ERIC AMBLER

When the subject of masters in the spy-fiction category, one name at the top of anyone's list is Eric Ambler. Born to a family of puppeteers, he tried for a while in his young adulthood to train as an engineer but the entertainment world had too strong a hold and he was soon writing plays and stories. In his mid-20s he earned a living writing copy for an advertising agency in London but grew tired of that and moved to Paris for a change. It was there he met his first wife. Ambler was fanatically anti-fascist and rebelling from what he perceived as capitalistic copitualation, he turned to communism. When Hitler and Stalin signed their pact, however, his attraction to communism ended for good. Mr. Ambler served in the military during WWII, entering as an enlisted man but getting a commission and eventually leaving as a Lieutenant-Colonel. His specialty was film work and after the war, rather than returning to book writing, he stayed in the film business for a long while. Eventually, though, he would return to the novel writing at which he was so incredibly good.