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Cause for Alarm

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Nicky Marlow needs a job. He's engaged to be married and the employment market in Britain in 1937 is pretty slim. So when his fiancée points out the position with an English armaments manufacturer in Italy, he jumps at the chance. Soon after he arrives, however, he learns the sinister truth about his predecessor's departure and finds himself courted by two agents with dangerously different agendas. In the process, Marlow realizes that it's not so simple just to do the job he's paid for - not in fascist Italy, on the eve of a world war.

© Eric Ambler 1939 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

 Classics Espionage Spies & Politics Thriller & Suspense Fiction Suspense War
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The plot itself is nothing complex or even very interesting but the writing is excellent and the ideas are engaging

Cerebral Thriller

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Eric Ambler is the first modern spy novelist, on which others have followed. Ambler's protagonists are not suave and sophisticated like Bond, or intelligent and discerning as with Smiley, but rather ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances.

In Cause For Alarm, engineer Nicky Marlow - naive and foolish - is the only ideal candidate for a job in an English armaments manufacturer in Italy. Nicky accepts the position and travels to Milan, only to be hoodwinked and thrust into espionage.
The central plot ends too quickly for my liking. Dangerously ignorant, he relies on others to rescue him, and it's a race to elude the authorities and escape Italy. The episode with the professor and his daughter, seems overly long and oddly escapist from the story. Perhaps Ambler was describing his view of war as madness - which it is.

Not my favourite novel by Ambler, although the narration is good, and carries the audio book through.

Cause for alarm!

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I originally read this as a young teenager. It was an enjoyable read then & is an excellent listen now & very well narrated.

Excellent book

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This is typical Eric Ambler, right up to a bizarre chapter towards the end about perpetual motion....

Fine, right up to the perpetual motion chapter....

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This is one of the two books by Ambler which feature Soviet spies as heroes. The intention, I guess, was to point out the relative complicity of the British with the Fascist governments of the time. Although the hapless anti-hero Marlow and his Soviet protectors seem to benefit from an extraordinary run of good luck as they make their escape from Italy, the story is still good escapist fun. The performance is impeccable.

Atmospheric 1930s spy thriller

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