ABSTRACT
In the preface to his tale Incognita, William Congreve made a distinction between novels, which were relatively realistic, and prose romances, which were relatively far-fetched. The Graham Greene has nevertheless opened some benignly Arcadian vistas as compensation for the infernal or purgatorial landscapes of the earlier, more intense, novels of Greeneland. When A Gun for Sale appeared in 1936, the list of works which appeared in the preliminary matter showed that Graham Greene was dividing his longer narrative works into the categories of ‘Novels’ and ‘Entertainments’. The distinction was rather arbitrary: though the ‘entertainments’ may have been conceived as thrillers which might eventually be filmed, there is no marked generic distinction between, say, A Gun for Sale and It’s a Battlefield, for both have ingredients of the popular thriller mixed with topical political content. From the 1950s onwards, his literary works became more diversified, and comedy played an increasing role.
