Please no more roses
Please no more roses (English original title: Send No More Roses ) is the title of a thriller by the British writer Eric Ambler from 1977, the author's second creative period. The German edition was published in 1980 by Diogenes Verlag in a translation by Tom Knoth . Against the background of the global financial system, the novel describes the activities of a company that offers tax avoidance and money laundering as a service to its sometimes criminal customers and cheats them in the process.
Structure and content
In first-person form, the novel tells the story of the senior manager of this company, Paul Firman, who is exposed through a carelessness while attending the funeral of a Swiss bank manager whom he has bribed. Now the Dutch sociology professor and criminologist Frits Bühler Krom is pursuing him, who sees in Firman the ideal type of the competent criminal postulated by him in his crime theory and whose correctness he wants to prove by means of Firman in order to gain recognition in the professional world. At a tax law conference, organized by the Symposia company, which appears to be extremely serious to the outside world, Krom confronts him with his not entirely flawless past due to his work for the company. Firman sees himself cornered and has to grant Krom and his two fellow scientists an interview under questionable circumstances, which tells the story of Firman, his companions and the way the company works in numerous, nested flashbacks .
Paul Firman works under changing identities for the Symposia-Gesellschaft , an institute for international investment and fiduciary advice, which advises its clients on tax avoidance and money laundering that are not always lawful and collects high commissions. In order to save his reputation to some extent, (a motif of his witty and cunning anti-heroes that often occurs with Eric Ambler) Firman invited Professor Krom and his two companions to a rented Villa Lipp on the Côte d'Azur for the interview . In the course of their stay in the mansion it emerges that his dangerous adversary and successor in the company, Mat Williamson, wants to drop and kill him. Mat Williamson, who was born on the (fictional) Pacific island of Placid Island and wants to convert it into a tax haven in order to become its de facto ruler, sees his interests threatened in this interview. Confident that Firman will divulge internals of the symposia society at these meetings in order to get out of it himself, Williamson, who has placed an agent on the mansion's security staff, has them besieged by a group of killers to help Firman in a professional manner to eliminate.
criticism
Ambler's novel was received differently by literary criticism. In a detailed review in Die Zeit , Hans-Christoph Blumenberg wrote in 1978:
- “In spite of all the virtuosity in constructing and quoting, 'Please no more roses' is unfortunately not one of Ambler's strongest books: it seems to have reached the limits of the genre here. Within a thriller, if it is supposed to be somehow “thrilling”, the intricate maneuvers of advanced white-collar crime can no longer be portrayed. "
The website Books and Boots sees the novel rather ambiguously:
- "This is not an accessible, easy-to-read, poolside thriller; it is something much more peculiar and oblique. [...] It's all very readable, once you have slowed down to the leisurely pace and discursive style of the narrator "(It's not an easily accessible thriller that can be quickly read at the edge of a pool, but rather a bit strange and weird. [...] Everything is easy to read once you get involved in the narrator's leisurely pace and discursive style Has).
In the FAZ of November 29, 1978, a benevolent criticism appeared, in which, however, the weaknesses of Tom Knoth's translation were mentioned:
- “Ambler's prose is flawless, the diction neither too stiff and carried nor too softened by slang . In Tom Knoth's translation, however, annoying errors crept in [...] "
Expenses (selection)
- Send no more roses . Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1977, ISBN 0-297-77277-5 (US title: The Siege of the Villa Lipp ).
- Please no more roses . 1st edition. Diogenes-Verlag, Zurich 1978, ISBN 3-257-01568-2 (translated by Tom Knoth).
- Please no more roses (= Diogenes-Taschenbuch, 20887 ). Diogenes-Verlag, Zurich 1980, ISBN 3-257-20887-1 (translated by Tom Knoth, new edition 1998).
Web links
- Eric Ambler - Please no more roses on the website of the Diogenes Verlag (description of the content of the novel)
- Review How intelligent can a thriller be? In: The time of December 1, 1978.
- Review: Ambler, Eric: No more roses, please. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. dated November 21, 1978, p. L6.
- Send No More Roses by Eric Ambler (1977) on astrofella.wordpress.com (website Books & Boots)