Review: The Third Man
Gaby Meares
Only a writer as talented as Greene could bring so much to a slim volume of only 157 pages - and this is, according to his Preface, merely a novelisation of his original screen-script.
The setting: Vienna, at the end of the Second World War
The narrator: Calloway: a Scotland Yard detective
Main Players: Rollo Martin: writer of pulp Westerns, old friend of…..
Harry Lime: old friend of Rollo Martin, killed in an accident before Martin arrives in Vienna to visit him
Anna Schmidt: poor actress; Harry Lime’s ‘girl’.
In a few sentences, Greene shows us the sad remains of Vienna: ’the smashed dreary city…divided up in zones among the four powers; the Russians, the British, the American, the French zones, regions marked only by notice boards’. Vienna is now ‘simply a city of undignified ruins which turned that February into great glaciers of snow and ice’. A Vienna once famous for its coffee houses, now serving ersatz coffee.
Rollo Martin is naive; he hero worshiped Lime ‘for twenty years, since the first meeting in a grim school corridor with a cracked bell ringing for prayers’ and cannot believe Calloway’s story of Lime being ’the worst racketeer who ever made a dirty living in this city’. He also doesn’t believe that Lime’s death was an accident, and sets out to clear his name, and find his murderer.
So Calloway lets Martin investigate Lime’s death, knowing that an amateur can often illicit more information that a police officer. Half way through the novel, we are finally introduced to ’the third man’, and Greene’s clever twist in his tale.
As an aside, Greene is famous for being a convert to Catholoicism and although this book is not considered one of his ‘Catholic’ novels, the religion gets quite a few mentions, including a reference to the obscure Jansenist movement, a theological movement active in France during the 17th and 18th century.
Now it’s time to find a copy of the film staring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten, which, according to the Preface, has a different ending to the book.