ABSTRACT
Two novels from the second half of Eric Ambler’s career, The Light of Day (1962) and Dirty Story (1967), tell the continuing story of Arthur Abdel Simpson, a British-Egyptian man living in Greece without a legitimate passport. Whereas most of Ambler’s protagonists are innocent men in over their heads in the murky world of espionage, Simpson’s statelessness makes him quite familiar with the margins of legality. In The Light of Day, his likely expulsion from Greece leads him to align himself not only with a group of German and Swiss jewel thieves, but also with the Turkish intelligence service trying to stop them. In Dirty Story, statelessness again forces Simpson out of Greece and into dubious company: he first works for an international pornography ring and then joins a mercenary army, starting a war to alter African national borders to the advantage of a multinational mining concern. Mapping Simpson’s extralegal adventures and their consequences—he is unwelcome in England, barred from Egypt, flees Greece, is expelled from Turkey—generates a map of nations taken off the world map, as more and more nations become off-limits for Simpson and other stateless people.
