Greene has written a number of novels of international intrigue since his service with British Secret Intelligence: The Ministry of Fear (1943), The Third Man (1950), The Comedians (1966) and The Honorary Consul (1973). In Our Man in Havana (1958), he returns to many of the same concerns of The Quiet American, but this time from more comic perspective, just as Monsignor Quixote (1982) is a comic rewriting of The Power and the Glory. Wormold, a British vacuum cleaner salesman living in Havana, allows himself to be recruited into British Intelligence, partially because he does not know how to say no, partially because he needs the extra money to support his seventeen-year-old daughter's expensive taste. He does not know how to be a secret agent, so he simply sends imaginary information back to the home office. Even though the novel is a comedy, it shows Greene at his most cynical: The kinds...