But first he wants to get a list of agents Segura has, and avenge a murder, leading to a most unusual game of checkers.Įven if he can escape danger from Segura and foreign operatives he (and Beatrice) have to face the music with MI6. He faces an assassination threat of his own, and has to figure out how to extract himself from Cuba. It appears that someone close to him has discovered his “reports” and that the English aren’t the only ones who believe Wormold’s reports. The game appears to be up when a man who has the name of one of his fictional agents turns up dead, and another is shot at.

The do arrange a secretary, Beatrice, to keep an eye on him and his agents. Hawthorne has his doubts, but as the lone doubter in a company of believers, he keeps silent. He creates reports from newspapers, and sends drawings of an “installation” based on blown up drawings of vacuum parts.Įveryone back at MI6 believes they’ve found a “natural” and his reports create quite a stir. He does, a mix of fictional and actual figures who don’t really work for him. He confides in his one friend, Dr Hasselbacher, his dilemma and Hasselbacher suggest that he could invent them. Except he has to become an agent, recruit sub-agents, and send “reports” via code. Wormold finally realizes that the money he will be paid is the answer to his financial woes. Cuba is a hotbed of competing interests under the Batista regime of the mid-1950’s. Then Hawthorne, an MI6 agent walks into his life and tries to recruit him as an agent.

At first, this appears to be another one of Graham Greene’s middle-aged men struggling to make some sense of their existence in a far-off foreign land. He struggles to sell vacuum cleaners named “the Atomic Pile,” a real loser, and come up with enough money to support his daughter’s expensive interests while guarding her against the romantic interests of police Captain Segura, known for his ruthless investigative techniques. His wife has left him and their teenage daughter Milly. James Wormold is a struggling proprietor of a vacuum cleaner business in 1950’s Cuba. Summary: A struggling Englishman in 1950’s Cuba is recruited to be a secret agent for MI6 and ends up deceiving the service only to find his fabrications becoming all too real. New York: Open Road Media, 2018 (originally published in 1958).

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