Scobie, a police officer in a fly-blown West African colony during the war, is above suspicion

Then, passed over for promotion, he is forced to borrow money from a Syrian trader to send his faded wife, Louise, on holiday.

In her absence he falls in love with a pathetic child widow ... and, inexorably, his conscience and his love of God lead him to disaster.

Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as a sub-editor on The Times. He established his reputation with his fourth novel, Stamboul Train. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in Journey Without Maps, and on his return was appointed film critic of the Spectator. In 1926 he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote The Lawless Roads and, later, his famous novel The Power and the Glory. Brighton Rock was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the Spectator. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone front 1941 to 1943. This later produced his novel, The Heart of the Matter, set in West Africa.

As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography - A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape and A World of My Own (published posthumously) - two of biography and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in Reflections. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and The Third Man was written as a film treatment. A great number of his film writings, reviews, scripts and interviews have been published as Mornings in the Dark: A Graham Greene Film Reader (1993). Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour.

Graham Greene died in April 1991. Among the many people. who paid tribute to hint on his death were Kingsley Amis: 'He will be missed all over the world. Until today, he was our greatest living novelist'; Alec Guinness: 'He was a great writer who spoke brilliantly to a whole generation. He was almost prophet-like with a surprising humility'; and William Golding: 'Graham Greene was in a class by himself ... He will be read and remembered as the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety.'