"But what happened to Dimitrios? How did the story end?"
Colonel Haki snapped his fingers. "Ah! I was waiting for you to ask that. I knew you would ask it. And my answer is this: it didn't end!"
As much as David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard appalled me as it detailed the greed, arrogance and machiavellianism of my own country, I do thank that book for teaching me truths that I would have otherwise easily avoided, and I also thank it for indirectly introducing me to a few 20th-century spy novel authors that I would have never otherwise read.
Just as with Ambler's Journey Into Fear this book has an "average" protagonist, with yet another proto-modern twist: he is a spy-detective novel writer who finds himself in an actual spy-detective situation. Thus the book explores the difference between how a novelist looks at reality and how reality actually is--particularly from the perspective of real world investigators who do for real what he only writes about.
And, again, this book teaches the reader more history: in this case it's a useful review of all the post-World War I chaos among Turkey, Greece, Armenia, Bulgaria and the Balkan republics. Remember, it was the major Versailles Treaty powers who divided up the world after the Great War and catastrophically interfered in all these countries: what followed was a tremendous amount of conflict and intrigue among Europe's smaller countries as everyone interfered in everyone's affairs. References in this novel to the 1923 coup d'état in Bulgaria and the murder of prime minister Aleksandar Stamboliyski was just one example of history I'd never heard of, and that sent me down a multi-hour Wikipedia rabbit hole to brush up.
I recommend A Coffin For Dimitrios more than Journey Into Fear. It carries more insights, and it's an interesting study of hyper-realism in the detective novel, as the main character, Latimer, discovers, with increasingly mortified humility, that reality and fiction are nothing alike, not even close:
"The situation in which a person, imagining fondly that he is in charge of his own destiny, is, in fact, the sport of circumstances beyond his control, is always fascinating. It is the essential element in most good theater from the Oedipus of Sophocles to East Lynne. When, however, that person is oneself and one is examining the situation in retrospect, the fascination becomes a trifle morbid. Thus, when Latimer used afterwards to look back upon those two days in Smyrna, it was not so much his ignorance of the part he was playing but the bliss which accompanied the ignorance that so appalled him. He had gone into the business believing his eyes to be wide open, whereas, actually, they had been tightly shut. That, no doubt, could not have been helped. The galling part was that he had failed for so long to perceive the fact. Of course, he did himself less than justice; but his self-esteem had been punctured; he had been transferred without his knowledge from the role of sophisticated, impersonal weigher of facts to that of active participator in a melodrama.
"Of the imminence of that humiliation, however, he had no inkling when, on the morning after his dinner with Muishkin, he sat down with a pencil and a notebook to arrange the material for his experiment in detection."
I can see now why so many later spy novelists (Ian Fleming, John Le Carré, among others) drew influence from Eric Ambler.
Notes:
* There's good writing here and amusing characterizations of people, from an era where physiognomy was still in vogue and people believed it revealed information about a person's nature. One quick example: "The Greek was a dark, lean man of middle-age with intelligent rather bulbous eyes and a way of bringing his lips together at the end of a sentence as though amazed at his own lack of discretion."
* Another example of good--and extraordinarily insightful--writing: "In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance." A quote to remember for this era as American civilization declines.
* Re: Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard again: ironically, the early architects of the CIA drew aspects of their "business model" and modes of operation from the prior era's spy novels, Eric Ambler and John Buchan among others. Yet another example of how life imitates art.
* Finally note this quote from Goethe, from Pandora: "Ach! warum, ihr Götter, ist unendlich, alles, alles, endlich unser Glück nur?" [Oh why, ye Gods, is everything infinite, everything, except our happiness?] One to file away.