The Maras Affair By Eliot Reed (eric Ambler)
Using the pen name Eliot Reed, Eric Ambler wrote several of the best Hitchcockian
mysteries Hitchcock never filmed, but should have before he left England for fame and fortune in Hollywood. With The Maras Affair, Ambler wrote the best Hitchcockian political thriller Hitchcock never filmed.
Eric Ambler wrote A Coffin for Demetrios, one of the novels creating the modern international thriller genre. The Maras Affair tells an all-too human story in a fictional East European country behind the Iron Curtain.
Years before the Hungarian Revolution, Ambler speculates about how rebels could plot the overthrow of the oppressive government. It's typical of Ambler that, although the government clearly deserves to be overthrown, his rebels are presented by even their friends as fanatics who should have known better.
The top people are aging men who knew each other in better times (the World War 2 Resistance). The head of the secret police is an overweight, affable nice guy who fools nobody, but in the end is foiled by his own arrogance.
The hero is a Western journalist heading up his newspaper's local office. He's driven by his love for the beautiful daughter of a Resistance leader who believes too much in democracy to fit into the new postwar order.
The book's greatest flaw is that, so far as I can tell, Anna gives no sign of returning his love, until she has no reason to remain in the country and every reason to leave, so she's motivated to accept his offer to get her out.
It's the kind of relation which seems flat on paper but which, in the hands of a master directory (such as Hitchcock) could be communicated simply through the hot looks the woman gives the man. Old time directors knew how to do this, because censors didn't allow them to show explicit sexual relationships.
Another flaw, as I think on it, is that the leader is presented as a nice old guy just going along with the times. I don't know the history of every postwar East European leader, but I believe that most of them had a history of prewar communism.
World War 2 was not a war of democracy against tyranny. It was a war of democracies joining with communist tyranny to defeat Nazi and Japanese tyrannies.
I'm not being critical. We allied ourselves with the U.S.S.R. thanks to Hitler's erroneous belief that the Wehrmach could defeat the Red Army, because the oppressed peoples of the Soviet Union would welcome the opportunity to rise up against their communist rulers. As it turned out, most Soviet citizens decided they'd rather live under the monster they knew (Stalin) than to surrender to the German monster (Hitler).
Plus, the communist armies of Asia (Mao's in China and Ho Chi Minh's in Vietnam) were already fighting the Japanese.
So I'm not so sure of Ambler's cozy picture of anti-Nazi comrades in arms being sadly torn about by the commies. Many must have known during the war even as they worked together that it was a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" situation that would end upon the defeat of the common enemy.
The book's ending would have made an exciting movie sequence. In an ideal world, Hitchcock would have made this into a great film, possibly starring Gary Grant and Grace Kelly.
by: Richard Stooker
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