Mapped
Brighton Rock
Graham Greene
A razor-gang thriller set in the seaside Brighton of the 1930s, where the seventeen-year-old gangster Pinkie kills a man in the Whitsun crowds and marries a waitress, Rose, to keep her from testifying, while the cheerful Ida Arnold sets out to bring him down. Greene maps the town precisely: the Palace Pier where it starts, the racecourse where the gangs slash each other, the grand seafront hotels of the rival boss Colleoni, and the poor streets off Nelson Place that made Pinkie what he is. The chase ends on the cliffs at Peacehaven, east of town.
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Our Man in Havana
Graham Greene
Greene's Havana is the tourist capital of Batista's Cuba, all cocktail bars, floodlit cabarets and the sea breaking over the Malecon, where a downtrodden vacuum-cleaner salesman is recruited as a British agent and invents his network out of thin air. The map anchors in Old Havana, runs out to the seafront and the Tropicana, and slips east to Santiago as the revolution gathers.
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The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene
A West African coastal colony in the middle of the Second World War, lightly fictionalised but unmistakably wartime Freetown, where Greene himself served in intelligence. A deputy police commissioner moves between the harbour and its anchored convoys, the waterfront wharf and the police station, the hillside bungalows above the town and the Catholic church, until private failure and Catholic conscience close in. The map runs across the Freetown peninsula, with one excursion inland to the border district.
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The Quiet American
Graham Greene
Greene's Saigon is the French colonial capital in its last years, seen through the weary British correspondent Fowler and the earnest young American Pyle. The map holds the short, dense spine of the old centre: the terrace of the Continental, the shopfronts of the rue Catinat, the square by the opera house where a bomb goes off at mid-morning, and the Majestic on the river where the war and the city meet the water. It brings Vietnam and 1950s Saigon into the atlas.
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The Third Man
Graham Greene
Greene's story of the black market in occupied, four-power Vienna, where the pulp novelist Holly Martins comes to visit his old friend Harry Lime and arrives in time for Lime's funeral, then slowly learns that his friend is neither dead nor innocent. The ruined city is exact: the Central Cemetery where Lime is buried and reburied, the doorway in the old town where he is glimpsed alive, the Great Wheel at the Prater where the two friends have it out, and the sewers where the chase ends.
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