Eric Ambler & Alfred Hitchcock

Eric Ambler (1909-1998) is the father of the modern thriller novel. He took the pulp thrillers of his day and with appropriate changes wrote thrillers that were in effect, literature. The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) became the first literary thriller and thirty year old Eric Ambler was unanimously accepted as a master of his craft. Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) is the father of the film thriller. The MacGuffin, voyerism, suspense and point of view in pure cinematic terms were mostly developed by him. Hitchcock with his fifty odd films, and a successful ten year TV series, was well known but not considered important. It took a frenchman, film director Francois Truffault, and his book Hitchcock (1966), to elevate him to one of the great movie directors of all time.

Joan Harrison (1907-1994) a graduate of Oxford and the Sorbonne was hired as Alfred Hitchcock's secretary in 1933. Soon she read various books and screenplays to help him choose his future projects, and even wrote the screenplays of his films Jamaica Inn (1935), Rebecca (1940), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Suspicion (1941) and Saboteur (1942). In 1958 she married Eric Ambler. She was a major collaborator to Hitchcock's success, and it is hard to imagine that she had no say in Ambler's later novels. But as much as we would find it intriguing to think that it was a woman who pushed the two men to greatness, she wasn't. Ambler had made his fame well before he met Harrison, and she was but one of Hitchcock's collaborators. What united the two men and contributed to their success was not a woman but the concept of an innocent man who is wrongly accused.

Choosing the Storyteller

There are basically three points of view (PoV) in literature:

(a) The first person, where the narrator is one of the characters in the story and speaks directly to the reader. (Example: I liked this girl. “Want to go for a coffee?” I said. She looked away.)

(b) The third person, where the narrator observes the characters in the story and can tell us what one of the characters thinks or feels in any particular scene. (Simon Drake thought that he liked this girl. “Want to go for a coffee? he said. She looked away.)

(c) The omniscient, where the narrator observes the characters in the story and can tell us what each of the characters thinks or feels in all the scenes. (Simon Drake thought that he liked this girl. “Want to go for a coffee? he said. What nerve she thought and looked away.)

Before the author puts the first word on paper he must decide who is going to tell us the story. Will it be God (omniscient), one of the characters (first person), or something in between (third person)? There are advantages and disadvantages in each of the three PoV.