Finally we hear from the master himself. The writer whom Graham Greene called "unquestionably our best thriller writer" and who John le Carré once called "the source on which we all draw". If his 1985 autobiography, the self-deprecatingly entitled Here Lies Eric Ambler, is to be believed, his intention as a young man was to be a playwright. Ambler found a novel way (forgive the pun) to introduce his first full length work, by giving his girlfriend a bound page proof in a cinema on King's Road, Chelsea, just before the lights went down. So became The Dark Frontier (1936) and thereafter some of the greatest thrillers of the 20th century, such as Epitaph for a Spy, Cause for Alarm, The Mask of Dimitrios and Journey into Fear, a good number of which were reduced to film and other "media" (before such things were called media). Not long after finishing Journey into Fear Ambler stopped writing and joined the army, later working for Ealing Studios and J. Arthur Rank, where he adapted Nicholas Montserrat's The Cruel Sea for film before decamping for fame and relative fortune in Hollywood. In 1958 he married Joan Harrison, Alfred Hitchcock's long time assistant and collaborator. Hitchcock even organised their wedding. Get inside the mind and life of one of the inventors and indeed archetypes of the thriller genre.