‘Graham Greene is one of the most important British writers of the twentieth century – he brought something undeniably new to fiction.’ Daily Telegraph
Stamboul Train is a classic espionage thriller by master storyteller Graham Greene. Carleton Myatt meets Coral Musker, a naive English chorus girl, aboard the Orient Express as it heads across Europe to Constantinople. As their relationship develops, they find themselves caught up in the fates of the other passengers and drawn into a web of espionage, murder and lies.
This edition is introduced by Christopher Hitchens.
Reviewed by Frances Donnelly in Slightly Foxed Issue 22.
Don’t Give up the Day Job
Frances Donnelly
If there were teenage novels in the 1950s, I never found them. Instead the gap between Last Term at Malory Towers and the foothills of serious literature was plugged, most enjoyably, by period adventure stories. Two types appealed. In the first, fair-haired young Englishmen, armed only with a first-class degree from Cambridge and ‘a little Hindustani’, became unwilling players in the Great Game on the North West Frontier. In the second, a rail journey across between-the-wars Europe plunged ordinary men, often from Haslemere, into a maelstrom of violence and treachery.
These tales were the logical next step from Enid Blyton and followed a similar pattern. After danger and uncertainty, and the demonstration of some personal courage, the status quo is firmly reinstated. Blyton’s triumphal ginger-beer moment becomes the whisky-and-soda conclusion in a Pall Mall club or back in Haslemere. (‘Good trip, darling?’ enquires his wife. ‘Oh, pretty average,’ her spouse somewhat evasively replies.)
I first read Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train when I was 12, and the set-up was instantly recognizable – a disparate group of English people thrown together on a rail journey across a snowy Europe in the early 1930s. Their characters are trenchantly and vividly described . . .
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 22, Summer 2009
Don’t Give up the Day Job
I first read Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train when I was 12, and the set-up was instantly recognizable – a disparate group of English people thrown together on a rail journey across a snowy Europe...
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