One of the great disadvantages of Kindle - and there are many - is that the browsing experience is terrible and certainly doesn't touch the joy of spending an hour in a bookshop. I don't think, for example, I'd ever have found the novels of Eric Ambler on Amazon.
Last year, I spent an hour in the paperback fiction section of Waterstones Piccadilly, looking only at the green spines of Penguin Modern Classics and the red spines of Vintage Classics. I came away with a bagful, including Ambler's 1938 espionage novel, Cause for Alarm.
At a time of renaisance in the craft of spy writing, led by Mick Herron, Charles Cumming and others, it was a good time to find a man who is perhaps one of the forgotten early masters of the art.
Cause for Alarm tells the story of Nicholas Marlow, a recently engaged engineer who loses his job and in desperation takes on a commercial role for the Spartacus Machine Tool company of Wolverhamption that requires him to live in Milan where the machines are used for the manufacturing of weapons.
It is immediately apparently that Marlow is out of his depth in fascist Italy on the eve of war as he finds himself torn between the machinations of two agents with differeing political agendas seeking intelligence about the use of Spartacus machines and much else besides.
The set-up - the ordinary man thrown into an extraordinary situation - feels very modern, and offers a very different espionage experience to the world of smoke and mirrors of George Smiley or the fast cars and tuxedos of James Bond. Ambler's language and pacing is understated but perhaps more powerful for that, as he builds tension beautifully and creates an oppressive, atmospheric Milanese backdrop for the novel.
Through Marlow's innocent eyes we see behind the scenes of the unravelling of European peace and the hidden work of intelligence agencies.
Cause for Alarm is a smart, taut novel and it was no surprise to discover that Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John Le Carre, among others, acknowledge Ambler's influence on their own work. He was successful in his day and deserves a broader audience now among those who enjoy spy fiction.