More successful than most of Greene's "entertainments," this comic spy tale set in pre-Castro Cuba concerns an insignificant little man-a vacuum cleaner salesman to be precise-who, against his better judgment, becomes MI6's "man in Havana." A longtime Havana resident, Englishman Jim Wormold is divorced, but the custodian of his beautiful, Catholic teenage daughter, Millie. One day he is approached by Hawthorne-a hilariously daft MI6 agent, whose speech is littered with upper crust slang-who shanghais him into becoming a spy. Although he is resistant to the whole notion, his best friend (a German named Hasselbacher), suggests he simply manufacture his sources and intelligence and take the ample money. Millie's expensive tastes and his own devotion to her result in his succumbing to this temptation, and he spends a few happy weeks inventing subagents and fake intelligence. For the first time in years he's doing something interesting, and no longer has money worries-in the funniest bit, he submits drawings of vacuum cleaner parts as sketches of a new Cuban weapons installation.
Of course, this being Greene, complications arise. He is sent reinforcements from the London office, and must scramble to keep them in the dark as to his deception. At the same time, his inventions seem to be taking on a life of their own as people start dying around him, and somebody seems to think he's a real spy. Integral to all this is the ever-present Captain Seguras, a policeman of some renown as a sadist who seeks Millie's hand in marriage. Although a deep melancholy and tragedy lurks in the background, and there's a rather lame love injected, it remains a delightfully absurd tale, one of Greene's better efforts. One is rather reminded of Joseph Conrad's classic, The Secret Agent, in which an ordinary shopkeeper receives payment as a spy for doing nothing-payments which allow him to keep the company of a beautiful woman-and whose misguided scheme ultimately crumbles around him.