Our Man in Havana

James Wormold sells Atomic Pile suction cleaners in pre-revolutionary Havana and is broke enough, mostly on account of his daughter Milly's expensive tastes, to accept Hawthorne's recruitment into MI6 despite having nothing to report. Rather than confess he has no network, Wormold invents one: a pilot, a nightclub dancer, an engineer, all fictional, all paid a real salary he pockets. Greene's joke is structural as well as comic: a man who sells appliances nobody needs starts selling intelligence nobody can verify, and London buys both with the same uncritical enthusiasm.

The turning point is a set of diagrams Wormold submits as reconnaissance sketches of a secret installation somewhere in the mountains, drawn, when London presses for technical detail, directly from the cross-section of a vacuum cleaner's internal parts. His superiors treat the enlarged nozzle assemblies as terrifying evidence of a new weapon, and agents commissioned on his fabricated dossier are subsequently really recruited, given real code names, and paid with real money that starts a chain of consequence Wormold never intended and cannot stop.

Once the fiction has enough believers, it starts protecting itself: a real assassination attempt targets Wormold, and one of his invented agents, an engineer named Raúl whom Wormold made up entirely, is reported dead in a plane crash Wormold cannot explain and did not order. Greene's genuinely bleak insight, tucked inside a farce, is that an intelligence apparatus doesn't need real information to generate real bodies, it only needs someone credulous enough at the top, and Captain Segura, the local police chief courting Milly, supplies exactly the casual violence that turns paperwork lethal.

Wormold and Segura play checkers with a set where each captured piece is a different miniature rum bottle, which the loser has to drink, a running gag Greene uses to stage the novel's real power balance without a word of exposition: Segura always wins, always by design, and Wormold's compliance in getting quietly drunk across the board from the man investigating him says more about Havana's occupying hierarchies of British commerce, Batista's police, and American money than the espionage plot does directly.