Recommendations
Books Like The Third Man
Best books to read after The Third Man by Graham Greene
The Third Man is Greene's most celebrated entertainment — Holly Martins in post-war Vienna discovering that his friend Harry Lime has been diluting penicillin on the black market and causing children to die. If the novella's moral clarity and its portrait of post-war Vienna moved you, these books share its concern with moral corruption at the heart of a friendship, its portrait of a world organized around black markets and divided loyalties, and its conviction that the people we idolize are rarely the people they appear to be.
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The Quiet American
by Graham Greene
The essential companion in Greene's serious political fiction — Fowler and Pyle in 1952 Saigon; the mature and more extended expression of what The Third Man approaches through the thriller framework: a man discovering that the person he knew was not who he thought, and that their good intentions were more dangerous than any enemy's malice
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Our Man in Havana
by Graham Greene
The companion in Greene's entertainments — the comedy version of the same moral territory; both are organized around an ordinary man who discovers the gap between the fiction he has been living and the moral reality that underlies it
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The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
by John le Carré
Le Carré's breakthrough novel — the most important spy novel in the tradition The Third Man belongs to; George Smiley's world of moral exhaustion and institutional corruption is the direct development of what Greene established, and le Carré acknowledged Greene as his primary influence
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Brighton Rock
by Graham Greene
The essential companion in Greene's moral fiction — the novel that most clearly poses the question The Third Man dramatizes: what does it mean to acknowledge that someone you care about is genuinely evil? Pinkie's Catholicism and Harry Lime's famous 'cuckoo clock' speech are the two poles of Greene's engagement with moral darkness
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The Innocent
by Ian McEwan
McEwan's novel about a young British technician working on a Cold War project in Berlin who becomes entangled in violence and espionage — the most direct contemporary heir to The Third Man in its portrait of an innocent man discovering the moral reality of the intelligence world in a divided European city
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A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
The essential American parallel in the tradition of post-war disillusionment — the same moral landscape of wartime and aftermath, organized around a similar gap between the romantic values characters bring to the conflict and the reality they encounter; the comparison shows the American and British responses to the same twentieth-century catastrophe
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro's novel about Stevens the butler reconstructing his past service to a Nazi sympathizer — the most important contemporary English novel in the tradition of loyalty and betrayal that The Third Man belongs to; both are organized around a man who has given his loyalty to someone who did not deserve it, and is reconstructing the truth of that betrayal in retrospect
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Night Train to Lisbon
by Pascal Mercier
Mercier's novel about a Swiss professor who follows a mysterious trail through Lisbon and Portugal's past — the most direct contemporary heir to The Third Man's central conceit: a man's reconstruction of another person's life and values, organized around the discovery that the person he thought he knew was someone entirely different
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