The Third Man and the Fallen Idol.
First edition, first printing of The Third Man and the Fallen Idol.
A very fine copy preserved in publisher's binding, as issued with its dust jacket in very good condition.
Octavo, (3) preliminary leaves, 188 pp.
Original black cloth, silver title on spine, dust jacket preserved. Contemporary binding.
183 x 122 mm.
Greene, Graham. The third man and the fallen idol.
William Heinemann Ltd, Melbourne, London, Toronto, 1950.
First edition.
First edition, first impression.
This novella by Graham Greene, published in 1950, became famous through the film by Carol Reed and Orson Welles.
It is the presentation of a case of conscience. Arriving in Vienna where a situation has been offered to him by a childhood friend, the novelist Rollo Martins suddenly finds himself in the midst of an adventure. His friend has just died in suspicious circumstances. Was he murdered? The British Occupation police refuse to help Martins. Despite the police wanting to expel him, Martins stays, falls in love with Ida, and becomes an instrument of fate. Forced to choose between friendship and justice, after a gripping chase through the sewers, he kills his friend who, involved in a racket of adulterated penicillin, had faked his own death.
The troubled, romantic, and sordid atmosphere of the imperial city under Occupation is skillfully explored but remains secondary in the study of the motives that lead a man to choose duty over affection for his friend and his own happiness.
“Most novelists, I imagine, carry around with them, in their heads or in their notebooks, the seed-idea for stories that will never see the light of day. And it can happen, after many years, that one returns and finds this idea, ruefully miming that it would have been good once, in a time that is now dead. And that is how, a long time ago, I wrote on the back of an envelope this opening paragraph: ‘I had said my last goodbye to Harry a week before, when they lowered his coffin into the frozen earth of February, and so it was with an incredulous eye that I saw him pass me by without the slightest sign of recognition among the army of strangers walking up the Strand.’”
A very nice copy, very clean, preserved in its publisher’s binding, with dust jacket, as issued.
A very nice copy, well preserved with the dust jacket.
