It might be thought that it's only the current absence of Faulkner and Waugh and even Hemingway that makes Greene seem a novelist of consequence instead of, say, a fourth-rate Conrad. Is Greene not really a writer whose conceptions, plots, and style are, if the truth were told, as seedy as his famous settings? Can he construct? Can he imagine plausible characters and deliver believable images of their behavior in an efficient style? Is not his melodramatic, Manichean vision of life less a sign that he is "a Catholic novelist" than evidence of a coarse intelligence? Are not his psychological studies of fear and guilt forced and fraudulent? Is there the qualitative difference he Graham (Henry) Greene 1904– The Bettmann Archive, Inc.imagines between his novels and his "entertainments"? Does not his instinct for spy and detective adventure betoken a literary sense considerably less than subtle? These are the...