In 1958, Graham Greene published
Our Man in Havanain which he satirizes the British Secret Service for its eagerness to accept unvetted intelligence from local sources. Our man is James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman in pre-Castro Cuba who, strapped for money to support his spendthrift daughter, creates a subnetwork of fictitious agents and sells schematics to expensive vacuum models to an overly eager MI6 agent, Hawthorne. When exposed, Wormold is deported to London where MI5 sets him up in a teaching position and recommends him for the Order of the British Empire. Inspired by Greene’s novel, John le Carré, pseudonym for John David Moore Cornwell, published a far darker version of this basic plot as
The Tailor of Panama(1996). Calling his novel “Casablanca without heroes”…
3450 words
Citation: Beene, LynnDianne. "The Tailor of Panama". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 July 2021 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7880, accessed 27 December 2024.]
