – Here Lies Eric Ambler (an autobiography)
• 1991 – Waiting for Orders
• 1993 – The Story So Far (an expanded version of Waiting for Orders)

Ambler was born in London in 1909 and he died there in 1998. He served in the Second World War, joining the Royal Artillery as a private and earning an American Bronze Star in 1946. In 1981 he was given an OBE. His 1985 autobiography was disappointing, but in The Mask of Dimitrios he might have been describing his own subject matter:
‘Here was real murder; not neat, tidy book-murder with corpse and clues and suspects and hangman, but murder over which a chief of police shrugged his shoulders, wiped his hands and consigned the stinking victim to a coffin. Yes, that was it. It was real.’

The Levanter has just been republished by No Exit Press at £6.99 and The Light of Day will be re-released in April 2006