In 2007, it was adapted into a play by Clive Francis, which has toured the UK several times and been performed in various parts of the world. In 1963, it was adapted into an opera by Malcolm Williamson to a libretto by Sidney Gilliat, who had worked on the film. The novel was adapted into a film of the same name in 1959, directed by Carol Reed and starring Alec Guinness. The book predates the Cuban Missile Crisis, but certain aspects of the plot, notably the role of missile installations, appear to anticipate the events of 1962. Greene uses the novel to mock intelligence services, especially the British MI6, and their willingness to believe reports from their local informants. 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 in Havana (1958) is a novel set in Cuba by the British author Graham Greene. 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 book