Books Acquired:
A Coffin for Dimitrios, Eric Ambler
Epitaph for a Spy, Eric Ambler

Books Offloaded:
A Coffin for Dimitrios, Eric Ambler
Journey into Fear, Eric Ambler

Progress Made:
Epitaph for a Spy, Eric Ambler
A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick
JOB: A Comedy of Justice Robert A. Heinlein
David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God Peter Ormerod

Books Finished:
A Coffin for Dimitrios, Eric Ambler
The Undying Fire, H.G. Wells

Only recently, at the ripe old age of whatever I am now, have I realized that it’s important for me to always be reading something fun, in addition to whatever else I might be reading for some supposedly high-minded reason. Because if reading becomes a chore I don’t read, and when I don’t read I’m a different person, a lesser person

So currently I am in the midst of devouring the works of Eric Clifford Ambler OBE (28 June 1909 – 23 October 1998), which occupy a sweet spot between lowbrow (suspense-driven potboiler) and highbrow (sophisticated European repartee). A Coffin for Dimitrios was dispatched in short order and I would have gone straight into Epitaph for a Spy, except that it had not yet arrived in the post.

Thus it came to pass that, skimming through the shelves at Cecil’s house, I came across Heinlein’s JOB, a later work that I had never tackled previously. Since I had just finished The Undying Fire, which is based on the biblical story of Job, this seemed to make sense. (Fire itself, after an absorbing ramble through philosophies of all stripes, petered out in a giddy happy ending that would embarrass any musical comedy.)

At first JOB was exactly the book I was looking for: action-packed and mysterious, with RAH pulling the rug out from under you every so often by shifting into a new universe. Occasionally it slipped into that folksy bordering on cutesy tone that is his bugaboo, but on the whole I was Entertained and moving along smartly.

Then, about 150 pages in, he pulled the rug again by revealing that the narrator and protagonist — who up to this point had been highly sympathetic, though we’d known he was a religious fanatic of some sort — was actually an official in a theocratic fascist state; for all intents and purposes a high-ranking Nazi. Then Heinlein went right back to folksy/cutesy and got on with the action, and I was left to scratch my beard and wonder what the fuck.

Presumably the author has a plan to pull this back somehow, and the extreme discomfiture he put me in is an intentional effect. But I was so creeped out I put the book down and by then Epitaph for a Spy had arrived, so I changed course and have inhaled half of the latter in two days. Ambler writes the kind of books I have to restrain myself from gulping down too quickly. Even as I write this I am fighting a losing battle against the desire to go and start the next chapt…