It is 1940 and Mr Graham, a quietly-spoken engineer and arms expert, has just finished high-level talks with the Turkish government. And now somebody wants him dead. The previous night three shots were fired at him as he stepped into his hotel room, so, terrified, he escapes in secret on a passenger steamer from Istanbul. As he journeys home - alongside, among others, an entrancing French dancer, an unkempt trader, a mysterious German doctor and a small, brutal man in a crumpled suit - he enters a nightmarish world where friend and foe are indistinguishable. Graham can try to run, but he may not be able to hide for much longer ...

Eric Ambler, born 100 years ago next month, mastered as a young man a genre still in its infancy. Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent” (1907) and John Buchan’s “The Thirty-Nine Steps” (1915) preceded his works, and compatriots Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham fashioned artful thrillers out of turbulent political times alongside him. But Ambler’s mix of swift pacing, believable protagonists and thrilling locales proved an untold influence on those who took up the spy-story pen in his wake. After all, when James Bond, in the film version of “From Russia With Love,” needed a book to read on a critical train trip, he chose an Eric Ambler novel—specifically, “A Coffin For Dimitrios,” which 70 years after its 1939 publication holds up as a startling, elegant masterpiece of espionage fiction.

Mr. Ambler, a worldly Englishman, is generally credited with having raised the thriller to the level of literature. He brought intellectual substance to the genre at a time when it often suffered from shortages of surprise, maturity, verisimilitude and literary skill. He did that by writing half a dozen eloquent novels that were published, and widely applauded, between 1936 and 1940.