Recommendations from our site
“A lot of people really like Eric Ambler and he’s a wonderful prose stylist – he’s a serious writer. This is a claustrophobic story set on a ship full of German spies and the hero is an English spy. It’s set in World War II and what’s amazing is that it was written in 1940 and he didn’t know what the outcome of the war would be. We know Germany lost and everything was OK, but if you were writing in 1940 you’d think: ‘Cripes, these people look very scary and good and we don’t really look very good at all.’ It’s like all those Cold War thrillers that look very different now that we’ve won, but if you go back and look they were very frightening. This book is like George Orwell writing a thriller – it was the start, really, of the thriller as a literary genre.” Read more...
The Best Classic British Thrillers
Matt Lynn, Novelist
