4.25/5. This spy classic (originally published as a novella by Graham Greene) is also a major film noir experience starring Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles. The suspense is crisply written a la Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer. The reader follows Rollo Martin as he investigates the death of his best friend, Harry Lime, on the treacherous streets of WW2 Vienna, a city divided by war and corruption. Loved the book and movie! ( )

Post-WW2 Berlin, with drug lords, a hapless protagonist an a sort of love story. It sounds like a mess, but is a great read. ( )

3½ stars. For once, I think that the movie is better - and reading the preface, so did Greene himself! I hadn't known that he wrote this specifically for Carol Reed to film after their successful collaboration with The Fallen Idol… This is a good suspense story but it lacks the tension which the film had and doesn't come up to the standard of This Gun For Hire or Brighton Rock. ( )

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Rollo Martins, who writes Westerns under a pseudonym, arrives in post-war occupied Vienna to visit his old school chum, Harry Lime. Sadly, the larger-than-life Lime has just been killed in an accident, and Martins arrives just in time for the funeral. Discrepancies in the eyewitness stories soon have Martins suspecting that his old friend has been murdered, and the chief suspect is the third man who was present at the scene.

The novella is every bit as atmospheric as the film, with a strong sense of place and the undercurrent of rising Cold War tension. The audio version’s use of the film’s theme music is a nice touch. The narrative technique is similar to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with a British police officer narrating in first person, repeating what he was told by Martins and filling in some details from his own experience. I would be hard-pressed to say which version I like best – the book or the film. They’re both excellent. ( )