GREENE, Graham Our Man In Havana London, Wiliam Heinemann1958
8vo. Original blue cloth with title in gilt to the spine within illustrated pruple dustwrapper by Donald Green (not price clipped); devoid of previous owners inscriptions or annotations; loosely laid in publishers folding advert for the first UK edition of The Log From The Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck; pp. (8) 273 (1); minor bumping to head and foot of spine and slight chip to corner of dustwrapper; minimal signs of browning to upper and fore edge; otherwise a near fine copy.
First edition, First printing
~i~ "There is a splinter of ice in the heart" stated Graham Greene when comparing the role of the spy to that of the writer. Both, he believed, had to take on an objective observation of tragedy.
Graham Greene's 1958 black comedy and episonage thriller set in pre-revolutionary Havana (prefiguring the Cuban missile crisis of 1962) was, in the following year, adapted into a film starring Alec Guiness as James Wormald, a vacuum cleaner salesman turned unreliable MI6 Operative whose lies begin to endanger lives. Graham Greene was not only one of the leading novelists of the 20th Century, he himself was employed by the Foreign Office and served as an Intelligence operative duirng World War II. The novel analyses and mocks the ways in which the secret service rely too heavily upon the authority of local informants.
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