The larger issue, then, that Ambler examines through his protagonist's obsessive fascination with Dimitrios is what he articulated only a year later in Journey into Fear--namely, the morass of danger within the quotidian world "waiting to make nonsense of all your comfortable ideas about your relations with time and chance, ready to remind you--in case you had forgotten--that civilisation was a word and that you still lived in the jungle" (70).
Despite their methodological uniqueness all these conceptual frameworks share one thing in common: they acknowledge that any intended "life" of Dimitrios is doomed to indeterminacy, although Ambler's 1939 narrative itself is hardly inconclusive.
A former lawyer, with a university degree in Law, Mr
Dimitrios is the first Vice-President of the National Confederation of Hellenic Commerce and a member of the Executive Council of EuroCommerce in Brussels.