4 ideas
Latimer follows the man's trail back through the 1922 murder of a Smyrna moneylender (for which another man hanged), political violence in Sofia, espionage in Belgrade, and a Paris drug ring Dimitrios later betrayed to the police. Latimer eventually learns from the blackmailer Mr. Peters that Dimitrios is alive and respectable under a new name, and that the corpse was an associate he killed and dressed in his own papers.
Dimitrios is not presented as a monster outside the system but as its efficient employee. Banks, governments and intelligence services hire him to carry out assassinations, bribery and espionage because he does what their balance sheets require. The novel argues that interwar evil was a rational enterprise run on the logic of profit and power, and that the respectable institutions financing it were more culpable than the man paid to act.
Latimer writes puzzle mysteries in which murder has a clean motive and a satisfying solution. When he investigates a real killer, he finds squalor, contingency and injustice: the wrong man hanged, the guilty rich and unpunished, and motives that are merely commercial. The gap between the genre's moral bookkeeping and actual violence becomes the book's way of showing what comfortable fiction conceals.
In Belgrade, Dimitrios gets secret naval minefield charts by targeting a minor official, Bulić, whose vanity and money troubles make him exploitable. He draws Bulić into gambling losses and financial obligation until betrayal looks like the only way out. Espionage works here by steering an ordinary person's weaknesses step by step until he cannot refuse, with little need for ideology or force.