GREENE, Graham

Our Man in Havana

London: Heinemann, 1958. Item #06487

Greene’s Brilliant Satire of Espionage
“Wormold’s Vacuum Cleaners and the Absurdity of Intelligence Work”

GREENE, Graham. Our Man in Havana. An Entertainment. London: Heinemann, [1958].

First edition. Octavo (7 3/4 x 5 inches; 197 x 127 mm.). [vi], [1]-273, [1, blank] pp.

Publisher's blue cloth over boards, spine lettered in gilt, original pictorial dust jacket, small chip on lower part of jacket fold, small closed tear on lower front panel with some small surface loss. A very good copy.

First edition of one of Graham Greene’s most celebrated “entertainments,” a novel that brilliantly combines comedy, political satire, and espionage farce.

Set in pre-revolutionary Cuba, the story follows the hapless vacuum cleaner salesman James Wormold, who is recruited by British Intelligence and, in a moment of opportunistic invention, begins fabricating reports - and agents - from whole cloth.

Greene transforms this improbable premise into a razor-sharp critique of bureaucratic credulity and Cold War paranoia. The famous “diagrams” of vacuum cleaner parts mistaken for secret military installations remain among the most memorable comic devices in twentieth-century fiction.

Beneath the humor, however, lies a darker awareness of the real-world consequences of deception, as Wormold’s inventions begin to take on a dangerous life of their own.

Written with Greene’s characteristic economy and wit, Our Man in Havana stands as one of his most enduring and accessible works - at once entertaining and unsettling, playful yet edged with moral ambiguity. It remains a cornerstone of modern spy fiction, anticipating later satirical treatments of intelligence culture while retaining a uniquely Greeneian balance of comedy and menace.

Price: $550.00