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at breakneck speed along a dark and narrow mountain road, with the only intention of fleeing the country. However, Carruthers and Casey are following her in Groom's car (which they have stolen), but before they can catch up with her and stop her vehicle she has an accident, is catapulted out of her
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intelligence and skills that save them. Within only one day it turns out that, with the old government having stepped down, the revolution has been both successful and unbloody. Kassen is dead, and all copies of his secret except one have been destroyed. The one copy that has survived is
Countess
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Two groups of people want to prevent exactly that. There is Simon Groom, a representative of Messrs. Cator & Bliss Ltd., a
British armament manufacturer, who is sent to Ixania to get hold of the Kassen secret by hook or by crook. He enlists the services of Professor Henry Barstow, an English
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succeeds in overthrowing the country's dictatorial regime and in establishing freedom and justice for all its citizens. Throughout modern history Ixania, a "God-forsaken country", has preserved its political independence because of its lack of natural resources and, generally, its comparative
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attracts the attention of
William L. Casey, an American journalist stationed in Zovgorod, the capital of Ixania. Originally only interested in a good story, Casey becomes Carruthers's quasi-assistant, a change Casey himself describes as his "transition from newspaper man to
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car, and dies. The wreck of her
Mercedes catches fire, so all Carruthers has to do when he arrives at the scene is retrieve the last remaining copy of the bomb-building manual from the Countess's body and cast it into the flames.
245:" and who, accordingly, has made it his job to rid the world of that danger by destroying all copies of Kassen's papers. His mission is to prevent the manufacture of the bomb and to "preserve
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leader of the peasants. On several occasions his and Casey's lives are in danger, repeatedly they are "standing in front of the wrong end of a gun", but it is always
Carruthers's almost
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The novel was one of the first six of Ambler's books which made his name. Ambler wrote in his autobiography, "As I saw it, the thriller had nowhere to go but up".
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physicist who is to travel with him to Ixania to determine whether the secret papers whose theft he plans to commission are authentic and worth the money.
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He wrote about its genesis thus:"... Became press agent for film star, but soon after joined big London advertising agency as
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Schverzinski and her brother, Prince
Ladislaus, who effectively run the country, are in possession of a formula to build an
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irrelevance in economic matters. However, due to the defection from Nazi
Germany of Jacob Kassen, a nuclear scientist, the
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and 'ideas man'. During next few years wrote incessantly on variety of subjects ranging from
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This article is about the 1936 novel by Eric Ambler. For an episode of Star Trek, see
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parodies the conventions of the contemporary
British thriller, particularly
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who has realised that the Kassen secret poses "a serious menace to
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Priotti, Nadia (2018). "Eric Ambler and the Trick of
Boundaries".
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Siding with the peasant revolutionaries, Carruthers becomes the
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173:. Have travelled in most countries of Europe, been stranded in
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402:. 2018: NUMERO SPECIALE: CONfini (special edition): 176–83.
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was one of the first novels to predict the invention of a
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