Vienna provided Greene with a perfect setting for his tale of double-dealing and opportunist loyalties. The city stood on the border between the Soviet empire and the capitalist West and, on one level, The Third Man may be read as a Cold War allegory. Greene wrote it in 1948 when the tensions between West and East began to emerge after Stalin blockaded Berlin that summer. It is tempting to see Harry Lime as the fictional counterpart of the British spy Kim Philby, who had betrayed fellow agents to the Soviet Union. Greene knew Philby well during the war when he worked for him in British Intelligence, and he stayed in touch with his former chief long after he had been exposed as a Russian agent in 1963. Philby had helped Communists to escape through the Vienna sewers in 1934; newspapers later dubbed him ‘The Third Man’. Yet it would be a mistake to read too much into the idea of Lime as Philby. The racketeer is a compound of many men whom Greene had known. His surname suggests not only ‘Graham Greene’ (lime green) but the quicklime in which murderers were said to be buried.

In its first incarnation, The Third Man was not intended to be read as a book, but was an early draft for a screenplay (commissioned in 1947 by the London-based film producer Alexander Korda). Greene wanted to write the Lime story first as a novella in order to explore characterisation and detail. The result was one of the greatest films of the twentieth century, The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed and starring Orson Welles as Harry Lime. Greene wrote the book version in just eight weeks while on holiday in Italy in 1948. It has many of the virtues of the film, not least a sharp dialogue and fast-paced action. Lime’s last stand in the sewers could almost be a burlesque of the cheap Western novels which Martins writes for a living. The book also appears to parody the Victorian detective novels (Is He The Man?, The Nameless Man) which Greene avidly collected.1 For some, however, the film is better than the book; it has a greater suspense and atmosphere, as well as the instantly recognisable theme tune played on an Austrian zither.