First published in 1954 by Heinemann, Twenty One Stories is a collection of short stories written between 1929 and 1954, most of which were previously published in his 1947 volume Nineteen Stories. The other two were from The Basement Room collection. Few were worthy of further publication, as Greene admitted in the foreword: “I am only too conscious of the defects of these stories. The short story is an exacting form which I have never properly practised”.
Many of the stories are very raw and have the plot end in a unexpected death, suicide or murder. The characters are despondent people crawling through life either failing to see light or shunning it altogether for the comfort of their sad but familiar existence.
The End of The Party (1929)
A chilling story in which ten-year-old twins are forced to play hide & seek in the dark. One tries everything to wriggle out of the game due to the same terror in the previous year, but is forced into the game. Knowing all this his brother, Peter, makes efforts to be the first to find & touch him in the dark. When the lights are switched on he finds his brother has died of terror at his touch. The story induces fear and includes innocence as a very dreary mix.
I Spy (1930)
While his mother’s asleep , a child, Charlie, tiptoes to his father’s shop to steal some cigarettes. He secretly watches his father offer cigarettes to some policeman. Charlie is affected by the way his father is around those men - secretive and scared. Charlie later realises how these emotions run in the family.
While his mother’s asleep , a child, Charlie, tiptoes to his father’s shop to steal some cigarettes. He secretly watches his father offer cigarettes to some policeman. Charlie is affected by the way his father is around those men - secretive and scared. Charlie later realises how these emotions run in the family.
The Innocent (1937)
A man who is 36 meets a girl and they have a shared childhood. He remembers the house where they shared music lessons together and how he scrawled a message of his devoted love and left it in a wooden hole for her. The man has wandered to the very house where this happened, and now, to his amazement, discovers that the hole is still there. He pokes around and finds the paper with his childhood message on it. To his horror, he discovers that it is the crudest picture of a couple having intercourse.
A man who is 36 meets a girl and they have a shared childhood. He remembers the house where they shared music lessons together and how he scrawled a message of his devoted love and left it in a wooden hole for her. The man has wandered to the very house where this happened, and now, to his amazement, discovers that the hole is still there. He pokes around and finds the paper with his childhood message on it. To his horror, he discovers that it is the crudest picture of a couple having intercourse.
A Drive In The Country (1937)
It takes a drive in the night for a girl to realise her true values. A young lady is sick of living with her parents on a council estate. So she sneaks out one night to meet a useless man named Fred, who collects her in his car and drives her out to the country, drinking spirits on the way, where she discovers he has a gun in his pocket and plans a suicide pact, but she runs away, hears the shot of Fred shooting himself, stumbles back to a roadhouse, hitches a lift with another drunk man, and sneaks back into her house. She had good time to think over her life with relation to her parents and a new respect for the solid, petit bourgeois values of her father.
It takes a drive in the night for a girl to realise her true values. A young lady is sick of living with her parents on a council estate. So she sneaks out one night to meet a useless man named Fred, who collects her in his car and drives her out to the country, drinking spirits on the way, where she discovers he has a gun in his pocket and plans a suicide pact, but she runs away, hears the shot of Fred shooting himself, stumbles back to a roadhouse, hitches a lift with another drunk man, and sneaks back into her house. She had good time to think over her life with relation to her parents and a new respect for the solid, petit bourgeois values of her father.
Across The Bridge (1938)
Greene travelled round Mexico from January to May 1938, a trip which resulted in the travel book, The Lawless Roads, and his first popular novel, The Power and The Glory. The story Across the Bridge was probably inspired by the travel.
In this short story a crooked businessman, whose scams have been discovered, has fled England to a border town just inside Mexico. Two detectives arrive to arrest him but only have an old photo and so don’t recognise him. But they do spot the crook’s dog and kidnap it, taking it across the border to the States. The next day the crook himself crosses back to the States. The narrator of the story is chatting to the detectives in a bar when the dog (outside in the car) starts yapping, leaps out of the car and runs down the hill towards its owner. One of the detectives jumps into the car and then there is a pursuit. At the last minute the dog swerves in front of the car which takes evasive action and runs over the rich crook.
Greene travelled round Mexico from January to May 1938, a trip which resulted in the travel book, The Lawless Roads, and his first popular novel, The Power and The Glory. The story Across the Bridge was probably inspired by the travel.
In this short story a crooked businessman, whose scams have been discovered, has fled England to a border town just inside Mexico. Two detectives arrive to arrest him but only have an old photo and so don’t recognise him. But they do spot the crook’s dog and kidnap it, taking it across the border to the States. The next day the crook himself crosses back to the States. The narrator of the story is chatting to the detectives in a bar when the dog (outside in the car) starts yapping, leaps out of the car and runs down the hill towards its owner. One of the detectives jumps into the car and then there is a pursuit. At the last minute the dog swerves in front of the car which takes evasive action and runs over the rich crook.
Jubilee (1936)
‘Soiled by showers and soot the streamers blew across Piccadilly, draughty with desolation.’ There is a certain pleasure in reading Greene to see just how much despairing description and seedy atmosphere he can shoe-horn into a tiny scrap of plot. In this story a useless Mr Chalfont preys on women in Mayfair bars but the biter is bit when the woman he picks on turns out to be a retired hooker and she turns the tables on him.
‘Soiled by showers and soot the streamers blew across Piccadilly, draughty with desolation.’ There is a certain pleasure in reading Greene to see just how much despairing description and seedy atmosphere he can shoe-horn into a tiny scrap of plot. In this story a useless Mr Chalfont preys on women in Mayfair bars but the biter is bit when the woman he picks on turns out to be a retired hooker and she turns the tables on him.
Brother (1936)
A clash happens in a Parisian bar and the political situation at the time is shown through the story where the bartender doesn't like communists.
A clash happens in a Parisian bar and the political situation at the time is shown through the story where the bartender doesn't like communists.
Proof Positive (1930)
In a special meeting of the Psychic Society, the audience is not aware that the one who called the meeting has been dead for a week.
In a special meeting of the Psychic Society, the audience is not aware that the one who called the meeting has been dead for a week.
A Chance For Mr Lever (1936)
In 1935 Greene went for a four-week, 350-mile trek through Liberia in West Africa. The trip resulted in the travel book, Journey Without Maps and the second of his ‘great’ novels, The Heart of The Matter. This short story captures Greene’s horror at the poverty, the heat and the disease of the country.
A modern man, Mr Lever lost all his savings in the crash, has to go back to work, for a dodgy mine equipment company who sent him out to Africa on a wild goose chase to track down a prospector named Davidson to approve the machinery Lever is trying to sell. Lever complains about the heat, the disease, the lazy blacks etc. When he finally gets to Davidson out in the jungle he is dying in his tent. Lever has a moment of madness when he forges Davidson’s signature on a letter to his bosses saying, Yes, go ahead and buy Lever’s new machine. The omniscient narrator sadistically enjoys telling us that Lever has been bitten by a mosquito carrying yellow fever and will be dead in three days.
In 1935 Greene went for a four-week, 350-mile trek through Liberia in West Africa. The trip resulted in the travel book, Journey Without Maps and the second of his ‘great’ novels, The Heart of The Matter. This short story captures Greene’s horror at the poverty, the heat and the disease of the country.
A modern man, Mr Lever lost all his savings in the crash, has to go back to work, for a dodgy mine equipment company who sent him out to Africa on a wild goose chase to track down a prospector named Davidson to approve the machinery Lever is trying to sell. Lever complains about the heat, the disease, the lazy blacks etc. When he finally gets to Davidson out in the jungle he is dying in his tent. Lever has a moment of madness when he forges Davidson’s signature on a letter to his bosses saying, Yes, go ahead and buy Lever’s new machine. The omniscient narrator sadistically enjoys telling us that Lever has been bitten by a mosquito carrying yellow fever and will be dead in three days.
The Hint of An Explanation (1948)
Two men on a train in Yorkshire get talking about politics then religion. One’s a Catholic and tells an anecdote about how he was a boy in a small East Anglian town, and is cornered by the town baker, named Blacker, who had an obsessive hatred of Catholics. He threatens to break into the boy’s bedroom and slit his throat unless he smuggles him out a communion wafer. At his next communion the boy keeps the communion wafer in his mouth, slips it out at a safe moment, and takes it home with him. But then he refuses to hand it over when Blacker comes knocking at his window that evening. The boy changes his mind and swallows the wafer and is astonished to watch Blacker burst into tears and walk away. He is convinced the baker was an instrument of the Devil trying to pervert God’s love. His story, the teller’s overcoat falls open and the narrator sees that the teller is a Catholic priest.
The story has a Catholic theology to it and the poignancy of the Catholic priest’s personality is portrayed.
Two men on a train in Yorkshire get talking about politics then religion. One’s a Catholic and tells an anecdote about how he was a boy in a small East Anglian town, and is cornered by the town baker, named Blacker, who had an obsessive hatred of Catholics. He threatens to break into the boy’s bedroom and slit his throat unless he smuggles him out a communion wafer. At his next communion the boy keeps the communion wafer in his mouth, slips it out at a safe moment, and takes it home with him. But then he refuses to hand it over when Blacker comes knocking at his window that evening. The boy changes his mind and swallows the wafer and is astonished to watch Blacker burst into tears and walk away. He is convinced the baker was an instrument of the Devil trying to pervert God’s love. His story, the teller’s overcoat falls open and the narrator sees that the teller is a Catholic priest.
The story has a Catholic theology to it and the poignancy of the Catholic priest’s personality is portrayed.
The Second Death (1929)
Retelling of the Biblical Lazarus story, but with no names and in such a way that initially it seems as if it’s set in the present day, down to the characters calling each other ‘old man’. A young roustabout is summoned by the mother of his friend to the friend’s deathbed, and he tells him, terrified, about the last time everyone thought he was dead, but he woke and was alright, and it was that wandering preacher who did it.
Retelling of the Biblical Lazarus story, but with no names and in such a way that initially it seems as if it’s set in the present day, down to the characters calling each other ‘old man’. A young roustabout is summoned by the mother of his friend to the friend’s deathbed, and he tells him, terrified, about the last time everyone thought he was dead, but he woke and was alright, and it was that wandering preacher who did it.
A Day Saved (1935)
An fable like story about a man who called Robinson and describes himself as the shadow of another man who may be Canby or Wells, and who he plans to murder as he takes the train across Europe. An undefined third party advises his victim to save a day by flying and so the malevolent narrator sits behind him, helps him through customs, and translates his requests as they join a train, ending up carousing with the locals.
An fable like story about a man who called Robinson and describes himself as the shadow of another man who may be Canby or Wells, and who he plans to murder as he takes the train across Europe. An undefined third party advises his victim to save a day by flying and so the malevolent narrator sits behind him, helps him through customs, and translates his requests as they join a train, ending up carousing with the locals.
A Little Place Off The Edgeware Road (1939)
A typical Greene avatar wanders round London obsessed by his gloomy, suicidal thoughts. Everything is shit. He goes into a rubbish, half-empty cinema and a hairy man comes and sits next to him and gets him into conversation about murder, a new murder and then seems to brush fresh blood against him, on his hands and face. Does he even exist or is he the figment of the main character’s imagination?
A typical Greene avatar wanders round London obsessed by his gloomy, suicidal thoughts. Everything is shit. He goes into a rubbish, half-empty cinema and a hairy man comes and sits next to him and gets him into conversation about murder, a new murder and then seems to brush fresh blood against him, on his hands and face. Does he even exist or is he the figment of the main character’s imagination?
The Case For The Defence (1939)
Another short, punchy entertainment. The narrator reports on murder trials. A trial he’s covering collapses when the defence produces the defendant’s identical twin i.e. no witness can be sure which one of the two they saw. In the crowd outside court, one of the twins gets pushed under a bus and dies. A story with a reference to Catholic theology.
Another short, punchy entertainment. The narrator reports on murder trials. A trial he’s covering collapses when the defence produces the defendant’s identical twin i.e. no witness can be sure which one of the two they saw. In the crowd outside court, one of the twins gets pushed under a bus and dies. A story with a reference to Catholic theology.
When Greek Meets Greek (1941)
A rarity, a genuinely finished and amusing story. A plausible faker sets up a fraudulent Oxford college for a correspondence course during the War. A butler who has acquired the posh manners of his employers enrols his son in the fake college, saying he’ll pay later. (In reality, we learn the son is still in Borstal. The courses are taken by letter, so it doesn’t matter.) The fake’s daughter is clever and quick. When they hold a fraudulent diploma ceremony for the son, she and he both realise their respective parents are liars. Suddenly joined by this common link they fall in love, determined to turn the fake college into a really successful racket.
A rarity, a genuinely finished and amusing story. A plausible faker sets up a fraudulent Oxford college for a correspondence course during the War. A butler who has acquired the posh manners of his employers enrols his son in the fake college, saying he’ll pay later. (In reality, we learn the son is still in Borstal. The courses are taken by letter, so it doesn’t matter.) The fake’s daughter is clever and quick. When they hold a fraudulent diploma ceremony for the son, she and he both realise their respective parents are liars. Suddenly joined by this common link they fall in love, determined to turn the fake college into a really successful racket.
Men At Work (1940)
A comical story describing the futile bureaucratic activities of the Ministry of Information at the start of the War. Greene worked there for six months and was amazed at its ridiculousness, captured here in silly meetings with fatuous agendas.
A comical story describing the futile bureaucratic activities of the Ministry of Information at the start of the War. Greene worked there for six months and was amazed at its ridiculousness, captured here in silly meetings with fatuous agendas.
Alas, Poor Maling (1940)
A story about a man whose tummy rumbling perfectly mimics things he’s heard, like music. On one ill-fated occasion, just as a vital board meeting is starting, his stomach plays the air raid siren so convincingly that the meeting rushes down to the shelter and the decisive motion to amalgamate two printing business collapses.
The Blue Film (1954)
Carter has taken his tiresome wife on a tour of the Far East. She insists on doing risqué, dangerous things so he arranges for them to go to a dingy local’s house and watch blue movies. A darkly comical story of marital squibbing.
Special Duties (1954)
A Catholic satire where a secretary is cheating funds off her millionaire boss.
The Destructors (1954)
The collection concludes with a Lord of the Flies-type story, which is often referenced in essays about Greene. It’s about a gang of boys who are a menace to the townspeople.
A story about a man whose tummy rumbling perfectly mimics things he’s heard, like music. On one ill-fated occasion, just as a vital board meeting is starting, his stomach plays the air raid siren so convincingly that the meeting rushes down to the shelter and the decisive motion to amalgamate two printing business collapses.
The Blue Film (1954)
Carter has taken his tiresome wife on a tour of the Far East. She insists on doing risqué, dangerous things so he arranges for them to go to a dingy local’s house and watch blue movies. A darkly comical story of marital squibbing.
Special Duties (1954)
A Catholic satire where a secretary is cheating funds off her millionaire boss.
The Destructors (1954)
The collection concludes with a Lord of the Flies-type story, which is often referenced in essays about Greene. It’s about a gang of boys who are a menace to the townspeople.
