Eric Ambler's The Levanter

"My name, Michael Howell, may look and sound Anglo-Saxon, but, with a Lebanese Armenian grandmother and a Cypriot mother, I am no more than fractionally English."

Michael Howell is the Levanter. He's the son in a third generation running Agence Howell, a successful trading business in the eastern Mediterranean. It's around 1970, and Syria, where a good deal of his business takes place, has gotten much more difficult to work in. He struggles to keep on the good side of Syria's various government factions.

One faction is supporting the Palestinian Action Force, a group splintered off from the PLO, led by Salah Ghaled. Without quite realizing what he's doing, Howell gets lured into assisting Ghaled. One of Howell's initiatives in Syria is the manufacture of ceramic batteries, but his wife notes there have been some purchases by the factory that don't quite jibe with what they're supposed to be making. What's up?

The novel comes out in 1972, written before the attack at the Munich Olympics. So you can probably guess the sort of thing that's going to happen.

The novel won Ambler's second Gold Dagger from the Crime Writers Association in the UK, and I saw Alan Furst said it was one of the spy novels he most admired when setting out to write his series. But for me, while I enjoyed it, I wouldn't say I thought it one of Ambler's best: his later novels start with fifty pages of exposition (the union of Egypt and Syria in 1958, anyone? industrial engineering?--a subject Ambler knows about, but still...) that don't feel entirely useful. Once the story does get going, though, it's a good one, but you do have to plow through a bit at the beginning.

Good for a couple of challenges:

Vintage Mystery, Silver, Shadowy Figure. I'm going to call that Arab in a keffiyeh a shadowy figure. I'm not entirely sure what's supposed to be in those bottles, but they could just be the raw ingredients for batteries.

And...

Most of the novel takes place in Syria or Lebanon and the grand finale at sea, but a couple of key scenes do take place on Cyprus.