Eric Ambler

Eric Clifford Ambler OBE (28 June 1909 – 22 October 1998) was an English author of thrillers, in particular spy novels, who introduced a new realism to the genre. Also working as a screenwriter, Ambler used the pseudonym Eliot Reed for books co-written with Charles Rodda. Life Ambler was born in Charlton, South-East London, into a family of entertainers who ran a puppet show, with which he helped in his early years. Both parents also worked as music hall artists. He later studied engineering at the Northampton Polytechnic Institute in Islington (now City, University of London) and served a traineeship with an engineering company. However, his upbringing as an entertainer proved dominant and he soon moved to writing plays and other works. By the early 1930s, he was a copywriter at an advertising agency in London. After resigning, he moved to Paris, where he met and in 1939 married Louise Crombie, an American fashion correspondent. Ambler was then politically a staunch antifascist and, like many others, tended to regard the Soviet Union as the only real counterweight to fascist aggression, which was reflected in the fact that some of his early books included Soviet agents depicted positively and as sympathetic characters, the undoubted allies of the protagonist. Like numerous like-minded people in different countries, Ambler was shocked and disillusioned by the German-Soviet Pact of 1939. His postwar anticommunist novel Judgment on Deltchev (1951), based on the Stalinist purge trials in Eastern Europe, caused him to be reviled by many former Communist Party and other progressive associates. When the Second World War broke out, Ambler entered the army as a private soldier. He was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1941. He was soon reassigned to photographic units. He ended the war as a lieutenant-colonel and an assistant director of the Army Film and Photographic Unit.