Eric Ambler. First edition, first printing (stated). Dust Jacket: Near Fine. An unclipped jacket with original price $11.95 on inside flap. In an archival protective wrapper. Jacket design by the great Janet Halverson. Author photograph by Steven Cornwell. Hardcover: Near Fine. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981.
Ambler is considered "the inventor of the modern spy thriller." In this story, the main character, Robert Halliday, receives a bomb threat on Monday in the mail. Two days later, the bomb arrives accompanied by an offer of employment from one Karliss Zander, an international fixer. Unless Halliday agrees to help him edit the memoirs of a 19th century Russian terrorist and ghostwrite an exposé of modern terrorist governments, Zander will detonate the bomb. For the sake of self-preservation, Halliday joins the project but quickly discovers that Zander requires more than mere literary assistance: He and his daughter are in mortal peril from a Middle Eastern terrorist group. Now tangled in this massive international web of danger, Halliday wonders if it wouldn't have been far less painful if that bomb had just gone off.
Prior to this first printing, there was a limited run of 300 copies signed by the another.
