Ambler’s post-war novels venture further afield than his previous novels and explore the Cold War and post-colonial world.
In a commentary on Soviet show trials, Judgement of Deltchev is set over five days as a playwright reports on the trial of a politician in Eastern Europe.
The Schirmer Inheritance sees an American lawyer discover the legacy of the Nazis in post-war Greece as he tracks down the heir of an old woman who died without any descendants.
An engineer finds himself caught in the middle of a military coup in a recently independent Dutch colony in the pacific in The Night-Comers.
An American couple naively agree to help in a gun smuggling operation through East Asia in Passage of Arms.
In The Light of Day a small-time conman accidentally gets involved in a major jewel heist.
In A Kind of Anger a depressed journalist helps a mysterious woman in a dangerous game of selling information about a Kurdish conspiracy to the highest bidder.
A conman accidentally gets enrolled as a mercenary in a war over mineral rights on the border of two African nations in Dirty Story.
In The Intercom Conspiracy a hapless editor finds himself the pawn in a money-making plot to leak intelligence secrets and a crime writer helps him piece together the mystery.
A Middle Eastern industrialist is forced to collaborate in a Palestinian terror plot in The Levanter.
A Latino doctor finds himself a physician to Central American political exiles on a Caribbean Island and gets caught up in a planned coup in Doctor Frigo.
An academic criminologist interrogates an ‘Able Criminal’ tax evasion consultant in Send No More Roses and both find themselves under siege from a criminal Pacific Islander attempting to establish a tax haven kingdom.
In Ambler’s final novel, The Care of Time, the protagonist’s career has parallels with Ambler’s own. An ex-CIA agent-turned-writer finds himself involved in a scam involving a paranoid Arab sheikh, Western Cold War manoeuvrings, biological weaponry experimentation, and a fake TV interview.
