Cause for Alarm is a novel by Eric Ambler

Eric Ambler

Eric Clifford Ambler OBE was an influential British author of spy novels who introduced a new realism to the genre. Ambler also used the pseudonym Eliot Reed for books co-written with Charles Rodda.-Life:...

 first published in 1938

1938 in literature

The year 1938 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* The trilogy, U.S.A. by John Dos Passos, is published containing his three novels The 42nd Parallel , 1919 , and The Big Money ....

. Set in Fascist

Fascism

Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...

 Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 in that year, the book is one of Ambler's classic spy thrillers.

Plot summary

Nicholas Marlow, an English engineer

Engineer

An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical problems. Engineers design materials, structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality,...

 engaged to a young doctor, one day, out of the blue, loses his well-paid job. After several months of sheer desperation, he responds to an advert by an English engineering company, the Spartacus Machine Tool Company of Wolverhamption. He is offered the post of the firm's representative in Italy. Although the firm does not itself make weapons, its main sales are of the "Spartacus Type S2 automatic" boring machine, which is used for shell production. Able to speak some Italian

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

, Marlow gladly accepts, secretly deciding that he will quit the job again as soon as possible to go back to England and get married.

On arrival in Milan

Milan

Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...

, he realizes that there is a huge backlog at his office, and that both Bellinetti, his personal assistant (male), and his secretary (female) are highly inefficient co-workers. What is more, a lot of his time is diverted by the Italian authorities, to whom he has to report on a regular basis and who eventually inform him that they have misplaced his passport

Passport

A passport is a document, issued by a national government, which certifies, for the purpose of international travel, the identity and nationality of its holder. The elements of identity are name, date of birth, sex, and place of birth....

 so that he is temporarily unable to leave the country.

There is growing uneasiness on Marlow's part when he happens to notice that his private correspondence with his fiancée has been steamed open. When he makes friends with Andreas Zaleshoff, an American businessman of Russian descent whose office is in the same building, he learns from the latter that Bellinetti is an agent for the OVRA

OVRA

The Organizzazione per la Vigilanza e la Repressione dell'Antifascismo was the secret police of the Kingdom of Italy, founded in 1927 under the regime of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and during the reign of King Victor Emmanuel III. The German Gestapo were the equivalent of the OVRA...

 and watching each and every step Marlow takes, and that his predecessor's accident—he was run over by a car in a dark and foggy street of Milan—was in fact cold-blooded politically motivated murder

Murder

Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human being, and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide...

. On top of all that, Marlow is contacted by a General Vagas who informs him that he has no choice but to work as a Yugoslav

Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia refers to three political entities that existed successively on the western part of the Balkans during most of the 20th century....

 spy

SPY

SPY is a three-letter acronym that may refer to:* SPY , ticker symbol for Standard & Poor's Depositary Receipts* SPY , a satirical monthly, trademarked all-caps* SPY , airport code for San Pédro, Côte d'Ivoire...

.

There is no way Marlow could legally leave Italy, especially after an arrest warrant

Arrest warrant

An arrest warrant is a warrant issued by and on behalf of the state, which authorizes the arrest and detention of an individual.-Canada:Arrest warrants are issued by a judge or justice of the peace under the Criminal Code of Canada....

 has been issued for him by the authorities. Assisted by Zaleshoff, he succeeds in making his escape from Milan. Together, the two men embark on a several day long odyssey

Odyssey

The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the modern Western canon, and is the second—the Iliad being the first—extant work of Western literature...

 through the North of Italy—by train and on foot—until they finally, in the midst of a snowbound forest, reach the Yugoslav border. (Their flight takes up more than one third of the novel.) From Zagreb

Zagreb

Zagreb is the capital and the largest city of the Republic of Croatia. It is in the northwest of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the Medvednica mountain. Zagreb lies at an elevation of approximately above sea level. According to the last official census, Zagreb's city...

, Marlow can safely travel home to England.

The final episode before the escape is a particularly excoriating attack on the repressive behaviour of the Mussolini State. This novel, together with Uncommon Danger/Background to Danger and The Mask of Dimitrios/A Coffin for Dimitrios comes from Ambler's 'Popular front

Popular front

A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists. Being very broad, they can sometimes include centrist and liberal forces as well as socialist and communist groups...

' period when he was plainly sympathetic to the Left and the USSR. One of Marlow's English work colleagues, an obviously decent and intelligent sort, is sympathetically identified as a 'socialist'. Marlow escapes capture on one occasion thanks to the selfless intervention of a former Communist railwayman, who has been cunningly identified as a one-time Comrade by Andreas Zaleshoff.

Context

The charming, humorous, resourceful and courageous Zaleshoff and his beautiful sister Tamara - also a Soviet agent - are the only characters to feature at length in two Ambler books. Both also play a significant role in Uncommon Danger, where the English journalist, Kenton, blunders into a major intelligence operation and finds himself working for Moscow against agents of cynical capitalism and National Socialism. In an essay on Ambler, James Fenton

James Fenton

James Martin Fenton is an English poet, journalist and literary critic. He is a former Oxford Professor of Poetry.-Life and career:...

argued that Ambler said a decisive farewell to his left-wing period in his post-war thriller Judgement on Deltchev, which revolves around a show trial in an unidentified Communist country somewhere in the Balkans.