As in most of his espionage novels, Greene maintains suspense right to the very end. No one is who he appears to be. Not only does nearly everyone assume an alias, but most of the story is told to us by a narrator who tells the reader that he has been taught to lie from the very beginning of the novel.

By the end, it is not completely clear whether Quigly ordered the Captain's plane shot down, or how deliberately Jim betrayed the Captain, or how directly responsible he is for the Captain's death.

The suspense, however, is not without Greene's grim humor. At the end of the novel, the Panamanian National Guard is trying desperately to determine the identity of "King Kong," which they take to be a CIA code name for an operative. In reality, Jim was only commenting about seeing the movie with the Captain...