Guardian Newspaper 1000 Novels discussion

In September we will be reading The Third Man by Graham Greene for our Crime category - who's in?

I've always thought this an odd inclusion on the list, because it's essentially a novelisation of the film. Greene wrote a film script first and then adapted that for a novel after its success. He wrote plenty other far more successful and well known books that began life as books.

(having just read Wikipedia, it seems that the novella / adaptation was written ahead of the script as a film treatment, but originally not intended for publication).

I’m in!

just about to start. it's available for free on the Internet Archive.

I’ve just finished this, it was quite gripping and the setting of rundown post war Vienna was brilliantly done.

I've read the opening third - it's going to be a quick read. That throwaway line in the first few pages - "we never grow accustomed to finding out that we're less important to others than they are to" - is quite possibly the greatest sentence Graham Greene ever wrote.

I’m thinking this is a better Cold War story than anything John Le Carre ever wrote. It has its weaknesses—Anna Schmidt is a woefully underdeveloped character, and Ilse Koch is merely a name and not a character at all—but I am so glad I read it!