Graham Greene Against the World

Cool. Thanks. I probably should have checked that before posting. Russian Roulette is definitely on my shopping list.

Yep, it was retitled for the US market. That, incidentally, happened with a number of Greene's earlier novels (A Gun for Sale, for example, became This Gun for Hire). Later U.S. editions restored the original titles. Interestingly, a request from the publisher to retitle his late novel, The Human Factor, led to Greene changing publishers so while everything before that was published by Viking Penguin, beginning with The Human Factor, his U.S. publisher was Simon & Schuster (and later Reinhardt Books, owned by a friend, for his last novel and the miscellaneous books that gathered many of his uncollected shorter writings).

"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" was a thinly fictionalized retelling of this period. John le Carré's contempt for the people in the organizations he wrote about could be seen as a reaction to the excesses of the era Greene wrote about.

Perhaps by necessity, these aren't good people. The le Carré view can be summarized as, for that business you need people who only need the justification of the approval of their handler (and maybe a few dollars) or a story about being aligned to a secret power to release their inborn urge to be an utter piece of shit. He describes a world of compromised people, working and blackmailing each other all the way down. That they often use investment banking and journalism as a cover is no accident. I found his books more entertaining.

A lot of these people were driven by vanity, need, arrogance, ambition, narcissism, greed, ideology, biases etc.

Well, these sounds familiar.

Ah, if I access these comments from the comments pages of the users who posted them, the "3 hours ago" timestamp becomes "1 day ago", so that seems to resolve things. Thanks!