A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS: Someone Still Pays for the "Bullet."
Written: Oct 31 '00 (Updated Aug 10 '01)
Product Rating:
Pros: In my opinion, the best spy novel ever written, one that transcends the genre.
Cons: Rudimentary knowledge of Modern History is desirable -- but the novel provides its own lessons.
The Bottom Line: A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS, one of many excellent examples by Eric Ambler, is probably the most informative, interesting spy novel ever written.
macresarf1's Full Review: Eric Ambler - A Coffin for Dimitrios
As November, the Month of Elections, Assassination and personal sorrow comes around, I often reach (carefully) for my 1943 Pocket Book of the greatest spy novel ever written: A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS by Eric Ambler. I do this especially when I've had to deal with some of my old friends and their connections, who are dreadfully naive and ill-informed about things near and far in their lives. Sixty-odd years after it was written, it remains one of the best guides to how the murkier circles of Politics really work.
A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS is not only a spy novel but an imaginative history of the crucial years between the First World War and the Rise of Hitler, when, much like today, Britain, France, The United States and other powers scrambled for cash and power while the situation in Eastern Europe, Russia, the Balkans, the Mediterranean and the Middle and Far East deteriorated, making World War II inevitable. It is also a wonderful study of a "well educated" fool, like a majority of Americans today, preoccupied with his own small concerns, who does not, never does really, recognize the difference between fantasy and reality.
It is Colonel Haki of the Turkish Secret Police, in A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS, who to Charles Latimer explains the mechanism of Assassination -- you may wish to substitute politics or economics, or modern life for that matter: "My dear friend, Dimitrios would have nothing to do with the actual shooting. No! His kind never risk their skins like that. They stay on the fringe of the plot. They are the professionals, the entrepreneurs, the links between the businessmen, the politicians who desire the end but are afraid of the means, and the fanatics, the idealists who are prepared to die for their convictions. The important thing to know about an assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet." No more succinct explanation of how our Modern World is manipulated has ever been written.
Charles Latimer, the avuncular, peculiar hero of our novel, is an Englishman (for in those days the English still thought they ran the World) who until he was 35 was a lecturer (professor) at a minor English University. It was after recoiling from the experience of writing his third book, a study of The Myth of the 20th Century by Hitler's philosopher, Dr Alfred Rosenberg, and also a short infatuation with National Socialism, that Latimer wrote The Bloody Shovel, the first of a series of five lucrative and successful detective novels. Following a breakdown, he traveled to Greece for his health, took a boat from Piraeus to Istanbul, where he met Colonel Haki at a party.
Colonel Haki is an admirer of the power of things British, and a reader of Latimer's detective stories. In fact, Haki has begun a story of his own, set in England. They have lunch, hit it off, although Latimer suppresses a laugh at how foolish the officer's literary effort is. Haki, who says that Latimer's murderers are more sympathetic than the real thing, offers to show Latimer something of an actual case he is working on. He points to a dossier he has just received on one Dimitrios Makropoulos: "A dirty type, common, cowardly, scum. Murder, espionage, drugs -- that is the history. There were also two affairs of assassination."
Haki has hooked the bored Latimer's imagination, and so the Colonel takes him to a morgue to see the body of the man in question, recently washed up on the shores of the Bosporus. The ripe cadaver is that of Dimitrios Makropoulos, who began a poor Greek fig packer and became the instrument of serious criminal, economic and political upheavals, in half a dozen countries, over the preceding 20 years between the Wars. Latimer sees a possible plot for his sixth novel if he researches the life of the dead Dimitrios.
Latimer, with information provided by Haki, goes to Smyrna (now Izmir), the principal port of Eastern Turkey, in order to follow the trail of Dimitrios. From the simple murder of a Jew, which Dimitrios blamed on a black Arab in 1922, the trail leads to Sofia, where in investigating the Assassination of Prime Minister Stambulisky of Bulgaria, Latimer encounters another Englishman, a large one named Peters, who ingratiates himself, follows him, threatens him or acts as a partner through the rest of the story.
Latimer presses on: an attempt to assassinate Kemel Ataturk at Adrianople in 1924; espionage for France in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1926; drug traffic in Paris in 1929-31; another assassination in Zagreb, Croatia, in 1932; stolen passports in Lyon, France in 1937 and on and on.
[Latimer might be following such a trail today.]
Throughout his travels, like most of us, Latimer is impatient, frustrated, and only occasionally aware that he is delving into things, which, if he is successful, may be much more complicated than he imagined.
I cannot adequately suggest to you the equal amounts of wisdom, modern history, foreboding and suspense that Eric Ambler packs into this 225 page novel. I recommend my colleague wickengel's excellent review for more information about A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS.
Ambler, by the time he wrote A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS in 1939, had already produced The Dark Frontier (1936), Uncommon Danger (1937 -- made into the film Background to Danger, Walsh, 1943), Epitaph for a Spy (1938) and Cause for Alarm (1938). He went on to write 35 more novels, a few as Eliot Reed, in collaboration with Charles Rodda. Some of the more notable works were Journey Into Fear (1940 -- made into a film directed by Norman Foster, with Orson Welles as Colonel Haki, in 1942), Judgment on Deltchev (1951), The Night Comers (1956), and The Light of Day (1962, made into the film Tokapi, Dassin, 1964, for which Actor Peter Ustinov won an Academy Award).
During the War, he joined The Royal Artillery as a private, and was assigned to a combat photography unit. He served in Italy, eventually assisting John Huston to make the superb documentary, The Battle of San Pietro. By the end of the War, he was a lieutenant colonel and was the recipient of an American Bronze Star.
After the War, among other things, he wrote many screenplays, including one for The Cruel Sea (Frend, 1953), and one for the best film on the Sinking of the Titanic: A Night to Remember (Baker, 1958). In Hollywood, he created the TV Series Checkmate and The Most Deadly Game. He died in London at the age of 89 in 1998.
As we contemplate the strange bumps in the night around the campaigns of a childish dissembler like George W. Bush and an unreliable Al Gore, it might be well to come to self understanding and a measure of control by reading A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS.
Of course, we are the Charles Latimers of today, for America thinks she rules the World now.
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