Eric Ambler’s brilliant noir novel The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), peopled by the flotsam and jetsam of the inter-war and post-Ottoman period, relates the obsessive quest by an English writer to trace the career of the Smyrniot Dimitrios Makropoulos, who is a thief, killer, spy, assassin, drug dealer, drug addict, white slave trader and successful businessman, a quest that takes him on a journey through Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Switzerland and France. The book was made into a classic film noir of the same name in 1944, directed by the Romanian Jean Negulesco and starring Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet – both the novel and film are resonant of The Maltese Falcon, the film of which in 1941 debuted the enduring Lorre and Greenstreet partnership.
The film can be seen in its entirety here. Above is a trailer for the film. Below, historian of modern Greece and the Balkans Mark Mazower provides an introduction to Ambler’s novel.
The Mask of Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler. Introduction, by Mark Mazower
The film can be seen in its entirety here. Above is a trailer for the film. Below, historian of modern Greece and the Balkans Mark Mazower provides an introduction to Ambler’s novel.
The Mask of Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler. Introduction, by Mark Mazower
The Mask of Dimitrios is the work of a writer at the height of his powers. Saturated with the despairing mood of a world in rapid decay, it is also a manifesto for a new kind of crime novel, a bomb intended to blow up the vicarage whodunnit as decisively as the fifty tons of TNT that the eight-year-old Eric Ambler had watched devastate the Silvertown storage depot in 1917 in London’s biggest-ever explosion. One might think it was written yesterday with its Balkan drug dealers, unscrupulous Eurasian businessmen and bedraggled refugees drifting across the continent. In fact, moving between London, Paris and New York, Ambler finished it as the Nazis marched into Prague in the spring of 1939. But although the war’s threat lurks in the background, and international machinations impart a sweaty tension to the fast-paced story, the real action occurs elsewhere, in a naive Englishman’s efforts to set aside the comfortably parochial values of his homeland and come to terms with the harsher realities of the world across the Channel. Back home they are playing cricket on the sundappled sward; but meantime the action is in cheap hotels and sleazy bars with names like La Vièrge St Marie and Le Kasbah, figuring out Grodek and Marukakis, Madame Preveza and the sinister Mr Peters. They are the real diagnostians of the ‘disappearing civilization’ that is Europe.
Charles Latimer, the hero, is sketched with Ambler’s characteristically ironic economy: former lecturer at some minor university, he earns a living from writing old-fashioned detective stories. But like Ambler himself, he is curious about the world and again like Ambler, he needs the sun and the Mediterranean, and the unknown pulls him in. Is it coincidence that the catalyst for his enquiry, the urbane Turkish Colonel Haki, should evoke by his very name the word for Truth (Hakk)? The world-weary Kemalist police officer seeks Latimer’s advice about his own unpublished foray into murder mystery. What he offers in return triggers Latimer’s journey into the heart of Europe’s darkness – reality in the shape of the bloated corpse of a man called Dimitrios laid out on a slab in a stinking Istanbul mortuary. As a curious Latimer retraces Dimitrios’s crime-laden peregrinations, the doubts begin, the interrogations and questions pile up, and soon it is Latimer himself who is being tracked down.
Ambler had not been to the Balkans when he wrote this book, although you would never guess it from the sureness of the writing. Instead, he had hung out in seedy Turkish cafes in the backstreets of Nice, where refugees had told him their stories in bad French. He must have listened carefully. This book’s émigrés have seen things and have little time for words: they list their stations of the cross, scarcely bothering to fill in the gaps. ‘Odessa, 1918. Stambul 1919. Smyrna 1921. Bolsheviks. Wrangel’s army. Kiev. A woman they called The Butcher.’ This is a world where London is a distant haven across the water, as the dust settles on the collapse of “the Ottoman empire and the Russian civil war. Refugees and conmen teach the former professor their hard truths of deception and violence. The police file away their details in the archives, all too aware of the falsehoods they contain. The civil servant’s card index is a fiction: names and dates change for a few small banknotes. International bureaucrats pontificate about stopping drugs and preventing trafficking in women. But the real power is elsewhere and the hope of a rational and benign world is an illusion. Violence – assassination, ethnic cleansing, military coups, war – courses through the book but it is not the ultimate problem. That problem is money, and what men will do for it.
Soon Latimer finds that behind the gunmen and the spies lies the mysterious Eurasian Credit Trust which bets on currency markets and makes huge profits from the heroin trade. Standing above Left and Right, international finance pulls the strings and makes the puppets dance. A stranger tells Latimer to accept the will of the Great One: chance rules men’s affairs, unpleasant deeds are sometimes inevitable and stoical acceptance is best. Latimer objects. His impulse is still to rationalize: he wants to see the criminal not as a man but as ‘a unit in a disintegrating social system’. Yet the people he meets, those who know much more about the mysterious Dimitrios than he does, find this superficial: an engaging blackmailer tells him men are like rats – everyone has one impulse which masters all others. Meanwhile, the malevolent Peters tells Latimer that having read one of his books he found it terrifying for its ‘ferocious moral rectitude’.
And lurking in the background, the instability of identity and the question of who Dimitrios really was. Greek, Muslim, Jew? He had been born in the Ottoman Balkans, in Salonika in 1889, a time and place of labile ethnicities, and had exploited the chaos of war, the mindless nationalist passions of more stupid men around him, to carve out a small fortune. ‘The drug pedlar, the pimp, the thief, the spy, the white slaver, the bully, the financier’: all of these at one time or another. One is reminded of the arch-villain of interwar pacifists, the arms-dealer Basil Zaharoff, whose rapid rise to power disguised his murky origins. In Paris, at the book’s climax, a shaken Latimer confronts the reality of his amoral times. Beyond Good and Evil, there is nothing more than logic and consistency; beyond Beethoven quartets and Michelangelo’s David lies poison gas and ‘the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town’. Europe was a jungle and its rules were set by the Stock Exchange Year Book and Mein Kampf.
Ambler’s prose, taut and fiercely etched, still has the power to shock. His style combines the precision of the chemist and engineer – two skills he deeply admired – with the thespian flair he inherited from his parents, eking out a living as music-hall artistes on the southeastern fringe of Edwardian London. There had been nothing romantic about his lower-middle-class upbringing but nothing either to constrain an imagination fuelled by the attractively disturbing stories of violence, war and foreign lands his returning uncles brought home with them in 1918. As Ambler’s talent propelled him upwards between the wars, his level gaze skewered the hypocrisies of a continent on the way down. Courteous yet unillusioned, Ambler remains one of the best guides to that low, dishonest decade. He is without doubt the most entertaining.
Charles Latimer, the hero, is sketched with Ambler’s characteristically ironic economy: former lecturer at some minor university, he earns a living from writing old-fashioned detective stories. But like Ambler himself, he is curious about the world and again like Ambler, he needs the sun and the Mediterranean, and the unknown pulls him in. Is it coincidence that the catalyst for his enquiry, the urbane Turkish Colonel Haki, should evoke by his very name the word for Truth (Hakk)? The world-weary Kemalist police officer seeks Latimer’s advice about his own unpublished foray into murder mystery. What he offers in return triggers Latimer’s journey into the heart of Europe’s darkness – reality in the shape of the bloated corpse of a man called Dimitrios laid out on a slab in a stinking Istanbul mortuary. As a curious Latimer retraces Dimitrios’s crime-laden peregrinations, the doubts begin, the interrogations and questions pile up, and soon it is Latimer himself who is being tracked down.
Ambler had not been to the Balkans when he wrote this book, although you would never guess it from the sureness of the writing. Instead, he had hung out in seedy Turkish cafes in the backstreets of Nice, where refugees had told him their stories in bad French. He must have listened carefully. This book’s émigrés have seen things and have little time for words: they list their stations of the cross, scarcely bothering to fill in the gaps. ‘Odessa, 1918. Stambul 1919. Smyrna 1921. Bolsheviks. Wrangel’s army. Kiev. A woman they called The Butcher.’ This is a world where London is a distant haven across the water, as the dust settles on the collapse of “the Ottoman empire and the Russian civil war. Refugees and conmen teach the former professor their hard truths of deception and violence. The police file away their details in the archives, all too aware of the falsehoods they contain. The civil servant’s card index is a fiction: names and dates change for a few small banknotes. International bureaucrats pontificate about stopping drugs and preventing trafficking in women. But the real power is elsewhere and the hope of a rational and benign world is an illusion. Violence – assassination, ethnic cleansing, military coups, war – courses through the book but it is not the ultimate problem. That problem is money, and what men will do for it.
Soon Latimer finds that behind the gunmen and the spies lies the mysterious Eurasian Credit Trust which bets on currency markets and makes huge profits from the heroin trade. Standing above Left and Right, international finance pulls the strings and makes the puppets dance. A stranger tells Latimer to accept the will of the Great One: chance rules men’s affairs, unpleasant deeds are sometimes inevitable and stoical acceptance is best. Latimer objects. His impulse is still to rationalize: he wants to see the criminal not as a man but as ‘a unit in a disintegrating social system’. Yet the people he meets, those who know much more about the mysterious Dimitrios than he does, find this superficial: an engaging blackmailer tells him men are like rats – everyone has one impulse which masters all others. Meanwhile, the malevolent Peters tells Latimer that having read one of his books he found it terrifying for its ‘ferocious moral rectitude’.
And lurking in the background, the instability of identity and the question of who Dimitrios really was. Greek, Muslim, Jew? He had been born in the Ottoman Balkans, in Salonika in 1889, a time and place of labile ethnicities, and had exploited the chaos of war, the mindless nationalist passions of more stupid men around him, to carve out a small fortune. ‘The drug pedlar, the pimp, the thief, the spy, the white slaver, the bully, the financier’: all of these at one time or another. One is reminded of the arch-villain of interwar pacifists, the arms-dealer Basil Zaharoff, whose rapid rise to power disguised his murky origins. In Paris, at the book’s climax, a shaken Latimer confronts the reality of his amoral times. Beyond Good and Evil, there is nothing more than logic and consistency; beyond Beethoven quartets and Michelangelo’s David lies poison gas and ‘the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town’. Europe was a jungle and its rules were set by the Stock Exchange Year Book and Mein Kampf.
Ambler’s prose, taut and fiercely etched, still has the power to shock. His style combines the precision of the chemist and engineer – two skills he deeply admired – with the thespian flair he inherited from his parents, eking out a living as music-hall artistes on the southeastern fringe of Edwardian London. There had been nothing romantic about his lower-middle-class upbringing but nothing either to constrain an imagination fuelled by the attractively disturbing stories of violence, war and foreign lands his returning uncles brought home with them in 1918. As Ambler’s talent propelled him upwards between the wars, his level gaze skewered the hypocrisies of a continent on the way down. Courteous yet unillusioned, Ambler remains one of the best guides to that low, dishonest decade. He is without doubt the most entertaining.
