THRILLER OF THE YEAR

Southland Times, Issue 23954, 21 October 1939, Page 10

THRILLER OF THE YEAR

THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS.. By Eric Ambler. Hodder and Stoughton, , London, through W. S. Smart, Syd- ' ney. Price 7/6. Mr Ambler’s earlier books, “Epitaph For a Spy” and “Cause For Alarm,” marked him as one of the best living thriller writers. “The Mask of Dimitrios” will increase his reputation. It is a highly original book, admirably written. It tells how a university professor who has taken to writing detective stories is shown, in the morgue at Istanbul, a corpse which a Turkish police officer tells him is that of Dimitrios—one of Europe’s worst rogues, a

man who committed murder in Smyrna in 1922 and was afterwards engaged in criminal and political activities in Sofia, Adrianople, Belgrade and Paris. Mr Ambler’s hero, Charles Latimer, is fascinated by the outline of Dimitrios’s criminal careen, and is tempted to trace it back, step by step, as an exercise in detection. He follows a cold scent; but one or two strokes of luck put him on the trail of his man, and gradually the story of Dimitrios is unfolded. Not very exciting? Mr Ambler makes it exciting. Latimer soon' finds that someone else is engaged in the same task. He is forced to collaborate with the seedy “Mr Peters,” who quotes reams of “self-help,” and together they follow the trail to a room in a Paris house from which only one of them emerges. The climax of this story is Mr Ambler’s best yet; its inevitability can be felt through the whole book. “The Mask of Dimitrios” is, by a long way, the best,“straight” thriller of the year.