The first volume of Graham Greene's authorized biography by Norman Sherry was published in 1989. Before the second was completed in 1993, Greene had died. In 1994, an unauthorized biography by Michael Shelden, written without access to unpublished material and letters, appeared, as did a portrait by Fr Leopoldo Duran, a Catholic priest who had been a friend and travelling companion of Greene's over more than twenty years. Fr Duran was alone with Greene when he died, after receiving the final rites of the Church in which he claimed to be an agnostic. His portrait has the advantage of conversations in moments of pleasure and relaxation. But Greene lived his life in many rooms; an intensely private man, who disliked interviews, he warned his biographers that those whowanted to depict his life would face an almost impossible task, as he had so energetically covered or even distorted his tracks. ‘If anybody ever tries to write a biography of me, how complicated they are going to find it, and how misled they are going to be.’

The novelist whose narratives often derived tension from the theme of the pursuer and the pursued, the hunter and the hunted; the man whose close connection with the Intelligence Services may perhaps never be entirely revealed, lived in shadows of his own psychological making. As Yvonne Cloetta, the woman who remained his close companion during the last quarter of his life, wrote in her introduction to his posthumously published dream diary, A World of my Own (1992), ‘Graham guarded his privacy as fiercely as he respected the privacy of others’ (WO, p. vii). In this, the ordinary English reticence of Greene's generation and class was fused with the extraordinary harbouring of the sources of his creative talent. Secrecy preserved the interest of what he was making, as it also saved him from the boredom by which he claimed to be tormented throughout his life. Life and art were involved in an intricate web of concealment and disclosure, where in the end only God could be the true detective. This idea has shaped the conscience of the Catholic novels; but in The Honorary Consul (1973) he returned to it as a way of demarcating political and literary change.