Background to Danger

Eric Ambler's Background to Danger is another excellent political thriller, the story of an ordinary everyman who gets drawn into a criminal plot when he is asked by a fellow train passenger to carry money across the German border into Austria. Ambler’s striking realism, and his placement of the story in the middle of the real-world struggle between socialist and capitalist powers, gives the book more depth than virtually any of his espionage peers. And Ambler doesn’t allow his characters to fall into predictable good guy/bad guy roles, as for example the Soviet agents are some of the most sympathetic in the novel.