"The Mask of Dimitrios" - The character of Dimitrios

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Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: keine, University of Leipzig (Institut für Anglistik), course: Spy Novels, language: English, abstract: Eric Clifford Ambler was born in 1909. His parents were very creative in earning money: they ran a string puppet-show (Ambler 1986, p. 61). Every now and then, they performed their show in public and were even able to gain quite a reputation. Little Eric Ambler was interested in reading mystery stories and started to spend his time on chemical experiments in a friend's garage (Ambler 1986, p. 93) to find out how things work. Eric Ambler took up a job in an advertising agency where he kept on writing plays and his first novel The Comedian, which was never completed. (Ambler 1986, p. 143 et seq.) A very good friend of Ambler encouraged him to write mystery stories just as Somerset Maugham (Ambler 1986, p. 199), which he liked to read as well. In the following two years, Ambler wrote The Dark Frontier (1936) and Uncommon Danger (1937). The young man quit his job at the advertising agency and now worked as an author in fulltime (Ambler 1986, p. 211). He travelled a lot - to France, Spain and the USA, where he got to know his future wife Louise Crombie (Ambler 1986, p. 242). Ambler joined the army and soon became a screenwriter for educational films for the army film unit (Ambler 1986, p. 276 et seq.). After World War ll, Ambler worked on films about civilian professions and everyday things which might have been changed during the war to give former soldiers a certain security back in the civilian life: A British Diary supplied this information (Ambler 1986, p. 352f.). Writing novels again turned out to be difficult, since Ambler was not used to work with concentration for a longer period anymore. He himself had changed over the years and needed to find out what to write next. (Ambler 1986, p. 361) Ambler also kept on writing screenplays and even received an Academy Award nomination in 1953 for The Cruel Sea .He died in 1998 in Switzerland. The Mask of Dimitrios was written in 1939. In the novel, Ambler perpetuated to create another kind of criminal - one with credibility and realistic features. The reader does not 'see' Dimitrios until the end of the novel, but Charles Latimer, who writes detective stories, decides to research the bad guy's life, which puts him in danger and tests his mettle. On the following pages, Dimitrios' life is depicted and parallels are shown to a real life criminal named Basil Zaharoff. Moreover, important themes of the spy novel such as internationalism and crime by itself are explored.