Waiting for Orders - Hardcover

Ambler, Eric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892962410 ISBN 13: 9780892962419

Publisher: Mysterious Press, 1991

Synopsis

Eric Ambler is a master of narrative and an elder statesman of suspense. He virtually created the modern spy story with his ground-breaking series of pre-WWII novels; A Coffin for Dimitrios and Journey into Fear are hailed as classics of the form. Waiting for Orders is the first volume to collect Mr. Ambler's shorter works, most of which date from the period of his greatest literary triumphs.

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Reviews

Most of these eight mildly diverting short stories disinterred from the work of British suspense master Ambler were written in 1939-1940 as Ambler, already a successful novelist ( A Coffin for Dimitrios ), awaited his call to military duty. Six ingenious detective short-shorts star a heel-clicking, umbrella-toting refugee ("Dr. Jan Czissar. Late Prague police. At your service") who infuriates the outclassed Mercer of Scotland Yard by being insufferably and invariably correct. In a preface, Ambler relates that the ideas for these tales came from a standard two-volume work on forensic medicine. Two suspense stories, however, beg for further development. In "The Army of the Shadows" an English surgeon driving in the Swiss Alps becomes stranded during a snow storm and then entangled in the intrigues of prewar anti-Nazis. Here Ambler expressed the soon-to-be-unpopular view that the enemy was not the German people but the Nazi tyranny. In "The Blood Bargain," salvaged from a failed novel, a corrupt Latin American tyrant uses subtle psychological tactics to gain his release from insurgents, then finds exile extremely dangerous.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mysterious Press
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0892962410
• ISBN 13: 9780892962419
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144