This is a slim two-in-one offer of a pair of previously undisclosed ‘novellas’ (actually film treatments) by Graham Greene. In 1949, when they were written, The Third Man had just been a prodigious hit for the author, Carol Reed and Orson Welles. No Man’s Land — the sole complete piece on parade here — was an attempt to take another bite from much the same cherry (or a squeeze from the same Lime).
This time, Richard Brown, a British agent with a ‘neutral name’, crosses into the Soviet zone, in the Harz mountains, in order to find what Hitchcock called ‘the McGuffin’, that vital doesn’t-matter-much-what which serves to prime a thriller’s plot. Here it’s a coded message hidden, in extremis, by a colleague of Brown’s who didn’t survive, detailing secret Soviet uranium mines in the region. A typical Greene touch plants the coded clue in a Marian shrine, where the Virgin is said to have appeared to some young girls and which has become a place of pilgrimage.
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