Book #: 94
Title: The Third Man and The Fallen Idol
Author: by Graham Greene
Series: no
Format: Mass Market paperback, ILL, 155 pages and 54 pages
Pub Date: First published January 1, 1949
Started: 10/26/24t Finished: 10/28/24
Awards: none
Categories:
PS4 A book about a writer; PS47 A book with 24 letters in the title; GR21 A book with a title containing 6+ words; GR24 A book with a secondary color on the cover [orange, green or purple] (Greene! :D); GR32 A book with a number in the title; CCLS1 A Book by an Author You've Never Read Before; CCLS17 A Book with a Male Protagonist; CCLS20 A Book with a Number in the Title; CCLS35 A Mystery; CCLS37 A Book set in a Different Country (Austria); CCLS39 A Book that Became a Movie;
Goodreads Rating: 3.73; 3,256 ratings; 316 reviews
My Rating: *** three out of five stars

Rollo Martins, a penniless writer, arrives in post-war Vienna to live with his friend Harry Lime only to discover that Harry is killed in an automobile accident just before he gets there. He learns that his friend was a war profiteer and may have been killed because of it. He embarks on a quest to prove the rumors false, but the more he digs, the more he realizes the rumors may be true.

The Fallen Idol is a short story about a wealthy couple who go on vacation and leave their young son with their butler and his wife. The wife is tragically killed. I didn't care for the story at all.

The Vintage Classics features the two brilliant stories!

The edition I read had an introduction by Ian Thompson. This introduction is insightful but it revealed the plot and climax of both the stories as did the respective prefaces by the author, so I strongly suggest that you come back to these after reading the stories.

The Third Man
The Third Man was not supposed to be published as a book; Greene wanted to write a screenplay for a movie. The author wrote the story to create characterization, mood and atmosphere before he got to the screenplay. In the preface Greene mentions that the movie is actually better than the story.

The story is narrated by Col. Calloway of the British security police posted in Vienna. He is a pretty decent man.

Rollo Martins – writer of cheap westerns, almost a pauper, a harmless drunk with some women problems but overall a good man arrives at post WWII Vienna on the invitation of his childhood hero and friend Harry Lime.

Greene’s depiction of Vienna – dreary, destroyed and as an occupied territory is indeed praiseworthy and the author’s skill in using the elements of weather to convey meaning is also wonderful.

Needless to say, the writing is excellent and the characterization is brilliant. I liked the way the character of Martins is influenced by Rollo and Martins.

Rollo Martins arrives at Vienna to find that his hero, Harry has died in an accident and also learns that he might have been involved in some racketeering. Determined to know what had happened to his friend, Martins continues to investigate Harry’s death and as expected people die such that certain secrets are not revealed.

Human beings can do anything to further their vested interests. Do we really know a person whom we regard as our friend! Conflict between justice & morality on one hand and friendship on the other is brilliantly portrayed. Like most of his novels, the author’s Catholic belief also makes an appearance in the story.

The suspense would keep you turning the pages, some of the dialogues would strike a chord and the climax, in my humble opinion the most satisfying. The mood of the novel is dark and dreary, but a case of mistaken identity would provide some light-hearted moments as well.

I would recommend this story to lovers of mystery and suspense.

The story appears in both the lists of top 100 crime novels published by the British-based Crime Writers' Association and the Mystery Writers of America in the nineteen nineties. The lists can be found here - Link

The Fallen Idol

It is s short and dark story about the destruction of a child’s innocence. The traumatic events would keep haunting him years later until his very last breath.

Master Phillips is a little boy who has been left in the care of the family butler Mr. Baines and his wife, while his parents are out enjoying a vacation.

Mr. Baines is a decent man, he is kind to Phillips and is in turn loved by the child. Mrs. Baines is a different person altogether – sour and unpleasant, domineering and yet servile when she wants to be.

Poor Phillips gets caught up in the world of adults where lies and deception are normal. Certain events terrify Phillips and he desperately wants to withdraw from the world of adults. His predicament – running away from home, crying on the roads, his desperate desire to be rescued by the police and his insistence that a “male” constable should escort him home as his child’s mind believed that only a policeman could “impress” the formidable Mrs. Baines – would strike a chord.
Even in such a dreary setting, Greene’s description of a policeman is sort of humorous – not the laugh out loud type but somewhat subtle, and it bears testimony to the author’s wit.

I won’t elaborate more as I don’t want to give away the plot.

I don’t know if my review has done justice to this brilliant story, but if you like chilling stories then please give it a reading.

‘Evil was like Peter Pan – it carried with it the horrifying and horrible gift of eternal youth.’

Two novellas – one being little more than a short story – make up this volume; they’re linked by the fact that both also became postwar films from director Carol Reed. The Third Man is much the more famous movie but its immediate predecessor The Fallen Idol was well regarded too.

Superficially, though, they may seem to have nothing in common. One is set in the ruins of postwar Vienna, in a shady world of black marketeers and incipient Cold War tensions, whereas the other takes place in a mansion in during the late Victorian era in London’s Belgravia, the epitome of bourgeois respectability and comfort.

And yet both reveal where lies and deceit can lead to innocents becoming embroiled in sudden tragic death, regardless of whether the protagonist thinks himself a man of the world or presents as a trusting seven year old boy.

In The Third Man our innocent is English author Rollo Martins, invited by old school friend Harry Lime to join some enterprise connected with refugees in Vienna. Martins writes pulp Westerns under the pen name Buck Dexter, not realising there’s a Benjamin Dexter writing more serious fiction with whom he will become confused. But when Martins finally gets to war-torn Vienna he finds Harry Lime is about to be buried, the victim of an unfortunate traffic accident.

For a decade after the war Austria’s capital was divided into zones, each policed by the occupying forces of France, Britain, the US or Russia. In this time of slow stabilisation, reconstruction and shifting fortunes not all black market enterprises were relatively free of pain, but Martins finds it hard to believe Colonel Calloway when the military policeman says his deceased friend was involved in the worst kind of racketeering.

This novella – simultaneously a thriller, a mystery and a comedy of errors – is about alternate identities as much as depicting ugly realities. The protagonist is both Rollo the drunk womaniser and Martins the intrepid seeker after truth, a light genre hack or, as some assume, a literary heavyweight; meanwhile Harry may be his charismatic friend or a selfish criminal; Calloway may be a crooked cop or a trustworthy investigator; Harry’s girlfriend Anna Schmidt may be an Austrian citizen or a Hungarian refugee; and so it goes on.

Greene’s job is to keep us guessing while encouraging us to hope for the best, and he maintains a sense of instability by setting his story in the depths of a bitter Austrian winter, in a European capital in ruins. Was Harry dead or dying when he was carried back into the building after the collision? And were there just two men with the body or three, and if the latter who was the third man? At the approaching climax the plot reaches heights in Vienna’s famous Giant Ferris Wheel before plumbing depths in the city’s labyrinth of sewers. And it begins and ends with a burial, one fake and another certain.

The background to these two pieces is, as the author indicated in his fine prefaces to each, as involved as the stories themselves. For example ‘The Fallen Idol’ was originally titled ‘The Basement Room’ when written in 1935/6, appearing in Greene’s Twenty-One Stories (1954), which was itself a collection consisting mostly of pieces previously contained in the selection entitled Nineteen Stories (1947).

Though Greene’s book treatment for The Third Man was, in collaboration with Carol Reed, significantly adapted as the screenplay for the 1949 film the original was then published as a novella by William Heinemann in 1950; now it was accompanied by ‘The Basement Room’, which Reed had previously filmed in 1948 but with a different title – The Fallen Idol – which is how the short story was republished (and generally continues to be known) although the author considered it somewhat misleading.

In fact, as with the sewers that feature in The Third Man, the basement room of the short story may have significant psychological import: in Freudian theory, as the author doubtless was aware, cellars and so on represent the unconscious mind. Philip, the young lad whose point of view we’re given here, is fearful at night of shadows and nameless things under the bed but is prepared during the day to venture through the baize door that leads down to the servants’ quarters: here is where Baines the butler and Mrs Baines the housekeeper are based.

While Philip’s parents are away the lad looks forward to being in the company of the easy-going Baines, but he’s fearful of the menacing Mrs Baines, whom he senses doesn’t like him. In the company of his wife Baines presents as brow-beaten; but when Philip chances on a more relaxed Baines with a young woman the butler claims as his niece the seven year old is led into a web of secrets and lies, bribes and deceit that will ultimately affect his character for the rest of the six decades of his life.

Death and betrayal are the leitmotifs of these two pieces which, despite their two very different contexts, draw the reader into the narrative whether they will or no. Greene’s prefatory remarks about their realisation and relationship to the two feature films are each fascinating without giving too much away of what follows, but it’s the stories themselves which demonstrate to me why he remains so well regarded as a writer, and why I’ll be reading more of his work from now on.

'n  How quickly one becomes aware of silence even in so silent a city as Vienna... it was as if he would not find Lime anywhere in Vienna, and, as he reached the third floor and saw the big black bow over the door handle, anywhere in the world at all.n'


I was unsurprised to read that The Third Man was a novella written for film. It felt like it. It follows Rollo Martins, an author and womaniser, who visits post-war Vienna by invitation of his friend, Harry Lime. Too late though, as Lime is dead. But the circumstances around his death are suspicious and Martins feels compelled to investigate it.

The Fallen Idol was a short story about the loss of a child's innocence through the family butler's transgressions. How embittered a woman Mrs Baines was! I actually preferred this to The Third Man, and will aim to read another Greene novel that is actually a novel and not a screenplay due to it.

Carol Reed's The Third Man ranks among my favourite noir films. To a large extent, this is because of its stunningly atmospheric black-and-white cinematography (I just love those ruins and shadows...), but it's also because there's something quite compelling about the story about a Brit who is invited to post-war Vienna by a friend, only to discover that said friend is dead and may have been involved in a rather nasty racket. That story was written by Graham Greene, and was published by Penguin along with another Greene story adapted for the screen by Reed, 'The Fallen Idol'.

The Third Man is unlike other Greene books. As Greene himself points out in the preface, 'it was never written to be read but only to be seen'. In other words, while it's not exactly a film script, The Third Man was written to be turned into one, and it shows. By Greene's standards, the story is light on characterisation and heavy on descriptions of actions and situations. This is bad news for those of us who like Greene precisely for his characterisation, but it's not necessarily a bad thing per se, as for one thing, what little characterisation there is is solid and original (I love Rollo Martins' semi-split personality) and for another, both the plot and the atmosphere are great. Post-war Vienna (carved up into four spheres of influence by the Americans, British, French and Russians) makes for a wonderfully tense setting, and involuntary detective Rollo Martins' journey from indignation to disbelief to disillusionment to acceptance makes for compulsive reading, featuring as it does dramatic plot twists, some dark humour and a healthy dose of cynicism. In short, it's a fairly strong novella, even if it doesn't match up with Greene's longer works. Even so, I'm going to defer to the author's own assessment, which is that the film is better than the story (and not just because the story lacks the famous cuckoo clock line, which was written by Orson Welles). It's simply because the film (on which Greene closely collaborated with Reed) is, as Greene points out in his preface, 'in this case the finished state of the story', whereas the book version is merely an earlier draft -- a solid draft, but an unfinished one nonetheless.

As for the second, much shorter story in the book, 'The Fallen Idol', this is a tragedy about an innocent child who gets caught up in the nasty games adults play and ends up accidentally handing his best friend over to the police. As an exploration of the innocence-versus-guilt theme, it's rather interesting, especially since it is (unusually for Greene) told from the child's point of view. Due to the childish perspective, Greene doesn't get to indulge in his trademark cynicism (which is what I love best about him), but still, it's a well-told, well-observed story with great characters, some menace, several 'Oh, no!' moments and an abrupt but effective ending. It's not brilliant, but it's decent story-telling -- more proof (if any were needed) that Greene didn't need many words to tell a powerful story.

All in all, I'd say this is a solid 3.5-star book. Since it's closer to four stars than to three, I'll be generous and give it four.

I had listened to this book-on-tape as a teenager in the 1990s before I even saw the film, but I remembered very little. Returning to the story (in print this time) after having watched the movie countless times and read through more than two-thirds of Greene’s work, I felt like I had read it a hundred times. As Greene writes in the Preface, little details were changed in the film by Carol Reed – including the ending, which Greene agrees is greatly improved in the film. I agree. It’s one of the rare moments when a filmmaker changes an ending to be sadder, but also when such a cinematic change is better. The pace moves with the speed of Greene’s best spy fiction, and is required reading for fans of the film or Greene, naturally.

The accompanying short story, “The Fallen Idol” (aka “The Basement Room”), was also adapted into a movie by Reed. The story is serviceable but mostly seems like filler that was added to this book simply for readers who may have seen both Reed movies. I haven’t read any of Greene’s other story stories, so it’s hard to say how it stacks up.

3,5⭐

Graham Greene is a classic early twentieth century English novelist. I remember studying Brighton Rock for my school GCSEs.
The Third Man is set in the murky underworld of post World War 2 Vienna. The Austrian capital has been quartered into four allied zones: English, French, American and Russian. A front of the Cold War there are often tensions between Communist Russia (Soviet Union) and the Western powers. Our antihero is Harry Lime, who has the mystery unfolds has a dirty racket selling fake penicillin at huge profit. Lime invites his old school chum Rollo Martins over to visit and when this small time writer arrives from London, penniless, he is shocked to discover that Harry Lime is dead and attends the funeral where he meets some of the other main protagonists of the tale. Colonel Calloway is the British policeman who is the one to provide the welcome party for Martins in lieu of his dead friend. Martins is hostile to the policeman and sad at his friend's death. As he starts to investigate the whole matter a series of inconsistencies start to be thrown up. Martins falls in love with the Hungarian ex girlfriend of Lime who has a family history of Nazis and has trouble with the Russians. He encounters Harry's mates and their tales about the car accident that killed him just doesn't seem to add up. was it suicide or was it murder? Eventually the mystery deepens to the point that Martins discovers that Lime is so deep into a nasty drug dealing Penicillin racket that he's actually faked his death and he eventually meets up with Harry's ghost in the flesh, clandestinely in the shadowy depths of the snowy Vienna night. Ultimately Harry is exposed and the police encounter him and Martins even turns on his old friend and after a shootout in the underground sewer system our mysterious antihero Harry Lime is sent off to a second funeral.
The Fallen Idol is a short story which seen from a young child's view is very descriptive and quaint. The child's inability to keep secrets about the adults who are caring for him leads to a love truss and the murder of his friend's wife. The child can't help but reveal his friend's identity as the assassin and the criminal is brought to justice.

Poor Baines ...

Why have I taken so long to read something from Greene? I can't be exact, but I suppose I didn't expect him to be such a compelling writer. My Dad had a few Greene books in various places in his bookshelves as I was growing up, and I had always wondered what the fuss was all about. Well, now I know.

This book consists of two short novels, the first one, 'The Third Man' is the more known of the two, and I have since been told, there is a rather good film adaptation of it. I intend to seek that out. I was moderately intrigued throughout the story, and the dark humour was well received, however, I did notice that characterisation was fairly thin, and near enough non-existent, and instead, the story concentrated entirely around activity. This wasn't necessarily a bad aspect, but I wasn't expecting it. I enjoyed this short but interesting delve into Greene's works, and I've realised he has a style that I can appreciate.

'The Fallen Idol' is a much shorter story, and is about child innocence lost. A child unfortunately gets involved in adult affairs, and tragedy strikes. This story was told from the child's perspective, which I found to be rather engaging.

I'm so glad I've finally read something from Greene, and I'm certainly looking forward to reading some of his more lengthy works in the future!

За пореден път ми е изтрито ревюто…

I really like Greene and am not sure why I haven't read more of his work - it is something I must put right. After watching the film of 'The Third Man', I turned to this book which contains the original novella (amazingly, Greene wrote this just so that he could adapt it for the screenplay!) and another shorter story which was also adapted for a film directed by Carol Reed, 'The Fallen Idol'. I haven't seen the latter film as yet, but both stories are beautifully written with not a word wasted, and both are very bleak in different ways.