The Human Factor [antikvár]

Introduction On 15 May 1967 Graham Greene wrote to his brother Dr Raymond Greene to ask him how a character could be killed off without arousing suspicion. 'Could you help me with a suggestion?' he wrote. 'I am writing of a man in the Secret Service who is suspected of being a double agent.' The man, Greene went on, 'has to be made to die apparently naturally from some disease or other. The bacteriological War Establishment is at the disposal of the Secret Service. Is there some bug they could use with the help of those experts? . . . The death has to appear a natural one to escape an awkward inquest and questions in Parliament about security.' Greene had been thinking for years, he wrote later, of a serious novel about the Secret Service, 'a novel of espionage free from the conventional violence, which has not, in spite of James Bond, been a feature of the British Secret Service.' During his own years in the Service during the Second World War, first in West Africa and then in London, he 'had certainly found little excitement or melodrama coming my way.' The idea of working within a genre such as spy fiction and refusing to play the game according to its rules would have fascinated Greene. He loved scenes of boredom, lassitude, ennui, grim introspection. His own war had lacked adventure or the obvious stuff of drama. The mystery he wanted to work with was the mysterious self, the strange longings and cravings that can cause people to betray themselves or others, the private obsessions which can cause characters to risk everything. Greene began The Human Factor more than ten years before it was published. He reaUsed as he wrote that his knowledge of the Secret Service was outdated, which may