Journey into Fear by Eric Ambler

First published: 1940

Type of work: Suspense

Time of work: January, 1940 (early in World War II)

Locale: Istanbul, Athens, and Genoa

Principal Characters:

• Graham, the protagonist, an English engineer
• Josette, a dancer
• Banat, a Romanian assassin
• Kuvetli, a Turkish agent who is traveling as a business representative
• Mathis, a French Socialist
• Moeller, (alias
• Haller, ), a German agent

The Novel

The action of Journey into Fear occurs in Istanbul, on a voyage from there to Genoa, and in Italy during the day the protagonist, Graham, an English engineer, arrives there. In the early months of World War II, Graham has been sent to Turkey to arrange for the rearming of Turkish warships. The information he has acquired will be carried to England in his head, so the Germans, to delay Anglo-Turkish naval cooperation, must try to stop him. When he is almost killed by a man he later identifies as Banat, a German agent under the control of the Gestapo agent Moeller, the Turkish Secret Police put him on a small Italian steamer which will carry him to Genoa, where he will take a train to Paris.

On the ship he meets Josette, a French dancer; Kuvetli, a Turkish business representative; Haller, a German archaeologist; and Mathis, a Frenchman who constantly irritates his aristocratic wife with his arguments for socialism. The ship sails first to Piraeus. Graham tours Athens, and when he returns to the ship the man he knows as Banat has come on board. Graham confides in Josette, for whom, in spite of her husband, he is developing romantic feelings, and he feels secure because he has a revolver in his cabin. The gun is stolen, however, and that night, when Graham returns to his cabin, Haller, who is actually the Gestapo agent Moeller, is there. Moeller suggests that since the Germans only want to delay the rearming of the Turkish warships for six weeks, Graham need only take a “rest cure” in Italy for that time as their guest.

When Kuvetli informs Graham that he is a Turkish agent, sent along to protect him, they hatch a plan for Graham’s escape. Kuvetli is killed, however, and Graham must confide in Mathis, the Frenchman, who lends him his own pistol.

Moeller and Banat take Graham in a car into the country beyond Genoa, and when it stops, Graham is informed that he is to be killed. He shoots Banat, leaps from the car, and shoots into the gas tank. The car explodes, and Graham gets back to Genoa, where the Turkish consulate, warned by Mathis, helps him get a train to Paris. On the train he meets Josette, rejects her husband’s offer of renting her to him for a weekend in Paris, and returns the pistol to Mathis.

The Characters

Journey into Fear is essentially an action novel designed to create suspense. Eric Ambler makes Graham an ordinary man to make it easier for the reader to identify with him. Like any other ordinary man, he is unwilling to believe that his situation is as dangerous as it is. At the same time, Ambler makes it clear that Graham is a rather cold person, uncommitted to anyone. He and his wife married only as a matter of convenience, and Graham has got through life by standing aside from people and from events, an observer rather than a participant in the real problems of the world.

It is only when Banat boards the ship in Piraeus that Graham realizes how terrifying his situation is. Yet while Ambler is primarily concerned with events which build Graham’s terror and are designed to carry the reader along, he also makes his characters believable. They are not fully rounded, but neither are they the kind of cutout figures who sometimes populate spy novels. Ambler’s method is not to get inside his characters to show their complexity but to present them to the reader as persons who are not what they seem to be.

Josette, for example, appears first as a sophisticated, though rather weary, woman of the world, and Graham himself realizes that she is playing a number of roles, shifting from one to another like a dancer gliding through the movements of a dance. Later, she seems truly concerned with Graham’s predicament, but she also seems to be less concerned with his welfare than with the lucrative arrangements she intends to establish in Paris with him if she can help to save his life. Finally, on the train, she reveals herself as a businesswoman whose deal has fallen through.

Mathis tells Graham that he became a Socialist during World War I, when he learned that a French official had ordered that iron mines captured by the Germans not be bombed, because he owned them. At the same time, he seems to be less concerned with the usual left-wing social concerns than with threatening to spout socialism in public as a means of keeping his conservative wife in line.

Mathis and Josette exemplify Ambler’s method of creating characters who are not what they appear to be. Kuvetli seems to be an inconspicuous little man traveling as a salesman, but he is actually a secret agent and a devoted Turkish patriot of considerable courage who dies in the service of his country.Moeller pretends to be Haller, a distinguished German archaeologist, and at first he seems very much a man of ideas altogether too civilized to care anything for the usual antagonisms of people whose countries are at war. Actually, he has taken over the passport and identity of the real Haller, even mastering a detailed knowledge of ancient history to make the deception work, and he is a very calculating Gestapo agent who believes in nothing but the murderous ideology of the Nazis.

Ambler, in other words, is not concerned with characterization in the usual sense. That would get in the way of the action of the novel, which must be fairly rapid to heighten the suspense which is the novel’s purpose. Journey Into Fear, after all, fits the requirements of the genre of the novel of intrigue, the modern version of which Ambler helped to create.

Critical Context

Ambler’s first novels of intrigue expressed his criticism of the international bankers and armaments manufacturers who he believed in the 1930’s were responsible for international conflict. The evils faced by his protagonists were the greed and social irresponsibility of international economic forces, served by agents who were willing to commit any crime for the success of their employers. By the time Ambler wrote Journey into Fear, he was no longer convinced that the world’s ills could be so easily explained. Here the evil is Fascism, and the enemy of his protagonist is Nazi Germany, represented by agents who just as ruthlessly serve a murderous state bent on domination of the world. When Ambler returned to writing novels of intrigue after World War II, they were less sensational than his early work and more despairing. Journey into Fear stands as one of Ambler’s finest achievements in espionage fiction because it goes beyond the often simplistic political vision of his earliest novels while preserving the positive, even moral, attitude of those works.

At the same time, if the novel adheres to the requirements of the novel of intrigue, it goes far beyond that genre’s limitations. It is written in a style that is appropriately spare, and it goes as far in characterization as it can in a work which depends for its success on action and suspense.

Bibliography

Eames, Hugh. Sleuths, Inc.: Studies of Problem Solvers, 1978.

Lambert, Gavin. The Dangerous Edge, 1976.

Landrum, Larry, and Pat Browne, eds. Dimensions of Detective Fiction, 1976.

Panek, LeRoy L. The Special Branch: The British Spy Novel, 1890-1980, 1981.