The Reader’s Gazetteer: I

Ixania, in Eric Ambler’s The Dark Frontier, possibly shouldn’t be included in this gazetteer, because the name is stated to be fictitious. (So is that of the country’s capital, Zovgorod.) This annoys me irrationally. Maybe it still begins with I.

The Dark Frontier is a good deal of fun, however, at the same time sending up and gloriously indulging itself in the tropes of the Ruritanian thriller. The mild-mannered, idealistic, scientist (a stereotype in his own right) gets a knock on the head and becomes convinced that he’s Conway Carruthers, the hero of the pulp novel he was reading before the accident. And there’s a good train journey, all the way from Paris to Bâle and then east from there:

Carruthers watched the mountains of Switzerland and Austria pass in slow review. Then for some hours, they ran across wind-driven plains. On the second night, he again saw…