I had a professor in grad school who was firmly of the
opinion that Greene's "entertainments" were where he was at
his best; that he didn't let his concern with dealing with
the weighty issues of Catholicism get in the way of telling a
good story, and as such, the entertainments allowed him to do
both tell a good story and work the Catholic issues into the
background. It's been awhile now (1989), but the best college
course I ever took was a graduate seminar at Purdue
University with this professor (A. A. DeVitis), comparing the
work of Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad. Each of us had to
take one Conrad and one Greene novel and prepare a class
session for each--I turned my work on _The Honorary Consul_
into an entry for Masterplots, with little revision required.
Greene's always been one of my favorites and his failure to
win a Nobel Prize was (and is) an outright travesty.
Reading that over, I realize it doesn't have a lot of
hardboiled content, but just wanted to say I've really been
enjoying reading the digests these past few weeks. There've
been some great exchanges and a lot of very interesting
detail. Thanks for giving me so much to think about.
Craig Larson Maple Grove, MN
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