Image created using Canva’s AI tool.
INTERMISSION: CARRUTHERS EX MACHINA
Eric Ambler had fun parodying the spy thriller in The Dark Frontier, but he was also making a point about its constraints: geopolitics in 1936 were much more complex than were usually considered in the genre. Ambler illustrated this by creating a meta-thriller in which a physicist takes on the identity of a secret agent from a pulp novel, and then having that character be forced to deal with a ‘real world’ threat: a small nation producing an atomic device and an arms conglomerate desperate to get hold of the ability to make it themselves.
Perhaps, in turn, there are meta-mechanisms to explore what Ambler was doing. The concept of throwing lots of genre ideas into a stew and combining them with unexpected elements reminded me of a hot topic we face today: the use of Artificial Intelligence, or more specifically Large Language Models. These have been trained to scrape billions of words from the internet and reconfigure them into new permutations in fractions of seconds. Like Ambler’s Professor Barstow, the software sometimes takes a wrong turn and ‘hallucinates’, creating alternate, incorrect, versions of reality .
The other day, I read this fascinating Substack post by James Marriott in which he showed how ChatGPT has become much better at writing poetry. The Larkin example at the end of that post doesn’t feel massively like Larkin’s work to me, but I found it alarming nonetheless: it reads like a ‘real’ poem, and it also made me laugh. I would genuinely have struggled to have known it wasn’t created by a human.
Inspired by James’ experiments, I asked the free version of ChatGPT to ‘come up with three ideas for sequels to The Dark Frontier by Eric Ambler, and to create 200-word synopses for each’. From these, I selected the one I liked most and prompted it further:
‘Please make it a fuller outline, and include Professor Barstow’s hidden identity from the first book, the dashing pulp fiction secret agent Conway Carruthers, who leapt from the pages of a paperback thriller he had read in his hotel in The Dark Frontier.’
Those were my only two prompts. Here’s what it then came up with:
The Silent Threshold
(A sequel to Eric Ambler’s The Dark Frontier)
Tone & Genre:
An espionage thriller blending dark political tension with ironic flair and adventure—continuing the satirical undercurrent of the first novel, but with a more refined and morally complex edge.
Outline & Expanded Synopsis
Act I: Ghosts of the Frontier
Five years have passed since Professor Henry Barstow sabotaged Ixania’s nuclear ambitions. Now back in Cambridge, he lectures on moral philosophy and physics, repressing memories of his surreal transformation into Conway Carruthers, a two-fisted secret agent born from the pages of a trashy thriller he’d read in a hotel lobby.
When a Swiss physicist is assassinated en route to a disarmament conference in Geneva, and Barstow’s name is found among the victim’s papers, British Intelligence discreetly requests his assistance. The world teeters between peace and brinkmanship, and rumors swirl of a stolen scientific brief containing the next stage in atomic miniaturization—something Barstow once theorized but buried.
Reluctantly, Barstow travels to Geneva under the pretense of academic diplomacy. But as he crosses into this murky world of spies and sabotage, a part of him reawakens: Carruthers, suave, cunning, and wholly fictional—or is he?
Act II: The Fictional Man Returns
In Geneva’s sleek and secretive diplomatic circles, Barstow quickly learns that the killer is not just eliminating scientists, but reenacting scenarios from the very pulp novels that inspired Carruthers. It becomes chillingly clear that someone else knows his secret—or worse, shares it.
Chased through snowbound streets, seduced by a double agent with loyalties no one can define, and manipulated by rival intelligence factions, Barstow must wrestle with his old persona. Is Carruthers merely a coping mechanism—or the one tool capable of navigating a world where truth is dead and fiction shapes reality?
He tracks the stolen formula to a shadowy think tank called The Threshold Institute, operating under diplomatic immunity. Its agenda: to auction micro-nuclear technology to the highest bidder, under the veil of theoretical research.
Act III: Crossing the Threshold
As global powers gather for a closed-door summit, Barstow discovers that the man behind The Threshold Institute is a familiar name from his past—a fellow Ixanian operative presumed dead, who has rebranded himself as a “visionary technocrat” in neutral territory.
Barstow must now decide whether to remain the quiet, ethical professor—or embrace Carruthers one last time, to destroy The Institute from within. But Carruthers may not be entirely under Barstow’s control anymore…
In a final gambit involving false identities, a forged scientific demonstration, and a countdown to detonation, Barstow thwarts the plot—but at the cost of blurring the line between the man he is and the fiction he once became.
Themes:
Reality vs. fiction: Can a man become what he once only imagined?
The burden of knowledge: Who deserves to wield world-ending science?
Satirical identity play: How spy fiction warps expectations of heroism.
Would you like to begin drafting the first chapter or need help with developing key scenes or characters like the antagonist or the femme fatale?
I t’s rather tempting to say ‘yes’ to that last question! However, despite the feeling of complexity in the synopsis – helped along by it priming us at the beginning that this will have a ‘more refined and morally complex edge’ than the original – there is still a vast distance to travel between this and a finished novel. The bare bones are presented well, but they are still bare bones. Would it be able to do it? And if so, would that be ethical? Exactly whose ideas is it using, uncredited?
Some of the elements are easy to spot as simply rearrangements from The Dark Frontier: nuclear weaponry is miniaturised rather than normal-sized, for example. That also feels far too modern, and if it’s five years later we would surely be in the midst of the Second World War. Think tanks also didn’t exist at that time, and this feels like a stock answer, or a variation of one, that it will be prone to giving when asked for synopses of thrillers within certain parameters. Barstow/Carruthers is also a British agent, not an Ixanian one, so it’s not understood that.
By grafting lots of ideas together from who-knows-where, the synopsis is impressive but feels a little off, like the waistcoat that is also somehow a jacket in the AI-created illustration I’ve used at the top of this page. Perhaps that’s appropriate in this case, though, as it’s a surreal thriller in which reality and fiction merge.
There are also several intriguing and amusing ideas in the synopsis. I especially liked this: ‘But as he crosses into this murky world of spies and sabotage, a part of him reawakens: Carruthers, suave, cunning, and wholly fictional—or is he?’ The most obvious barrier to a sequel for me is how one would bring back the premise when The Dark Frontier ends with Barstow vacating the Carruthers persona, but even though the precise solution to that isn’t provided here, it suddenly seems much less of a problem, and I kick myself for thinking it would be a barrier at all. It would need a small, well-crafted scene: perhaps Barstow listens to a radio play or sees a Conway Carruthers film at the cinema this time to trigger the change? So my prompt of the machine creates text that in turn prompts me. That’s potentially useful.
I also really liked this: ‘In Geneva’s sleek and secretive diplomatic circles, Barstow quickly learns that the killer is not just eliminating scientists, but reenacting scenarios from the very pulp novels that inspired Carruthers. It becomes chillingly clear that someone else knows his secret—or worse, shares it.’
Yes. Of course. That is what should happen. It hadn’t occurred to me before asking the question, but I think reading this synopsis that Ambler could have written a sequel to this novel – and what fun it would have been if there had been a villain in the same boat as Barstow, and we could see him working out what is going on. ‘It was a curious thing: as a young agent with Department Y in Prague he had once received a card delivered to his quarters with a similar offer. Could it be that this was the same ruse? Perhaps even sent by the same man?’ Etc.
But this is still just a synopsis. The vagueness of some of the ideas can excite other ones but, as any human writer will tell you, filling them all in is where most of the work happens. It sounds exciting that a thriller is set in Geneva’s ‘sleek and secretive diplomatic circles’, but writing chapters in which the reader really feels the action is taking place in circles that warrant that description would involve a lot of thought and planning: locations, characters, individual scenes, all of which also need to string together and make at least some kind of sense.
Perhaps all this could be done if one were to take it further. There’s a difference between a a formulaic plot and a parody of one, but perhaps that could be dealt with by simply asking ChatGPT to mock what it has created, and while it’s at it apply a filter of Eric Ambler’s sparse but laconic prose style and sprinkle in some beautifully observed insights into the human condition. Absurd? On this evidence, it’s not so much of an ask as it might have seemed even a year ago.
Just some food for thought. In the next part of the essay, I’ll be looking in detail at Sydney Horler, a writer who, in his own way, was rather ChatGPT-ish.