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161st out of 427 books
—
363 voters
Epitaph for a Spy
by
Eric Ambler
When Josef Vadassy arrives at the Hotel de la Reserve at the end of his Riviera holiday, he is simply looking forward to a few more days of relaxation before returning to Paris. But in St. Gatien, on the eve of World War II, everyone is suspect–the American brother and sister, the expatriate Brits, and the German gentleman traveling under at least one assumed name. When th...more
Paperback, 263 pages
Published
February 5th 2002
by Vintage
(first published 1938)
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Eric Ambler’s 1938 novel Epitaph for a Spy is a perfect example of his distinctive approach to spy fiction. Ambler’s heroes were not professional spies but ordinary people caught up in the dangerous web of espionage. They do not thereby metamorphose into brave and noble heroes. They remain ordinary people, struggling desperately to survive, blundering through as best they can.
Josef Vadassy is a man without a nationality. Born in a part of Hungary that became part of Yugoslavia after the redrawin...more
Josef Vadassy is a man without a nationality. Born in a part of Hungary that became part of Yugoslavia after the redrawin...more
I picked this up because Alan Furst, whose spy novels I have been enjoying (I have three reviews posted) stated that he was a great admirer of Ambler.
I can see why. Ambler, like Furst, does not write conventional spy thrillers. (Of course, this book was written in the 1930's, so that's part of it.) Epitaph for a Spy follows a very unlikely "spy," Joseph Vadassey, who is a country-less ex-Hungarian conscripted by a devious French commisariat into helping locate a spy at a hotel on the French coas...more
I can see why. Ambler, like Furst, does not write conventional spy thrillers. (Of course, this book was written in the 1930's, so that's part of it.) Epitaph for a Spy follows a very unlikely "spy," Joseph Vadassey, who is a country-less ex-Hungarian conscripted by a devious French commisariat into helping locate a spy at a hotel on the French coas...more
What can I say? I was seduced by the cover - despite a certainty that I would dislike all spy novels, I bought five of these (...there was a special...) and now let's see how it goes.
OK - well it wasn't as bad as I feared. There were plot holes, moments of monumentally bad writing, and things that just seemed too easy (find who has a camera? An expensive yacht sails up and everyone gets their camera out. Someone broke into my room, who has an alibi? Conveniently everyone was on the beach watchin...more
OK - well it wasn't as bad as I feared. There were plot holes, moments of monumentally bad writing, and things that just seemed too easy (find who has a camera? An expensive yacht sails up and everyone gets their camera out. Someone broke into my room, who has an alibi? Conveniently everyone was on the beach watchin...more
It's becoming a pet peeve of mine how almost every book written during WWII (in this case just before) has at least one review complaining about how it doesn't have enough period detail. Period detail laid on is the biggest giveaway of inauthenticity. Anyway, I liked the atmosphere of this book. It's always nice in genre fiction when the author goes for the "How would this play out if this was real life and not a genre novel?" route, and here we have a hero placed in the role of detective who ju...more
I had actually forgotten about reading this book just a few years ago until I recently watched the movie version. [The book was much better and, with the right director, it could easily have been the other way around. Maybe they had problems with the budget.:]
Eric Ambler is one of my favorite authors and I'm really not able to put my finger on why that's the case. His themes have a lot in common with Graham Greene, but there is something about him that is a bit more likeable. His style is almost...more
Eric Ambler is one of my favorite authors and I'm really not able to put my finger on why that's the case. His themes have a lot in common with Graham Greene, but there is something about him that is a bit more likeable. His style is almost...more
Really taut spy thriller. Well it's not just a spy thriller, there's an awful lot of emotion/relationship dynamics stuff in there. Loved all the camera mentions too, being a vintage 35mm fan.
For practically the whole book I felt like I was reading it with a knot in my stomach. It was that gripping and threatening, you could really see how that situation could happen to the unexpecting Josef. Very realistic basis for quite a wild plot.
But the ending was a tiny bit disappointing. Just didn't reac...more
For practically the whole book I felt like I was reading it with a knot in my stomach. It was that gripping and threatening, you could really see how that situation could happen to the unexpecting Josef. Very realistic basis for quite a wild plot.
But the ending was a tiny bit disappointing. Just didn't reac...more
The main character is the classic Hitchcock victim - an innocent man who gets sucked into an alien world through random circumstance. Isn't that the perfect metaphor for this life?
Anyway - quickly - the main character is a well crafted boob - perhaps one of us. . .just a schlub on holiday who gets arrested as a spy. He is forced to try to track down the "real spy" among a group of ten hotel patrons. It's got that Agatha Christie Ten Little Indians vibe. . .which isn't really my thing. I'm findi...more
Anyway - quickly - the main character is a well crafted boob - perhaps one of us. . .just a schlub on holiday who gets arrested as a spy. He is forced to try to track down the "real spy" among a group of ten hotel patrons. It's got that Agatha Christie Ten Little Indians vibe. . .which isn't really my thing. I'm findi...more
I am an Ambler fan, but I was not over the moon with this one, though I liked it fine. I think Ambler got better in the later books (this one was his third). When it was published in 1938 in England, according to American critic Howard Haycraft, it was notable for pushing the action out of the hands of diplomats and professionals to catching up a common man into the intrigue. It was a bit like an Agatha Christie with a cast of ten potential bad guys and an amateur sleuth, but better because of t...more
May 19, 2010
Ian Russell
rated it
3 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
someone searching for the antithesis of the spy-hero
Yeah, not normally my cup of tea this one: espionage, crime thriller, whodunnit? A well good story - any frustration I felt with it I put down to my unfamiliarity with the genre. It was a bit like Agatha Christie - though I've never read Agatha Christie - but I've seen the movie and I imagine the book is like that. The protagonist is utterly wet but you kind of feel for him mixed up in all this crap. I wanted him to kick ass sometimes but his was the only arse offering to be kicked and no one se...more
I enjoyed this a lot-- Eric Ambler is a wonderful writer, spare but evocative. There are brief, lush descriptions of the French Riviera, a group of carefully drawn characters (especially the 1st person narrator) and, as always, ingenious plotting. That said, I expected tension to mount more than it did. By the last third of the book I felt the narrator's predicament was somewhat tame and had looked forward to greater and greater danger to him, more twists and turns of the screw. All in all, thou...more
Having authored A Coffin for Dimitrios, and The Light of Day, Eric Ambler is known as one of the father’s of the thriller. Since I have read A Coffin for Dimitrios, and seen Topkapi, the film version of The Light and Day, I decided to read one of Ambler’s less well-known books, Epitaph for a Spy.
Epitaph for a Spy is an excellent thriller, set on a small stage but similar in atmosphere to Alan Furst’s wonderful novels of Europe in the 1930s, which I also recommend. The story takes place on the ev...more
Epitaph for a Spy is an excellent thriller, set on a small stage but similar in atmosphere to Alan Furst’s wonderful novels of Europe in the 1930s, which I also recommend. The story takes place on the ev...more
Sep 20, 2008
Bob
rated it
3 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
hard-core spy thriller buffs
Recommended to Bob by:
bookmarks magazine
Shelves:
spys
It was the first Eric Ambler book I have read. I like historical and spy stories and this was both. The main character, Vadassy, gets mixed up in the hunt for a spy while staying at a resort in southern France just prior to World War II. The character is unique in that he is a man without a country, a teacher of foreign languages, who happens to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and finds himself accused of espionage because of he is a foreigner. Ambler's prose can be dry at time...more
(Belated addition of my Thanksgiving plane reading.) Ambler invented the modern spy novel, and this is his first major work, goes the party line, but as a spy hunt it's basically an Agatha Christie murder mystery -- the hermetic setting and closed-set subject list, which each suspect characterized by a set of jolly quirks, and each one carrying a secret that makes him or her behave suspiciously. In the context of the mystery novel genre, making the detective a socially awkward amateur (there's a...more
3.5 stars really - the half goes to the excellent charcater of the narrator, who is quite believable and pleasantly different from the normal hero spy. The characters were less well drawn and rather two dimensional but none the less interesting. The setting in the Riviera was effective, the heat palpable. Like another reviewer I felt the pressure diminish rather than build in the last part of the book and felt no interest in, and shock when disclosed, who the spy may have been.
This is the second Eric Ambler book I have read after A Coffin for Dimitrios. Although not as classic as Dimitrios, it still is a pretty entertaining spy story. The plot follows an ordinary Hungarian man on vacation at a beach resort in the south of France. From the opening sentence the reader is instantly drawn into the story as the protagonist announcing that he was placed under arrest by the French police. The police confiscate his camera film and discover that there are 10 photographs contai...more
A good, quick read, though Journey into Fear was a much tighter and more satisfying novel. Josef Vadassy is unwillingly drafted into hunting for a spy in his small Riviera hotel on the eve of WWII. It is first person novel and Josef, who is a foreign language instructor, is not a particularly competent spy/detective. Still, Ambler creates interesting characters and dialogue and the plot does not dawdle.
I don't usually like whodunits. I dislike being set up, and once I solve the mystery, I'm bored. But Ambler's pre-Clouseauvian unwilling detective/narrator and the book's humor so charmed and disarmed me that I didn't mind the genre at all here. This was the first book I've read by Ambler and I'm excited about reading his others, which I understand are not so, er, whodunitesque.
Excellently atmospheric 1930s spy novel. The setting on the French Riviera was excellent, as was the cast of suspicious characters – reminded me a little of Murder on the Orient Express in the sense that you know you should suspect each and every character, but aren’t sure which ones are the baddies.
Eric Ambler is one of the giants of writing about spies. Others (Maugham's "Ashenden";Graham Greene's work) preceded him, but his novels about individuals caught in the maze of espionage are very influential and were extremely wel written. Alan Furst is probably his most obvious successor.
Enjoyable spy novel from the 1930s set in a resort in the south of France. The author successfully creates a shy academic with no detective ability as the central character who, due to a mix-up, must assist the police in ferreting out the spy. This character's struggles add both humor and a feeling of on-going nightmare to the novel.
An engaging, fun read. I love the Hitchcock-esque tale of a person who unwittingly gets pulled into a conspiracy. Eric Ambler has the right alchemy of drama, intrigue and humor mixed together in this one. It will not be my last read of his.
Really enjoying these...perhaps I should read more spy fiction? Alhough...I hadn't for years because, as much as I like Bond films, Ian Fleming's fiction was pretty bad.
Maybe Ambler is all I'm likely to like in the genre?
Maybe Ambler is all I'm likely to like in the genre?
Ambler's books are always a pleasure, and this one is no exception. It plays in pre-World War II France and involves an innocent and somewhat hapless civilian who gets caught up in some nasty espionage.
A cross between Agatha Christie and Hitchcock, this is a classic detective thriller. An innocent bystander is caught up in a spy-ring and, against his will, becomes a pawn in a political game of cat and mouse. Very enjoyable and a reminder of a time when dinner when always a black-tie event. You can almost taste the gin and tonics and smell the cigars.
A sort of old-fashioned Golden Age whodunit told as a spy story. Masterful storytelling, though, and although it was written in the late 1930s the prose has not aged or diminished. A good read.
An excellent story. An engaging and sympathetic protagonist for whom I felt deeply when he was being treated more like a pawn than a person. Beautifully written by Ambler. Will definitely be hunting for more of his stories at the library.
Reminiscent of Graham Greene, but with less humor. Interesting ideas about what it would be like to be thrust into the role of spy, whether you like it or not.
Oct 12, 2011
Shinjan *Lord Pistachio*
rated it
5 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Recommended to Shinjan *Lord Pistachio* by:
Sonali V
I like this book because it is a different type of spy novel. Ambler's description of how Vadassy eventually finds out who the spy is, is amazing(for me). To make it short and sweet- this is an amazing book for those who generally don't like mysteries.
Another classic spy novel, love how timeless Eric Ambler's books are. Wrong place at the wrong time, love how the main character is a bit clueless.
Another very good spy novel by Ambler. You really feel the political and cultural turmoil in his books. And there's a surprisingly touching ending.
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Eric Ambler began his writing career in the early 1930s, and quickly established a reputation as a thriller writer of extraordinary depth and originality. He is often credited as the inventor of the modern political thriller and John Le Carre once described him as 'the source on which we all draw.'
Ambler began his working life at an engineering firm, then as a copywriter at an advertising agency,...more
More about Eric Ambler...
Ambler began his working life at an engineering firm, then as a copywriter at an advertising agency,...more
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