The Light of Day
by Eric Ambler
Summary
Arthur Abdel Simpson is one of the great disreputable narrators in the language: half English, half Egyptian, all grievance, a Cairo born hustler working the Athens airport with a stolen guidebook patter, part time pornographer, full time self justifier, whose account of his own career is a masterpiece of injured innocence with the facts showing through. He picks the wrong mark: caught going through the wallet of a traveller named Harper, he is blackmailed, with professional smoothness, into driving a Lincoln across the border into Turkey, papers in the door panels being the least of what he suspects.
At the border the Turkish security police find what is actually in the doors, arms, grenades, and Simpson exits the frying pan into a second blackmail: spy on Harper's crew for Turkish intelligence or rot. So the wretched Arthur becomes a double agent in a villa on the Bosphorus, fetching, eavesdropping, inflating his reports, terrified in two directions, while slowly assembling what the reader guesses ahead of him, that the crew's target is not political at all: it is the Topkapi Palace treasury, and the job is the jewel robbery of the century, planned to the minute, needing only a driver.
Ambler runs the heist with full technical relish, but the book belongs to Simpson's voice, wheedling, cowardly, irresistible, the little man of the thrillers finally given the microphone.
Around two hundred and eighty pages.
Best for readers who want the caper novel narrated by its most unreliable participant, comedy and tradecraft in perfect proportion.
Historical Context & Significance
The Light of Day won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1964, fresh American recognition for Eric Ambler, who had remade the thriller twice: the late thirties novels, The Mask of Dimitrios above all, had replaced clubland heroes with frightened ordinary men in a real, corrupt Europe, effectively inventing the modern espionage novel le Carré would inherit, and this later, sunnier masterpiece showed the same machinery run for comedy.
Jules Dassin filmed it in 1964 as Topkapi, the heist rendered as glamorous caper, and Peter Ustinov's Arthur Simpson won the Academy Award for supporting actor, the Oscar going, fittingly, to the sweaty little man rather than the thieves. The film's suspended from the ceiling robbery became one of cinema's celebrated set pieces.
Ambler brought Simpson back in a sequel, and the character's DNA, the shabby narrator conscripted by events, runs through the comic thriller ever since; Britain's Diamond Dagger followed in 1986.