Frontiers have a dynamism of their own in Graham Greene's fiction, and typically set off a reflex of unease. The novelist's father, Charles Greene, had been the pious Anglican headmaster of a public school in Berkhamsted near London, and each day the schoolboy Greene experienced divided loyalties as he left the family quarters to go to class. Greene's literary gift, later, was to locate the moment of crisis when a character transgresses a border of some sort, whether geographical, religious or political, and life is exposed in all its drab wonder.
East-West border tensions were rife in the Baltic outpost of Estonia, which Greene visited in spring 1934, “for no reason”, he writes in his 1980 memoir Ways of Escape, “except escape to somewhere new”. His fellow passenger on the flight from Latvia was an ex-Anglican clergyman installed in the Estonian capital of Tallinn as a diplomat. Greene does not name the man but he was Peter Edmund James Leslie, appointed His Majesty's Vice-Consul in Tallinn in 1931. Leslie was a Catholic convert who worked, rather dubiously, as a munitions salesman. He might have been a spy in an Eric Ambler novel. In fact, Leslie was Greene's first (and possibly inadvertent) contact with British intelligence. A Foreign Office file notes: “Leslie is one of the best representatives the SIS [the Secret Intelligence Service, or M16] have got in eastern Europe.”
Espionage runs through Greene's life like a Cold War melodrama. A film sketch conceived by Greene in 1944, “Nobody to Blame”, concerns a British sales representative in Estonia (“Latesthia”) for Singer Sewing Machines, who turns out to be an SIS spy. The film was never made as it poked fun at the British Secret Service; yet it contained the bare bones of what was to become “Our Man in Tallinn”, later Our Man in Havana. In 1988, anticipating my first visit to Soviet Tallinn, I wrote to Greene asking why he moved Our Man in Havanafrom Estonia in the 1930s to Cuba in the 1950s. Greene explained that a Secret Service comedy about an expatriate vacuum cleaner salesman who gets “sucked up” into espionage would be more credible in pre-Castro Havana, with its louche nightclubs and promise of tropical oblivion, than in Soviet-occupied Tallinn. He concluded: “I already knew Cuba and my sympathies were with the Fidelistas in the mountains… One could hardly sympathise with the main character if he was to be involved in the Hitler war.”
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