Authors Like Graham Greene

Joseph Conrad

Polish-British · Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), The Secret Agent (1907)

Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857 in Berdychiv, then in the Russian Empire, spent twenty years at sea and wrote in English, his third language. Heart of Darkness draws on his own voyage up the Congo River in 1890, and The Secret Agent is a London novel about anarchists, police and a bomb. In a 1975 lecture the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe argued that Heart of Darkness is a racist book, a critique that still shapes how it is read.

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John le Carré

British · The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), A Perfect Spy (1986)

John le Carré was the pen name of David Cornwell (1931–2020), who worked for MI5 and then MI6 until the success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold let him write full-time. His novels, many following the intelligence officer George Smiley, show espionage as bureaucracy, betrayal and compromise. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a hunt for a Soviet mole at the top of British intelligence, a story shaped by the Philby case.

Evelyn Waugh

British · A Handful of Dust (1934), Brideshead Revisited (1945), Sword of Honour (1952–1961)

Waugh (1903–1966) made his name with satirical novels about bright young things such as Decline and Fall (1928) and was received into the Catholic Church in 1930. Brideshead Revisited follows an army officer's memories of an aristocratic Catholic family and their house; the Sword of Honour trilogy draws on his own service in the Second World War. He and Greene were friends for decades.

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François Mauriac

French · Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927), Vipers' Tangle (1932)

Mauriac (1885–1970) was born in Bordeaux and set most of his novels among the landowning Catholic families of the Gironde. Thérèse Desqueyroux follows a young wife who tries to poison her husband, and Vipers' Tangle is the bitter testament of an old man who hates his family. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1952 and was also a prominent journalist who denounced torture by the French army in Algeria.

Shūsaku Endō

Japanese · The Sea and Poison (1958), Silence (1966), Deep River (1993)

Endō (1923–1996) was baptised a Catholic as a boy and studied French Catholic literature in Lyon. Silence, which won the Tanizaki Prize, follows a Portuguese Jesuit in seventeenth-century Japan during the persecution of Christians, faced with renouncing his faith to end the torture of others; Martin Scorsese filmed it in 2016. Critics called Endō the Graham Greene of Japan.

Patricia Highsmith

American · Strangers on a Train (1950), The Price of Salt (1952), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)

Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, spent much of her later life in Europe and died in Switzerland in 1995. Strangers on a Train, filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, and five novels about the charming murderer Tom Ripley made her name; The Price of Salt, a love story between two women, appeared under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. Greene called her “the poet of apprehension”. Her diaries and biographers record open antisemitism and racism.

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Muriel Spark

Scottish · Memento Mori (1959), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Driver's Seat (1970)

Spark was born in Edinburgh in 1918 and was received into the Catholic Church in 1954; Greene was among the established writers who encouraged her as she began her first novel, The Comforters (1957). The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie follows a teacher in 1930s Edinburgh and the girls she shapes, one of whom betrays her. Spark died in Tuscany in 2006.

Every book by Muriel Spark →

Eric Ambler

British · Epitaph for a Spy (1938), The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), Journey into Fear (1940)

Ambler (1909–1998) trained as an engineer and worked in advertising before writing a run of thrillers in the late 1930s in which ordinary men are dragged into the business of arms dealers, police and spies across Europe. In The Mask of Dimitrios an English crime novelist traces the life of a dead criminal across the Balkans. He later wrote screenplays, including The Cruel Sea, which was nominated for an Academy Award.

Robert Stone

American · Dog Soldiers (1974), A Flag for Sunrise (1981)

Stone (1937–2015) was born in Brooklyn, served in the US Navy and worked as a correspondent in Vietnam, the background of Dog Soldiers, about heroin smuggled from Saigon to California, which won the National Book Award in 1975. A Flag for Sunrise is set in an invented Central American country on the eve of revolution, among a nun, an anthropologist, a drifter and the American intelligence men watching them.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Vietnamese-American · The Sympathizer (2015), The Refugees (2017), The Committed (2021)

Nguyen was born in Buôn Ma Thuột, Vietnam, in 1971 and came to the United States as a refugee in 1975. The Sympathizer, the confession of a communist double agent who flees Saigon in 1975 with a South Vietnamese general, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016 and was adapted for television by HBO in 2024. He teaches at the University of Southern California.