The novel is narrated by Colonel Calloway, an English policeman in the occupied city of Vienna, in 1949. After the war Vienna was divided into zones and controlled by four countries – Russia, France, the USA and the UK, with a central zone controlled in turns by each of the four.

Crime and racketeering is widespread, with shortages of basic supplies making essentials such as penicillin highly profitable. Rollo Martins, a womanising author of pulp westerns, comes to Vienna to meet his old school friend, Harry Lime, only to be told that Lime has died in a car crash a few days earlier.

Calloway tries to tell Martins that Lime was involved in racketeering, but he doesn’t want to hear, and decides to investigate Lime’s death. Interviewing some of the witnesses to the ‘car crash’ he discovers that a mysterious third man was present when Lime died.

This is an extraordinarily atmospheric book, suffused with images of post-war Vienna. Suspicion and paranoia are a feature of every encounter, every relationship in this divided city. And, the mysterious figure of Harry Lime looms over all of the characters.