Our Man in Havana

Anyone who has witnessed the spy game up close knows that it is forever balanced on the edge of farce and often topples over into it. The world of espionage is filled with chancers, charlatans, and the desperate. Graham Greene beautifully captures this descent into farce in the character of Wormold, who invents agents and secret plans to keep his handlers happy and hopefully improve his life a little at the same time.

I love how Greene shows that intelligence is often unintelligent and that the motivations of those involved in the spy game are rarely simple, easily derailed, and… show more.

Early in my career, I realized that 1.) Spy bureaucracies lend themselves to satire, and 2.) Inventing information to sell to a government is a line of work as old as espionage. Graham Greene leverages these truths in the grandaddy of satiric spy novels.

His protagonist, James Wormold, is a vacuum cleaner salesman who becomes a reluctant employee of MI6. Wormold fabricates assets, reports, and expense accounts to boost his lagging sales income and spoil his daughter. In the process, he trips over the uneven border between invention and reality and almost gets himself killed.

The closest ancestor I have found to my own writing, Greene, a former British intelligence officer, tells a classic spy story with an absurd sense of humor.

James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman in need of cash, agrees to become an MI6 informant. But laziness causes him to invent intelligence, including by sketching vacuum cleaner parts and passing them off as drawings of a secret military installation.

When real life and the fake intelligence become intertwined, things get very strange and very funny. A joy to read.   

This one is a classic in the satirical espionage genre; a fish-out-of-water protagonist, the story being set in Cuba and taking aim at the MI6 Intelligence Service during the Cold War years. While it embraces its initial silliness, it ultimately embeds an important message into the narrative.

Perhaps the closest ancestor of my own work, and probably the most famous of Greene’s ‘entertainments’, Our Man in Havana is a dark comedy in which Greene satirizes his former employer, MI6, via the exploits of a struggling vacuum cleaner salesman called James Wormold.

Desperate for money, Wormold agrees to be an informant for British intelligence, but finds it’s easier to invent his reports rather than going to the trouble of finding actual intelligence. Among other deceits, he sends drawings of fake military installations based on vacuum cleaner parts.

He lands in hot water when real life becomes entangled with… show more.

A second Graham Greene book but no apologies! Greene split his novels between the serious, like The Human Factor, and what he called ‘entertainments.’ Our Man in Havana, a black comedy, sits very firmly in the second category with Greene drawing inspiration from Garbo and Ostro, two German agents and skilled fabricators he dealt with during the Second World War, to ridicule his former profession. The British secret service’s ‘Man in Havana’ is James Wormold, a cash-strapped vacuum cleaner salesman, who creates an entirely false network of intelligence agents. When they produce the plans for a supposed top-secret… show more.

Set in 1950s Havana, Our Man in Havana is a satirical novel about vacuum cleaner salesman, Jim Wormold, who is recruited by MI6 as a spy. Needing the money and without a clue on how to run agents, he begins fabricating his intelligence reports using names from the local country club and complex diagrams from his latest vacuum cleaner. All seems well until his made up reports start coming true. 

As one of Greene’s “entertainments” this prescient book perfectly captures the beginning of the Cold War and the cluelessness and desperation with which the world’s powers vied for influence and… show more.