Cause for Alarm cover art

Cause for Alarm

Penguin Modern Classics

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Cause for Alarm

By: Eric Ambler
Narrated by: Daniel Weyman
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Nicky Marlow needs a job. He's engaged to be married and the employment market in Britain in 1937 is pretty slim. So when his fiancée points out the position with an English armaments manufacturer in Italy, he jumps at the chance. Soon after he arrives, however, he learns the sinister truth about his predecessor's departure and finds himself courted by two agents with dangerously different agendas. In the process, Marlow realises that it's not so simple just to do the job he's paid for - not in fascist Italy, on the eve of a world war.

©1939 Eric Ambler (P)2020 Penguin Audio Classics Espionage Spies & Politics Thriller & Suspense Fiction Suspense War

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Eric Ambler cover art
Frankie's Letter cover art
Patrick Hamilton: Rope, Gaslight, Hangover Square and More cover art
The Man in the Queue cover art
The Caine Mutiny cover art
A Hundred Thousand Dragons cover art
Meet the Tiger cover art
The Crime at Black Dudley cover art
A Man Lay Dead cover art
The Enemy cover art
Bulldog Drummond cover art
The Belting Inheritance cover art
Paul Temple Intervenes cover art
Into the Blue cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
I originally read this as a young teenager. It was an enjoyable read then & is an excellent listen now & very well narrated.

Excellent book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is typical Eric Ambler, right up to a bizarre chapter towards the end about perpetual motion....

Fine, right up to the perpetual motion chapter....

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Eric Ambler is the first modern spy novelist, on which others have followed. Ambler's protagonists are not suave and sophisticated like Bond, or intelligent and discerning as with Smiley, but rather ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances.

In Cause For Alarm, engineer Nicky Marlow - naive and foolish - is the only ideal candidate for a job in an English armaments manufacturer in Italy. Nicky accepts the position and travels to Milan, only to be hoodwinked and thrust into espionage.
The central plot ends too quickly for my liking. Dangerously ignorant, he relies on others to rescue him, and it's a race to elude the authorities and escape Italy. The episode with the professor and his daughter, seems overly long and oddly escapist from the story. Perhaps Ambler was describing his view of war as madness - which it is.

Not my favourite novel by Ambler, although the narration is good, and carries the audio book through.

Cause for alarm!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is one of the two books by Ambler which feature Soviet spies as heroes. The intention, I guess, was to point out the relative complicity of the British with the Fascist governments of the time. Although the hapless anti-hero Marlow and his Soviet protectors seem to benefit from an extraordinary run of good luck as they make their escape from Italy, the story is still good escapist fun. The performance is impeccable.

Atmospheric 1930s spy thriller

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.