Eric Ambler's Judgment On Deltchev

reviewed Pearce Hansen

A British playwright travels to an Eastern European dictatorship, recruited to cover the ‘kangaroo court’ trial of that country’s former Prime Minister. Not a professional journalist, a stranger to the country, and smugly ensconced within his own bourgeois worldview, our hero is totally unprepared for the denouement that follows . . .

Graham Greene himself has acknowledged Eric Ambler as a master of the thriller. JUDGMENT ON DELTCHEV (while not usually counted among Ambler’s best work) is a perfect example of just what separates his novels from the rest of the pack.

The typical hero of an Ambler novel is an Everyman, an Average Joe – not a Rambo or Einstein in the lot – and JUDGMENT ON DELTCHEV is no exception. Although our hero is a keen observer of his surroundings, and (he thinks) a fairly astute judge & student of human character & nature, the certainties of his preconceptions quickly turn out to be potentially fatal liabilities in JUDGMENT ON DELTCHEV, because, (as in all Ambler’s work) it seems someone has changed all the rules while our hero wasn’t looking, and were not polite enough to let him know.

THAT’S Ambler’s specialty, the banal initial veneer of pedestrian detail that lulls the reader to sleep, that lets you think you know just what’s going on and just where you stand in the scheme of things – but then the human darkness beneath bubbles through a weak point in the facade, and you’re running for your life through a distorted nightmare parody of a world you thought you understood.

In JUDGMENT ON DELTCHEV, as in all other Ambler novels, no one is who or what they seem, all is deception, and no event can be taken at face value. The only certainty in Ambler’s universe is that a single misstep, even if made by a clueless innocent, can have dire (and often fatal) consequences. In the world of Eric Ambler, the lightest conversation about the most trivial details can actually be a frantic exercise in mutual deception, with death as the penalty for failure to convince.

Besides the pretence of banality, Ambler also depends on plot twists that rival the agility of a mountain goat escaping from a predator, and so any review risks choosing between either frustrating vagueness, or of spoiling the seemingly endless parade of nasty surprises. Suffice it to say that, in JUDGMENT ON DELTCHEV, it becomes clear at the end that the hero is not actually the hero, but that even the noblest deeds can be muddled by moral ambiguity, or possibly even inspired by delusions of the most pathetic nature.

Eric Ambler WAS a master, and JUDGMENT ON DELTCHEV is a worthy minor gem, an example of his work worth reading for its sheer noir sensibility, or to savor Ambler’s techniques of suspense. I highly recommend it, and him.

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Copyright © 2004 Pearce Hansen

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Pearce Hansen bio
Born in SF in the 50s into a train wreck of a family, the subject under discussion came up in Oakland in the 70s and then traveled widely, misspending his youth careening from one terror-in-retrospect abortive learning experience to the next. Cab driver, bouncer, kick boxer, Marine: all the stereotypical noir writer's breeding grounds apply here. Has seen most of the continents, and is not nearly as dysfunctional as his writing might seem to imply. Street Raised will be published by PointBlank Press next year.
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