Eric Ambler

Sure, I know.

You've been reading too much Eric Ambler and John Buck and spies and stuff.

Goodbye, Mr. Rogers.

Goodbye.

You have 39 Steps, a classic train chase.

You've got Eric Ambler on Common Danger.

You've got...

And I think we have avoided the error today, but you do have that classic James Bond moment of...

Now, get in the car and keep your mouth shut.

The author Eric Ambler wrote, The important thing to know about an assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.

While John now knows who his employer is, we will have to wait to find out when I return with Act 3 shortly.

Also in our first season, we introduced the haunting series, The Saga of Fred, which tells the story of Frederick Washington Davis, a poor lost ghost taken in by the Peters.

I mean, I had my genre years as a reader and I read copiously books.

in you know fillers and suspense i don't do that too much anymore but you know everyone from eric ambler and raymond chandler and you know dashiell habit to you know boris akunin the russian writer and andre kirkhoff the ukrainian and then people like john brujette and and Michael Connelly and Tony Hillerman was a big fan.

Yes, Tony Hillerman.

And

Do you know who he is training right alongside?

Eric Ambler.

The legendary Eric Ambler.

I mean, you have two absolute titans of the British thriller genre doing their basic military training side by side in the mud.

It's

Oh, no, we'd better put that another way.

But while I mull a subtitle for this oriental tapestry, find yourself a copy of something by Eric Ambler or E. Phillips Oppenheim and bone up on the ground rules of international intrigue.

Ooh, international? Ooh, yes.

The next 39 steps you hear will be me walking up to the door in my black Homburg in velvet color with my pockets bulging with plans for submarines, supersonic airplanes, and secret fortifications, and my tongue awag with a report which will echo around the embassies of the world as...

Oh, no, we better put that another way.

But while I mull a subtitle for this Oriental tapestry, find yourself a copy of something by Eric Ambler or E. Phillips Oppenheim, and bone up on the ground rules of international intrigue.

Ooh, international?

Ooh, yes.

And the reality is, when you look at it, that there's an awful lot of the time when spy films are actually leading the way.

I think, for instance, if you take the mood of those 60s movies, things like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, The Ipcris File, and all of that, I bet you more writers writing books in the 70s and 80s were influenced by that film image of Spy than they were actually influenced by the earlier books.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah.

Some of the earliest pioneers, going back to the very beginning of film, were actually women, and they were writing it, they were directing it, and they were starring in it.

And of course, that didn't happen with the spy book.

It's way into the 60s before you start getting some prominent women writers coming through.

I'm going to talk about one of the movies that has a very prominent woman spy in it that's a very old one that I'll get to it a little bit later.