Journey Into Fear
Eric Ambler
 The first part of the novel focuses on Colonel Haki, the dour but basically likable head of Turkish Security, who already made his first appearance in The Mask of Dimitrios and returns in later Ambler stories as a general. The protagonist is a British engineer traveling back from Turkey, where he had completed high-level technical talks which could help cement a Turkish-British alliance in the recently-started Second World War. German spies seek to assassinate him. Most of the plot takes place on board an Italian ship, where the protagonist travels in company with his nemesis - a satanic yet believable German intellectual spymaster, accompanied by a Romanian hired killer - and with a rich cast of other characters, such as a Turkish secret agent, a Spanish courtesan and her pimp, and a French couple of which the husband is left-leaning and his wife is a staunch reactionary.