Cause for Alarm (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Ambler, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141190329 ISBN 13: 9780141190327

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2009

Synopsis

Nicky Marlow needs a job. He's engaged to be married and the employment market in Britain in 1937 is pretty slim. So when his fiancée points out the position with an English armaments manufacturer in Italy, he jumps at the chance. Soon after he arrives, however, he learns the sinister truth about his predecessor's departure and finds himself courted by two agents with dangerously different agendas. In the process, Marlow realizes that it's not so simple just to do the job he's paid for - not in fascist Italy, on the eve of a world war.

About this title

Review:

The classic 1930s thrillers of Eric Ambler took the crudely patriotic certainties of John Buchan and gave them a salutary shake. Nick Marlow, the hero of Cause for Alarm is an engineer who likes to think of himself as a plain man, above politics; when he takes a sales job in Mussolini's Fascist Italy, it never occurs to him as relevant that his predecessor was killed by a hit-and-run driver or that the boring machines he sells might be used for the making of armaments. Nor does he regard the politics of his clerk as of interest, nor think of the rouged Yugoslav general Vagas as anything more than a friendly buffoon. Before he knows where he is, a web is tightening about him and the only reliable friend he has is Zaleshoff, an American businessman, oddly keen to educate him in the ways of the world ... This is a superb piece of propaganda fiction from the popular front era; the things that made it work then as a thriller--its hairs-breadth escapes, its chunks of spycraft, its atmospheric portrayal of dark city streets and dangerous high passes--are as fresh-minted as they ever were. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

'Eric Ambler is a master of his craft' Sunday Telegraph 'If you want to experience the feel of the Continent in the 1930s, you will find few better guides' - Robert Harris

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0141190329
• ISBN 13: 9780141190327
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288