Other changes made by Reed with Greene’s consent were no less decisive. Rollo Martins and Harry Lime are British subjects in Greene’s treatment, but American in the film. In Ways of Escape Greene explains that he chose Rollo as a deliberately ‘absurd name’, but Cotten objected that it would be considered ‘sissy’ by American audiences. Reluctantly Greene substituted Holley, derived from ‘that figure of fun, the nineteenth-century American poet Thomas Holley Chivers’. (After that, Cotten recalled, ‘I stopped complaining for fear he’d change it to Pansy’.) Interestingly, the episode in Greene’s original story of the Russians kidnapping Anna on the grounds that she was carrying false papers was eliminated from the film. Reed did not want to make an overtly propagandist picture that peddled anti-Soviet, Cold War nostrums. His first intention was to thrill and amuse.

In their different ways, The Third Man and The Fallen Idol reflect an awareness of sin and human wretchedness that can be termed ‘Catholic’. Greene’s gift in these novellas was to locate the moment of crisis when a character loses faith, religious or otherwise, and life is exposed in all its drab wonder. Not surprisingly, the unsparing bleakness of his vision has influenced a number of contemporary writers, from Muriel Spark to the Irish novelists Brian Moore and Ronan Bennett. However, Greene remains inimitable. Few novelists have fathomed with such intensity the suffering and dark places of this earth. And Harry Lime, the shabby Catholic compromised by greed and self-deceit, has become part of popular culture.

Ian Thomson, 2005

1 See Victorian Detective Fiction: A Catalogue of the Collection Made by Dorothy Glover and Graham Greene (1966, Bodley Head).

2 In 1994 I visited the sewers of Vienna with a local Third Man enthusiast, Dr Brigitte Timmermann. The entrance by the Stadtpark U-bahn was much as it had been in Greene’s day, said Dr Timmermann, and I half expected to see the police in pursuit of Lime. As we descended into the darkness I could make out a graffito on the wall: ‘Lime is my favourite fruit.’

The Third Man

THE THIRD MAN

Preface

Preface

The Third Man was never written to be read but only to be seen. Like many love affairs it started at a dinner table and continued with many headaches in many places: Vienna, Venice, Ravello, London, Santa Monica.