British novelist Graham Greene (1904-1991) created a group of thrillers, works he termed “entertainments”, many of which were as deliberative as his serious Catholic novels. The most sardonic of Greene’s entertainments is
Our Man in Havana(1958), a black comedy set in pre-Castro Cuba. Greene based this novel, and others such as
The Third Man(1949) and
The Human Factor(1978), largely on his experience in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6, the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom. Recruited into MI6 in 1941, Greene worked for—and developed a special relationship with—the notorious double agent Harold “Kim” Philby who defected to the Soviet Union in 1963. Greene officially resigned from MI6 in 1944 but, perhaps, continued his…
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Citation: Beene, LynnDianne. "Our Man in Havana". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 31 January 2022 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=13310, accessed 02 May 2024.]