Books: Forever Ambler

THE CARE OF TIME by Eric Ambler Farrar Straus Giroux 277 pages; $11.95

After 45 years in thriller country, Eric Ambler is still the master of murk. Ironic, cerebral, smooth as vintage port, he has created an all-too-familiar world of doublecross and blackmail where the heroes are unheroic and the villains almost likable. The Care of Time is quintessential Ambler from the very first sentence: “The warning message arrived on Monday, the bomb itself on Wednesday. It became a busy week.”

A bit of an understatement. The bomb, a very sophisticated one, is intended to persuade its recipient, Freelance Writer Robert Halliday, that the sender is a man to be taken seriously. Next, through devious channels, follows a more attractive package: an offer to the writer to edit “a definitive work on the nature of terrorism”—based on the newly discovered journals of a 19th century anarchist named Sergei Gennadiyevich Nechayev. Halliday’s fee: $50,000. Such jack being rare for a hack, Halliday warily takes on the job. It leads him to Italy and to the mailer of the bomb, an unsavory entrepreneur of many aliases—Zander, Brochet, Hecht, Luccio—all of which, in various languages, mean pike, the fish.

The deal turns out to be as fishy as the dealer. Instead of penciling a manuscript—there is no manuscript—Halliday finds himself enmeshed in devious negotiations initiated by a Persian Gulf emir identified only as the Ruler. The potentate is eager to lease territory he controls to NATO as a major allied military base. Zander-Luccio, the Pike, serves as middleman in the deal, hoping that a grateful U.S. Government will thereafter provide him with political asylum and a new identity. After a long career of nastiness in the Middle East, he has learned that he is the target of an international hit gang named Muk h abarat Zentrum (secret intelligence service), code-named Rasmuk. There is also a contract out on his seductive girl Friday, who turns out to be his daughter and another reason why Halliday stays around.

These are only the bare bones of the plot. The author, who has also been one of the most felicitous movie scenarists of his generation (A Night to Remember, The Cruel Sea), may have developed his unerring tempo from that medium. His labyrinthine plots, however, are uniquely Amblerian. Hero Halliday, who is forced into acting as intermediary between the Ruler, the Pike and NATO intelligence, finally meets the sheik in a house above an abandoned silver mine in Austria. Though the mine is supposed to be a potential treatment center for respiratory diseases, Halliday discovers that the potentate has far more sinister intentions. What follows thereafter is a frenetic and wholly plausible chase, with enough twists and alarms to fuel two more novels.

From his debut in the 1930s, with The Dark Frontier, Ambler set the course for the likes of John le Carre” and Robert Ludlum, who have yet to show that they can match the maestro for consistency and endurance. In The Care of Time, as in Ambler’s 17 other novels, it is finally not so much the plot that grips the attention, superbly handled though it is, but the characters, all of them human and vulnerable: the flawed journalist, the fearful broker, his not quite ice-cool daughter, the sick sheik, even the attendant thugs, brass hats, cops and spies. No one except perhaps Graham Greene knows or describes his atmosphere or terrain as meticulously as Ambler. It encompasses the topography of fear. —By Michael Demarest