Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Vintage (2002), Edition: 0, Paperback, 272 pages
Description
Vadassy was just another name on the guest list at the seedy Mediterranean Hotel until he was accused of spying. Then, suddenly, he was on everybody's list.
User reviews
LibraryThing member AnnieMod
Meet Josef Vadassy. He was born in Hungary but after the last changes in Europe, his birth place is now part of Yugoslavia. Hungary refuses to issue him a passport (as he is not really Hungarian); Yugoslavia will not renew his expired one (this unfortunate circumstance has a lot to do with his
And this is where the fun begins. Knowing that he is innocent but never done any detecting before (or even thought of doing it), Vadassy makes a mistake after a mistake and manages to walk from one comical situation into another - mainly because he does not understand why the police asks him to do some things and decides to be... creative. Somewhere along the lines, he gets attacked, a lot of people tell him their life stories and the reality of the pre-war Europe is starting to show up. This is where Ambler's strong suit is - he is a keen observer of the times and a lot of what he predicts in his novels actually happens in a few years. "Epitaph for a Spy" does not have as many observations on the state of affairs as "The Mask of Dimitrios" but considering that it is written before 1939, some of these observations are chilling. And the people that are staying at the hotel cannot be more different from each other - an English couple, American brother and sister, a Swiss Family, a German man and a few French guys (we are in France after all). Slowly, very slowly, secrets start getting revealed and the real stories start emerging. Our poor Vadassy start getting more and more confused - and this leads to even more interesting situations.
The book is amusing and a spy is involved (so it is technically a spy book) - in a way the spy is a main character. But it is mainly about a man that has nothing left being faced with the possibility to be thrown in jail for something he had not done... and deciding to do anything needed to make sure that this does not happen. At the end of the novel, when the police puts their cards on the table, the whole story becomes even funnier - because Ambler had played masterfully on misunderstandings that lead to unexpected results and acts based on the partial information that a character had at the time.
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family getting into troubles and being shot). So as a man of no land, he is trying to live in Europe - and at the time the novel opens, he had found himself a place as a teacher of languages in Paris. Except that it is the vacation so he is away from the capital - in Nice and Toulon. His most prized possession is a camera and when he arrives in the nice cozy hotel where he had decided to spend the last few days of his vacation, he brings his film to be developed at the chemist. And suddenly he is arrested for espionage - because of some pictures on his film - pictures he knows he had not made. The police gives him a choice and a few hours later, our hero is back at the hotel, trying to help the police to figure out how the pictures ended up on his film. And this is where the fun begins. Knowing that he is innocent but never done any detecting before (or even thought of doing it), Vadassy makes a mistake after a mistake and manages to walk from one comical situation into another - mainly because he does not understand why the police asks him to do some things and decides to be... creative. Somewhere along the lines, he gets attacked, a lot of people tell him their life stories and the reality of the pre-war Europe is starting to show up. This is where Ambler's strong suit is - he is a keen observer of the times and a lot of what he predicts in his novels actually happens in a few years. "Epitaph for a Spy" does not have as many observations on the state of affairs as "The Mask of Dimitrios" but considering that it is written before 1939, some of these observations are chilling. And the people that are staying at the hotel cannot be more different from each other - an English couple, American brother and sister, a Swiss Family, a German man and a few French guys (we are in France after all). Slowly, very slowly, secrets start getting revealed and the real stories start emerging. Our poor Vadassy start getting more and more confused - and this leads to even more interesting situations.
The book is amusing and a spy is involved (so it is technically a spy book) - in a way the spy is a main character. But it is mainly about a man that has nothing left being faced with the possibility to be thrown in jail for something he had not done... and deciding to do anything needed to make sure that this does not happen. At the end of the novel, when the police puts their cards on the table, the whole story becomes even funnier - because Ambler had played masterfully on misunderstandings that lead to unexpected results and acts based on the partial information that a character had at the time.
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LibraryThing member BibliophileBubba
Ambler is a master of the spy novel, even arguably it's originator. Not as notable a success as his iconic "A Coffin for Demetrios," in this book Ambler still delivers a thrilling "wrongly-suspected man" story (a favorite sub-genre of mine!) in a very spare less-than-300 pages. Unlike so many over
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long, current-day works that desperately need an editor with a few sharp red pencils, Ambler tells here a remarkably exciting, deeply atmospheric and engaging story without a lot of filler. It's very evocative of Alan Furst's best work; I suspect Furst must consider Ambler an influence. Show Less
LibraryThing member clfisha
Written just before the 2nd world war and playing with spy conventions at the time, Eric Ambler has written a great tale of paranoia and mystery. Instead of a suave, sophisticated thriller we have a shy, introverted language teacher who is mistaken for a spy and thrust into a game of cat and mouse.
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It is this main character that sells the book, he is wonderfully portrayed and you really squirm along with him as he bumbles along trying to catch the spy. Of course you can join in too, every character has a secret so its fun to guess who as well. Ok it is not a book for lovers of the high octane thriller but it has that old world charm and a deep menace that a book in written in the 1930s brings. Show Less
LibraryThing member Larou
I was aware that Eric Ambler was an author of thrillers, but somehow I totally missed that he wrote spy novels. As it turns out, he not only did but it even was him and not, as I’d always assumed, John le Carré who first injected literary ambitions into the genre, and all later authors then
Having said that, Epitaph for a Spy is quite different from anything Le Carré (really the only author of spy novels I have read so far) was to do later: Ambler’s protagonist, Josef Vassady, is not a professional spy but gets involved in espionage through a mixture of accident and blackmail. And the reader soon (rather sooner than Vassaly himself) finds at that he is really, really bad at it – he does try hard, but bungles one amateurish attempt after the other. His task (or what he assumes to be his task) is to ferret out a spy among the handful of residents of a small hotel in a French seaside resort and as our protagonist conceives and spectacularly fails to execute one hare-brained scheme after another, quite a bit of hilarity ensues.
Epitaph for a Spy is mainly a comedy which draws its humour chiefly from the way Vassady attempts to apply plans he seems to not so much have come up with himself but snatched from a variety of James-Bond-like spy novels to what is at hear a realistic setting. Obviously (obviously, that is, for everyone buy Vassaly) this can`t work, and doesn’t and ends up being quite funny. We’re dealing with a parody of the spy novel genre then, and Ambler ridicules it by repeatedly showing how none of the common clichés of that genre would hold up if anyone actually tried them out.
But while the parody unfolds, it turns out that none of the hotel’s guest, who seemed a bit bizarre but overall quite charming, is quite what they claimed to be, that in fact some of them are quite sinister figures and as the novel progresses its canny humour takes on an increasingly creepy undertone.
The novel was first published in 1938 and Ambler obviously was very aware of what was going on politically at the time and very critical from what is clearly a very left-wing perspective. The introduction of my edition is quick to emphasise how he was not a communist, but that is pretty much a mandatory disclaimer (see most of the introductions to the novels by Sjöwall/Wahlöö) and personally I am inclined to think Ambler’s astonishing clearsightedness owes rather a lot to his political leanings.
However that may be, the longer the novel progresses, the more the political situation keeps seeping into its atmosphere which grows increasingly menacing even as the narrative retains its comical aspects. But even as the Vassady continues his bumbling Ambler raises the reader’s awareness that the novel’s protagonist does not act out of his own volition but is forced into playing a spy and that his situation is becoming more and more desperate as his target keeps eluding him. And we also learn some of the resort guests’ background stories some of which are also quite grim. And there is a twist at the end which come almost as an aside and is not even part of the main plot which is quite chilling and ends the novel on a very bleak outlook for the future. And I think it is precisely this balancing act between the comical and the menacing which makes Epitaph for a Spy remarkable – Ambler handles this very deftly and uses the increasing tension between those two elements to both drive his plot and create a unique atmosphere for his novel.
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built on his efforts.Having said that, Epitaph for a Spy is quite different from anything Le Carré (really the only author of spy novels I have read so far) was to do later: Ambler’s protagonist, Josef Vassady, is not a professional spy but gets involved in espionage through a mixture of accident and blackmail. And the reader soon (rather sooner than Vassaly himself) finds at that he is really, really bad at it – he does try hard, but bungles one amateurish attempt after the other. His task (or what he assumes to be his task) is to ferret out a spy among the handful of residents of a small hotel in a French seaside resort and as our protagonist conceives and spectacularly fails to execute one hare-brained scheme after another, quite a bit of hilarity ensues.
Epitaph for a Spy is mainly a comedy which draws its humour chiefly from the way Vassady attempts to apply plans he seems to not so much have come up with himself but snatched from a variety of James-Bond-like spy novels to what is at hear a realistic setting. Obviously (obviously, that is, for everyone buy Vassaly) this can`t work, and doesn’t and ends up being quite funny. We’re dealing with a parody of the spy novel genre then, and Ambler ridicules it by repeatedly showing how none of the common clichés of that genre would hold up if anyone actually tried them out.
But while the parody unfolds, it turns out that none of the hotel’s guest, who seemed a bit bizarre but overall quite charming, is quite what they claimed to be, that in fact some of them are quite sinister figures and as the novel progresses its canny humour takes on an increasingly creepy undertone.
The novel was first published in 1938 and Ambler obviously was very aware of what was going on politically at the time and very critical from what is clearly a very left-wing perspective. The introduction of my edition is quick to emphasise how he was not a communist, but that is pretty much a mandatory disclaimer (see most of the introductions to the novels by Sjöwall/Wahlöö) and personally I am inclined to think Ambler’s astonishing clearsightedness owes rather a lot to his political leanings.
However that may be, the longer the novel progresses, the more the political situation keeps seeping into its atmosphere which grows increasingly menacing even as the narrative retains its comical aspects. But even as the Vassady continues his bumbling Ambler raises the reader’s awareness that the novel’s protagonist does not act out of his own volition but is forced into playing a spy and that his situation is becoming more and more desperate as his target keeps eluding him. And we also learn some of the resort guests’ background stories some of which are also quite grim. And there is a twist at the end which come almost as an aside and is not even part of the main plot which is quite chilling and ends the novel on a very bleak outlook for the future. And I think it is precisely this balancing act between the comical and the menacing which makes Epitaph for a Spy remarkable – Ambler handles this very deftly and uses the increasing tension between those two elements to both drive his plot and create a unique atmosphere for his novel.
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LibraryThing member TedWitham
As in his other spy novels, Ambler places a naive man in the way of espionage and spies. Josef Vadassy, a stateless language teacher, is on holiday at a small hotel in the Riviera. THe police threaten him with deportation if he doesn't cooperate and help them find the spy. Vadassy decides the
He discovers the many stories that the guests at the Réserve, the small hotel where he is staying, but in the end the police ' arrest' him again and take him with them to make the arrest of the real spy.
His coperation may earn him French citizenship.
A good read.
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police request is stupid, and attempts his own investigation.He discovers the many stories that the guests at the Réserve, the small hotel where he is staying, but in the end the police ' arrest' him again and take him with them to make the arrest of the real spy.
His coperation may earn him French citizenship.
A good read.
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LibraryThing member annbury
This is set in Ambler's classic milieu, Europe just before the second world war, and it is about spies. It is, however, spy fiction at one remove -- the hapless protagonist, a stateless translator, is dragooned into espionage by the French police with the threat of deportation. His activities are
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set in a Riviera resort, not in the alleys of exotic capitals, and he is not good at what he does. It is (of course) wonderfully written, but I can't like it as much as I ought. The hero is easy to pity but hard to identify with, and the whole operation seems meaningless. Show Less
LibraryThing member leslie.98
I have a fondness for this sub-genre of spy novels - the type in which an innocent person gets caught up in some way with espionage and tries to muddle things out while unsure whom to trust. Ambler is one of the creators (if not the creator) of this sub-genre & the excellence of his books is
This novel, though published in the 1950s, is set during the 1930s. Thus tensions are high in Europe & an accusation of espionage is no light matter, especially for state-less Josef Vadassy with no embassy or consul to act on his behalf. One aspect I liked about this book is that while Vadassy triesto comply with the instructions he has been given by French Naval Intelligence, since it is his only hope of escape out this tangle , he is hopelessly inept at it! And he realizes that...
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witnessed by the number of authors who have followed in his footsteps. This novel, though published in the 1950s, is set during the 1930s. Thus tensions are high in Europe & an accusation of espionage is no light matter, especially for state-less Josef Vadassy with no embassy or consul to act on his behalf. One aspect I liked about this book is that while Vadassy tries
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LibraryThing member RonWelton
In Eric Ambler's Epitaph For a Spy Josef Vadassy finds himself in a precarious position. He has been arrested for espionage and, though he is innocent, the evidence against him appears to be rock solid. He has no legal standing. A Hungarian by birth and stateless by circumstances: "nowhere left for
Epitaph For a Spy is set just before WWII. Soon spies will reach into each hidden corner of the globe.
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me to go. Yugoslavia would arrest me. Hungary would not admit me. Neither would Germany or Italy." He can stay in France only at the sufferance of the Government. He has no choice when French Naval Intelligence operative, Michel Beghin, requires him to discover the real spy who has used a camera identical to Vadassy to photograph secret naval installations along the French coast where Josef is vacationing. There are twelve occupants listed by Beghin who are staying in the pension house with Vadassy. He is to determine which one owns the same camera as his. This will be difficult for Josef, who is reticent by nature, but he does have the advantage of speaking several languages. Epitaph For a Spy is set just before WWII. Soon spies will reach into each hidden corner of the globe.
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Subjects
Awards
Language
Original publication date
1938
Physical description
272 p.; 5.2 x 0.63 inches
ISBN
0375713247 / 9780375713248