Epitaph for a Spy [antikvár]

Introduction I remember the way Eric Ambler described what he had set out to do with the genre of spy fiction in the mid 1930s. He had decided to do a job' on it. The slang was taken firom the world of advertising in which Ambler was employed at this time. He had handled the Exlax account. 'Doing a job' on Exlax would have meant taking the product and completely rethinking its image. At the time, the slogan for this laxative chocolate was 'Exlax, for incomplete elimination.' This was supposed to imply that people with unsatisfactory, incomplete bowel movements would benefit from a dose of this product. The company Ambler worked for did some research on the effectiveness of the slogan, and discovered that most users thought that 'incomplete elimination' was some kind of sexual dysfunction. Somehow (I forget how) their substitute slogan and campaign was designed to correct the misapprehension. Today we would say that Ambler was responsible for rebranding Exlax. The job he did on the spy novel - this is the way he described it years later, in old age, when I interviewed him at his home in Switzerland - was to take a generally disprized and trashy genre and make it a thing of some quality. He wasn't quite the first person to do this. Somerset Maugham had published Ashenden in 1928, a collection of stories reflecting his own experiences as a British spy, also in Switzerland, during the First World War. Maugham invented the spy-master who is referred to by a single initial (in his case, 'R.'). He also invented something John le Carré later brought to a fine art (and perhaps took beyond a fine art into mannerism): a melancholy but sweet prevailing tone. The loneliness