Dedication

TO CAROL REED
in admiration and affection and in memory of so many early morning Vienna hours at Maxim’s, the Casanova, the Oriental

Title Page

Introduction

Introduction

When one has spent one’s life suffering the windy outpourings which call themselves statesmanship, political wisdom and human justice … it is soothing to go into the sewers and see the mire which is appropriate to all this.

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Graham Greene’s darkest entertainment, The Third Man, ends with a shoot-out in the sewers of Vienna and the death of the penicillin racketeer Harry Lime. A convert to Catholicism, Greene had found an appropriate image for man’s fallen state in the city’s murky underground. And Lime, with his alley-rat amorality, is a familiar Greene character. Greene’s literary interest was not just in shabby crooks and other compromised characters; he wanted to dissect their morally ambivalent worlds.

Rollo Martins, a thirty-five-year-old hack writer, arrives in post-war Vienna at the invitation of his oldest friend Harry Lime. To his astonishment he learns that Lime has recently been killed in a motor car accident and is to be buried that day. On further investigation, Martins discovers that the accident is not what it seems. A police source reveals that Lime had been selling watered-down penicillin on Vienna’s black market. The adulterated contraband resulted in the death or brain damage of children with meningitis. Murder was a by-product of Lime’s racket. Martins sets off on a blundering quest to prove his friend’s innocence, only to discover that Lime has faked his own death in order to elude the police. The authorities then draw up a plan to use Martins as a decoy and bring Lime into the open. Martins confronts his old friend in the sewers and, taking the law into his hands, shoots him dead. As a result of Martins’ amateur sleuthing, three men (a porter, a policeman, and Lime himself) have died violently. Perhaps Martins should not have strayed into other people’s affairs.