Just finished reading Eric Ambler's Uncommon Danger, partly for Scoop! (central character Kenton is a journalist) and partly because Ambler was admired by Greene and Hitchcock. In his introduction to the just released Penguin Modern Classics edition Thomas Jones notes that Ambler's writing career took off in the late 1920s:
"He was asked to compose a press release extolling the bogus virtues of a batch of dodgy bulbs for car headlights. They sold so quickly on the back of it that the company even thought about making more. As for Ambler, the experience may or may not have given him a taste for concocting plausible fictions with a pseudo-technical bent, but it certainly showed he had a talent for it. Before long he was working full-time as an advertising copywriter."
Splendidly, the author called his autobiography Here Lies Eric Ambler...
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