Greene died in Vevey, Switzerland, on April 3, 1991. In the service the priest declared, "My faith tells me that he is now with God, or on the way there." Two days before his death Greene signed a note that gave his approval to Norman Sherry to complete an authorized biography. The first part of the book appeared in 1989.
As a writer Greene was very prolific and versatile. He wrote five dramas and screenplays for several films based on his novels. The Third Man (1949) was developed from a single sentence: "I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand." To do research for the film, Greene went to Vienna, where a reported told him about the black market trade in watered-down penicillin. With the Ј9,000 he had received from Alexander Korda, he bough a yacht and a villa in Anacapri. Later he portryed Korda in LOSER TAKES ALL (1955) - he was Dreuther, the business tycoon.
In the 1930s and early 1940s he wrote over five hundred reviews of books, films, and plays, mainly for The Spectator. Greene's film reviews are still worth reading and often better than the films he praised or slashed. Hitchcock's "inadequate sense of reality" irritated Greene, he compared Greta Garbo to a beautiful Arab mare, and gave a warm welcome to a new star, Ingrid Bergman. When Hitchcock had troubles with the screenplay of I Confess (1953), Greene refused to help the director, saying he was interested in adapting only his own stories for the screen. In the story a priest is wrongfully accused of a murder. Although Greene knew that some critics considered his novels entertainment, his own models were Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford. In his personal library was a large collection of James's work.
Greene's first published book was BABBLING APRIL (1925), a collection of poetry. It was followed by two novels in the style of Joseph Conrad. The title for THE MAN WITHIN (1929) was taken from Sir Thomas Browne's (1605-1682) "There's another man within me that's angry with me." Greene started to write it after an operation for appending on his sick leave from The Times. The film version of the book, starring Michael Redgrave and Richard Attenborough, was made in 1947. Greene received a letter from Istanbul in which the film was praised for its daring homosexuality.
"In Stamboul Train for the first and last time in my life I deliberately set out to write a book to please, one which with luck might be made into a film. The devil looks after his own and I succeeded in both aims, though the film rights seemed at the time an unlikely dream, for before I had completed the book, Marlene Dietrich had appeared in Shanghai Express, the English had made Rome Express, and even the Russians had produced their railway film, Turksib. My film came last and was far and away the worst, though not so bad as a later television production by the BBC." (from Introduction, in Stamboul Train, 1974)
After the unsuccessful attempts as a novelist, Greene was about to abandon writing. His first popular success was STAMBOUL TRAIN (1932), a thriller with a topical and political flavour. Greene wrote it deliberately to please his readers and to attract filmmakers. One of its characters, Quin Savory, was said to be a parody of J.B. Priestley - Greene depicted nastily the writer as a sex offender. Priestley had just published a novel, which led some reviewers to compare him with Dickens. In Greene's story Savory was a popular novelist in the manner of Dickens. Next year he attacked another well-loved writer, Beatric Potter, in an article called 'Beatrix Potter: A Critical Estimate'. Also the American actress, Shirley Temple, aged nine, got her share when Greene wrote in the magazine Night and Day that "her admirers - middle-aged men and clergymen - respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality..." This time Greene had to pay for his remark.
THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT (1939) is a problematic work. In it the mysterious Forbes/Furstein, a rich Jew, plans to destroy traditional English culture from within. However, in 1981 the author was invited to Israel and awarded the Jerusalem Prize. He had visited Israel in 1967 for the first time, and spent some of the time lying against a sand dune under Egyptian fire, and thinking that the Six Day War "was a bit of misnomer. The war was too evidently still in progress." Greene's religious convictions did not become overtly apparent in his fiction until THE BRIGHTON ROCK (1938), which depicted a teenage gangster Pinkie