It’s the birthday of Eric Ambler (b. 1909-1998), who wrote intelligent, literary espionage thrillers that were gritty and realistic (instead of, you know, the opposite of that) and was therefore called “the father of the modern thriller.” His heroes, rather than the James Bond type, were ordinary people caught up in menacing situations. His 21 novels include Dark Frontier (1936, his first), A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939, also known as The Mask of Dimitrios), Journey into Fear (1940), The Light of Day (1962), and Doctor Frigo (1974), set in the Caribbean and considered one of his greatest works.

Ambler was born in London; his parents were music-hall entertainers who put on puppet shows. (Show of hands: who finds puppets kind of creepy?) He studied engineering at London University and started writing advertising copy, including ads for Exlax; by the late 1930s he was writing bestselling thrillers that eventually became an influence on such writers as Graham Greene (who called himself a disciple of Ambler) and John le Carre.

Ambler served in the Royal Artillery in WWII and worked on war films, including the documentary “San Pietro” with John Huston. (When asked in an interview years later if he’d worked on other films with Huston, Ambler replied, “No, once is enough with John.”) For a time, Ambler wrote screenplays, winning an Oscar nomination for his 1953 screenplay of Monsarrat’s novel The Cruel Sea. He did not generally write screenplays of his own novels, though some of his novels were made into films and many of his novel rights were bought by Alfred Hitchcock.

Fun fact: the thief Jack Murphy and his fellow beach bum Allen Kuhn stole the Star of India (the world’s largest sapphire) from the Museum of Natural History in New York City after seeing Topkapi (1964), the movie based on Ambler’s novel The Light of Day, about a jewel theft in Istanbul.

Ambler and his second wife, producer Joan Harrison, moved to Switzerland in the 1960s. Ambler returned to London for the last few years of his life and died there at the age of 89.

Have a pleasant if overly moist Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.