Our Man in Havana

Jim Wormold sells vacuum cleaners in pre-revolutionary Havana. When British intelligence recruits him as a spy, he has no information to give — so he invents it, sending back elaborate drawings of his vacuum cleaner parts labeled as secret military installations. The joke turns lethal when someone starts killing his imaginary agents. Greene's comedy is knife-sharp: a satire of espionage, colonialism, and the particular absurdity of powerful men believing what they want to believe. The 1950s Havana is rendered in precise detail — the Tropicana nightclub, the corruption, the Batista regime's last decadent gasp — a city on the edge of revolution, too drunk on its own excess to see it coming.