Background to Danger by Eric Ambler

First published in 1937

Everywhere Kenton goes, he seems to have the misfortune of finding a dead body with a knife protruding from its back. The police believe Kenton is responsible for at least one of the deaths, so he is on the run. His only chance to prove his innocence lies in recovering the photographs that a stranger gave him while he was on a train to Austria -- photographs he no longer possesses. Unfortunately for Kenton, at least two adversaries are also determined to find the photographs. As Kenton makes his way from Nuremberg to Linz to Prague, a journey that becomes more desperate by the minute, he tries to puzzle out the relationships between the various parties who are after the photographs. Along the way, he attempts to anticipate their next moves, the better to survive the journey.

This formula -- an innocent man caught in a web of intrigue must use his wits to save himself while thwarting the evildoers -- is the sort of thing that Alfred Hitchcock loved to film (Background to Danger was, in fact, filmed in 1943, but by Raoul Walsh). Background to Danger has all the hallmarks of a black-and-white Hitchcock film: a brooding atmosphere, a strong sense of place, quirky characters, sharp dialog, and suspense that begins to build from the opening scene. Yet the plot wasn't formulaic when Eric Ambler wrote Background to Danger; Ambler is one of the formula's originators, and writers who subsequently followed the formula have rarely done it better than Ambler.

The plot (as we learn in the prologue, it all has to do with oil) is complex without becoming convoluted. Action scenes alternate with chapters that engage the intellect, producing a story that drives forward at a brisk pace without ever becoming mindless. Ambler didn't feel the need to bog down the text with unnecessary verbiage as have so many of his successors; the story is tight. This isn't Eric Ambler's best novel (my favorite so far is A Coffin for Dimitrios) but it is more entertaining than most of the thrillers written in more recent decades.

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