So when the British Secret Service asks him to become their ‘man in Havana’ he can’t afford to say no. Still, Mr Hull’s book is a delicious companion to the tale Greene confected from the incompetence of spooks and an island in turmoil. Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene’s Cold War Spy Novel. Jim Wormold, an under-employed vacuum cleaner salesman living in 1950s Cuba, is struggling to pay for his teenage daughter’s increasingly extravagant lifestyle. It would be interesting to know what the novelist would make of that reverent appraisal. Mr Hull even sees Greene’s “clairvoyance” at work in the faulty evidence of weapons of mass destruction on which the invasion of Iraq was based in 2003. He makes a game case, but some readers might conclude that coincidence is a more apt judgment than prescience.

In “Our Man Down in Havana” Mr Hull argues that, as well as drawing on his secret-service experience to describe the bumbling nature of much intelligence work, Greene was eerily prophetic about the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which arose when reconnaissance flights proved that the Soviet Union was constructing missile sites on the island. In reality they have been adapted from diagrams of vacuum cleaners. His masterstroke is a report of strange goings-on in the mountains, which he backs up with what are supposedly aerial photographs of sinister constructions. Learning that the more information he provides the greater his remuneration, he invents a network of agents and increasingly farcical intelligence, to the delight of his minders in London. The protagonist is James Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner salesman recruited by the British secret service.

These half-baked efforts were worthy of his own comic novels, of which “Our Man in Havana”-published just months before the revolution-may be the best loved.

Our man in havana by graham greene