A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler

First published: 1939, in Great Britain as The Mask of Dimitrios (U. S. edition, 1939)

Type of work: Spy thriller

Time of work: 1922-1938

Locale: Istanbul, Athens, Sofia, Geneva, and Paris

Principal Characters:

• Charles Latimer, a former professor of political economy, now an author of detective novels
• Dimitrios Makropoulos, (also known as
• Talas,
• Taladis, and
• Rougemont, ), a spy assassin and drug dealer
• Colonel Haki, the head of the Turkish secret police
• Feilor Muishkin, an emigre Russian translator
• Dhris Mohammed, a black fig-picker
• N. Marukakis, a Greek journalist
• Madame Irana Preveza, a nightclub owner in Sofia
• Mr. Peters (Frederik Petersen), a drug dealer
• Wladyslaw Grodek, a professional spy
• Manus Visser, a drug dealer whose body is disguised as that of Dimitrios
• Bulic, a minor Yugoslav government official

The Novel

A Coffin for Dimitrios is a novel of obsession, first of the protagonist, Charles Latimer, and finally of the reader. It is a novel of a search as Latimer travels around the eastern Mediterranean in a journey of discovery, trying to locate the past of the man whose body he had seen lying in a Turkish morgue. It is a novel of betrayal as first one and then another of Dimitrios’ friends become his victims, finally ending as both Latimer and the reader discover their own betrayal at the hands of the author, Eric Ambler.

The novel opens in 1938 with Latimer, a lecturer in political economy who has just resigned his academic post for reasons of health and in order to concentrate on his career as an author of detective stories, vacationing in Istanbul, where at a party he meets Colonel Haki, the head of the Turkish secret police. Haki, an inveterate reader of romans policiers, offers to give Latimer the plot for his next book, and the following day, the men meet at Haki’s office, where the officer describes a conventional but totally useless story about a murder in the library of an English country house. In a moment of inspiration, Haki also offers to show Latimer the dossier of a real murderer whose body has been recently found floating in the Bosphorus. Spurred by Latimer’s interest, Haki tells the writer about Dimitrios from his first run-in with the Turkish police in 1922 until they found his waterlogged corpse a few days before. Latimer accompanies Haki to the morgue, where they view the body; as they leave, the Colonel remarks that he would like to have seen what Dimitrios saw and what death has prevented his lips from recounting. With these intriguing lines, Latimer is off and running toward an adventure that will take him from Turkey to Athens, on to Sofia and Geneva, and finally to Paris, where eventually he discovers the real ending of the life of Dimitrios. In the process, Latimer courses back over the years, tracing the life of his man from 1922 to the present moment of the novel, in 1938.

After examining the court files in Turkey which describe the first recorded crime of Dimitrios, that of murdering Sholem, a moneylender in Smyrna, in 1922, Latimer sets off for Athens to follow him through the Greek refugee camps caused by the Greco-Turkish War. The trail next leads to Sofia, where in 1923, Dimitrios, by then using the Turkish name of Taladis, was involved in an assassination attempt on the life of the leader of the Bulgarian Peasant Agrarian Party, Stambulsky. In Sofia, Latimer meets Madame Preveza, the first of the victims left in the wake of Dimitrios’ remarkable career. Although Dimitrios next escaped to Belgrade, Latimer is discouraged from going there by the mysterious Mr. Peters and instead sets forth for Geneva to interview a Mr. Grodek, who had hired Dimitrios to help him with some espionage work in Belgrade. There, in 1926, he posed as a German representative of an optical firm and blackmailed a minor government clerk, Bulic, into selling Yugoslav military secrets.

Dimitrios dropped out of sight until 1931, when he surfaced in Paris as the head of a large and well-organized drug ring. Latimer proceeds to the French capital, where he runs into the mysterious Mr. Peters, who proves to be another of Dimitrios’ victims, having been jailed when he turned over all the names of the members of his drug ring to the French police before eluding them. Peters fills in the rest of the details of Dimitrios’ life and reveals what the reader has already started to suspect—namely, that Dimitrios is still alive and that the body in Turkey was a plant to throw the authorities permanently off of his trail. In a finale worthy of a revenge tragedy, both Peters and Dimitrios, now posing as a successful French businessman, are killed in a shoot-out when Peters’ blackmail scheme against Dimitrios fails. Latimer walks away from the carnage without informing the police or taking the money, and the novel concludes with Latimer firmly reentrenched in his role as a writer about fictitious crimes and struggling to compose the plot of his next detective story.

The Characters

One of the engaging aspects of this story is that the character who most dominates the novel does not appear himself until near the end, and the reader is carried along in the belief, as is the protagonist Latimer, that Dimitrios is already dead. As a character, he embodies all those characteristics that have come to stand for the evildoers in spy fiction: deceit and ruthlessness, guile and resourcefulness. He is uncanny in his ability to elude the authorities and to disguise himself as various personae. The mercurial quality of his character and the flexibility of his values make him easily absorbed into any environment, and his lack of any consistent characteristics as an individual, except his cunning, make him particularly difficult to pursue, since without a context, either social, familial, or political, he becomes untraceable. He is the perfect existential man: alienated, quixotic, not bound by conventional morality, and utterly alone, both in his criminality and in his being.

Also of interest is the protagonist, Charles Latimer, because he is sufficiently gullible and sufficiently obsessed to abandon his life in order to follow the wanderings of Dimitrios. He is in search too, however, not only of the story of this incredible man but also, one suspects, of something else, a meaning or purpose, which he seems to lack at the beginning of the book. One realizes that he finds real-life crime, as would most of his readers, a frightening affair, and he retreats from life, with its violence and unpredictability and confusion, back into the manageable and secure world of his fiction. As Latimer notes early in the story, he feels as though he is no longer a professional during his search for Dimitrios and flees from his amateur status at the end into more familiar territory. As is often the case in detective fiction, Latimer is the eyes and ears of the tale, recording enough to keep the reader informed but with sufficient filtering to keep the reader interested and slightly off balance.

One of the riches of this work, as indeed of most of Ambler’s stories, is the luxuriance of the secondary characters. Unfortunately, the novel is old enough to have influenced the shape of spy fiction since World War II, and so some of the innovative aspects of the characters now seem overworked. Too many Peter Lorre films may prevent readers from fully appreciating the deftly drawn and memorable gallery of supporting figures in this novel. Colonel Haki is a suave and dangerous man whose smooth manners and bearing do not fully conceal the menace visible in the cast of his eyes. Irana Preveza is blowsy and vulnerable underneath but projects to the world a still stylish demeanor. Marukakis, a Greek journalist, is helpful and compassionate toward Latimer but worldly enough to keep him out of trouble. Grodek, the spy, is totally unprincipled and grandly amused at the fumbling lives of his fellowmen, who are so vulnerable to the venalities upon which he preys. Finally, there is Peters, also known as Petersen, who tries to outwit Dimitrios in one last attempt to best his master, and loses.

Such characters provide more than mere background atmosphere, as they would in a conventional spy thriller; they help to establish the sense of moral flux and confusion which distinguished the interwar years in Europe. Political assassination, drug smuggling, sexual decadence, casual murder for profit are all embodied in these figures, and they form a microcosm of a world doomed to destruction.

Critical Context

Eric Ambler was one of the originators of the spy novel genre, which has become increasingly popular since World War II through the fiction of Ian Fleming, John le Carre, Robert Ludlum, and others. Along with the Ashenden stories by W. Somerset Maugham and the early novels of John Buchan, Ambler’s books of the 1930’s established the limits and conventions of the espionage thriller. It is to his lasting credit that Ambler lavished on the genre a quality of writing and mind which early established an admirably high standard for such fiction.

Bibliography

Ambler, Eric. Here Lies: An Autobiography, 1985.

Ambrosetti, Ronald. “The World of Eric Ambler: From Detective to Spy,” in Dimensions of Detective Fiction, 1976.

Davis, Paxton. “The World We Live In: The Words of Eric Ambler,” in The Hollins Critic. VIII (February, 1971), pp. 1-11.

Jeffares, A. Norman. “Eric Ambler,” in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, 1985.

Lambert, Gavin. The Dangerous Edge, 1976.

Panek, LeRoy L. “Eric Ambler,” in The Special Branch: The British Spy Novel, 1890-1980, 1981.