Hull wraps his literary, cinematic and political history in a pocket-biography of Greene, tailored to set the author’s espionage story in context. One of these, “Our Man in Havana,” a satire published three months before Fidel Castro overthrew Fulgencio Batista’s regime in Cuba on the first day of 1959, paralleled future events on the island so closely that it came to seem clairvoyant.Ĭhristopher Hull, an English lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies, has, in “Our Man Down in Havana,” written a lively and informative work-an entertainment-telling “the story behind Graham Greene’s Cold War spy novel.” The book also recounts the making of a movie from the book, in Cuba. A writer of many novels, he labeled his less fraught works of espionage fiction “entertainments.” But even his most lighthearted books contained violence and death. At Calle Lamparilla 1, the building was just a short distance from the fictional vacuum. My own office was in a grand trading exchange in the old city that dated back to the early 20th century. He suffered the mood swings of a manic-depressive, was both a committed Catholic and a devoted sensualist, and played the revolutionaries’ sympathizer while accepting spy assignments from the British government. First published in 1959 against the backdrop of the Cold War, Our Man in Havana remains one of Graham Greene’s most widely read novels. It’s only when I re-read Our Man in Havana that I realized I shared a street with the hapless spy hero of Graham Greene’s novel. Graham Greene on the set of ‘Our Man in Havana.’ Photo: Peter Stackpole/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesĮnglish author Graham Greene (1904-91) was of two minds about many things.
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