Cause for Alarm in Milan

Cause for Alarm

Eric Ambler

1938

1. It turns out that the American commie agent's "sister" really IS her sister, as far as I can tell. And that's not even the craziest left turn in "Cause for Alarm," Eric Ambler's fourth spy novel.

2. She and her brother are both multilingual American Soviet agents living in Milan. They share a very modest apartment with scavenged furniture in which each room has a foldaway bed. They're married to the cause, I guess. Which is not really the USSR, but International Socialism and Anti-Fascism.

4. Good thing it's Internationalism and not Russia, because Ambler wrote this in 1937, published it in 1938, then saw the USSR sign a nonaggression pact with the Axis in 1940. Harsh toke.

5. Neither of these Americans talk like other 1930s Americans. I have extensive and very personal experience with Ginger Rogers and the Marx Brothers, so I know whereof I speak.

5. Eric Ambler's next novel, "Coffin for Dimitrios," (in Greece this time) far exceeds this effort. Since you're going to read that one instead, I'll spoil the highlight to "Cause for Alarm": Our heroes escape by humming the Worker's Anthem "Bandiera Rossa" ("Red Flag") to signal their allyship to their would-be guard.

6. The narrator's fiancee back home in England won't "give up being a very promising surgeon to become a second-rate housekeeper." The shady Nazi-Yugoslav spy wears makeup and employs a mincing manservant who burns incense, despite the wife's wishes.

7. The gold dust of "Cause for Alarm" is hidden in its details.. The trouble with the novel is the part that isn't the details: pages 150-260.