Spy Maestro
Ambler, Eric
Books Briefly Spy Maestro THE CARE OF TIME by Eric Ambler Farrar Straus Giroux. 277 pp. $11.95. The old maestro of espionage (he prefers "thriller") is back, and as usual Eric Ambler has...
...Ambler is interested in the interplay of characters and wits, in a social context, and the result is superior entertainment...
...Zander "was not a survivor for whom the care of time was becoming hard to ignore...
...The story line moves from America to Italy, where Halliday becomes involved with a sinister manipulator of many aliases, currently known as Zander, who is the target of an international terrorist group...
...Zander is acting as middleman for a Persian Gulf sheik who wants to lease territory to NATO as a military base in return for letting him run nerve-gas tests on human beings...
...Halliday and Zander, with some NATO types in the wings, meet the sheik in a house above an abandoned silver mine in Austria, a weird encounter that exposes the sheik's dubious sanity and ends in a frenetic chase for freedom...
...Ambler begins with a mysterious offer of $50,000 to a free-lance writer, Robert Halliday, to write a history of terrorism based on the journals of a Nineteenth Century Russian anarchist...
...The old maestro of espionage (he prefers "thriller") is back, and as usual Eric Ambler has something to say about the state of the world, this time terrorism and chemical warfare...
...There are deaths, but murder is not at issue...
...He had started to falter...
...Halliday's initial dislike of Zander slowly turns to sympathy as he realizes that Zander's luck and self-confidence are running out...
...The Care of Time, unsurprisingly, has a complex plot, or, more accurately, a succession of plots...
Vol. 45 • December 1981 • No. 12
