Cause for Alarm
Penguin Modern Classics
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Cause for Alarm
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Narrated by:
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Daniel Weyman
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By:
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Eric Ambler
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 AudioListeners also enjoyed...
What listeners say about Cause for Alarm
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Kindle Customer
- 20-09-22
Fine, right up to the perpetual motion chapter....
This is typical Eric Ambler, right up to a bizarre chapter towards the end about perpetual motion....
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Nicky Cole
- 13-08-22
Excellent book
I originally read this as a young teenager. It was an enjoyable read then & is an excellent listen now & very well narrated.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Banjoman
- 24-08-20
Cause for alarm!
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.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- princess tina
- 17-01-21
Atmospheric 1930s spy thriller
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.
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