A Coffin for Dimitrios (The Mask of Dimitrios)

⚖The case for it

A mystery writer, intrigued by a murdered man, traces his life through European espionage and crime. Ambler used spy and crime conventions to portray 1930s Europe: Fascism, Communism, capitalism's violence, the moral ambiguity of survival. Graham Greene called Ambler the best thriller writer in the world.

— the canon

✕The case against

The structure is a man being told things: Latimer crosses Europe so that a series of informants can deliver monologues in hotel rooms, and the novelist-hero mostly nods. After two hundred pages of patient dossier-building, the finish is a conventional gunpoint scene the book had seemed too intelligent for. Ambler invented the thinking reader's thriller, and with it the genre's most durable flaw: research wearing a trench coat.

— the honest librarian