subject: Tender To Danger By Eliot Reed (eric Ambler) [print this page] Eric Ambler was an old school espionage writer who sometimes wrote under the penname Eliot Reed.
This one reads much like an early Hitchcock movie. It's got that English understated feel. It begins, like a typical Hitchcock movie, with a hero innocently becoming involved in an international intrique when weather grounds his airplane and he's forced to room with a mysterious Yugoslav who disappears during the night. It ends with action in an isolated, abandoned British windmill.
Frankly, I think it'd be a lot better if Hitchcock had simply made it into a movie, than it is to read.
The emotional tone is very dry and laid back. The mystery of why dangerous men are looking for the small tender ship is revealed in the last chapter, after the end of the action. The modern style would have dramatized the incident and let us know much earlier what was at stake.
And to tell the truth, although we can understand why the German soldiers want to possess the gold, it's not so exciting and romantic as many more of the post-World War 2 suspense novels.
The hero, although an eye doctor who's spent three years abroad helping people recover from the war, too often acts likes an idiot, ignoring the plain danger.
He's so aggravated by the police that he fails to give them critical information, and sometimes simply wants to spite them and show them he knows better, like a little kid.
And late in the book he still goes through periods of denial, despite having been followed and even after his apartment is thoroughly searched. He acts like he's spent his life in kindergarten despite having seen the world following the largest war in history.
When he finally comes to grip with the possibility that the young woman in the story could be in danger and he'd be responsible for failing to warn her, it's good that he feels upset and guilty, because he would be.
And one small part of it strikes me as poor conceived. The Yugoslav man hides an envelope under the carpet of his hotel room, and it turns out to be a guide book. Maybe those books are a lot thicker now than they were then, but it'd have to be very thin not to show up as an edge in the carpet. I get the impression Ambler thought the idea sounded good, but didn't actually ever try sticking a guidebook under a carpet himself, or he'd realize it's not a good hiding place for guide books, only for dust.
And it's peculiar and too convenient that this doctor just happens to have a friend who used to work for British intelligence.
Unfortunately, I can recommend this book only if you can visualize it as an early Hitchcock movie while you're reading it. I'm sure the master would have turned the mudlands around the windmill into brilliant cinema, emphasizing its loneliness.
And we would have cheered the timely arrival of the police, who weren't so stupid after all. And he would have communicated more electricity between the doctor and the young heiress.
