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Author Henry Graham Greene was born on 2 October 1904 in Berkhamsted in
England and was one of six children. At the age of eight he went to the
Berkhamsted school. As a teenager he was under so immense pressure that he got
psychological problems and suffered a nervous breakdown. In 1922 he was enrolled
on the Balliol College, Oxford and in 1926 after graduation he started to work
for the London Times as sub-editor and for the Nottingham Journal as journalist,
where he met his later wife Vivien Dayrell-Browning. In February 1926 before
marring his wife he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, which had
influenced him and his writings. In 1929 his first novel The Man Within was
published, but his popularity wasn´t sealed before Stamboul Train (Orient
Express) was published in 1932. In 1935 he became the house film critic for The
Spectator. In 1938 he published Brighton Rock and wrote The Lawless Roads and
The Power and the Glory. In 1941 within the World War Two he began to spy
voluntarily for the British Foreign Office in Sierra Leone and resigned in 1943
because of being accused of collusion and traitorous activities that never
substantiated. He spent the rest of the war travelling widely and produced on
his experiences he made The Heart of the Matter in 1948. In 1950 The Third Man
was published which was written as a film treatment. So the book became famous
after the movie had been released in 1949 and Greene states: “The Third Man was
never to be read but only to be seen“. In 1975 he separated from his wife and on
3 April 1991 he died in Vevey, Switzerland. The novel Main Characters Rollo
Martins alias Buck Dexter, English author of cheap westerns Harry Lime, old
school friend and idol of Martins Colonel Calloway, English police officer and
observer narrator Anna Schmidt, actress and Lime’s girl-friend, feigns to be
Austrian but is Hungarian Dr. Winkler, Lime’s doctor and present doctor at the
accident Colonel Cooler, a friend of Lime Herr Koch, Lime’s caretaker and
witness of Lime’s accident Plot Rollo Martins travels after the World War II to
the into four zones divided Vienna to visit his old school friend Harry Lime,
who had invited him to Austria to report on international refugees. When
arriving, Martins finds out that his friend was run over by car and died. At
Lime’s funeral he meets Colonel Calloway who states that Lime was the worst
racketeer in Vienna who would have been arrested if he had not been killed. At a
literary discussion he starts his own inquiry at first with Kurtz who explains
the accident but Martins is not satisfied, he thinks Lime was murdered. Visiting
Schmidt, she tells the same as Cooler did, but mentions that even the driver was
a friend of Lime. After that, he visits the doctor to question him, but gets no
information.
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