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 . . .
I first read Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train when I was 12 and the set-up was instantly recognizable . . . It was Greene’s fourth novel and he badly needed a success. Married and still in his late twenties, he had already committed what his family must have seen as career suicide. He had surrendered the status of leader-writer on The Times and the comfort of a coal fire in the subs office in order to write fiction. One might quite reasonably argue that a working life that started at four o’clock in the afternoon already allowed plenty of leeway for other writing. But Greene, immensely private, constitutionally restless, was not a natural employee. Furthermore, he had just been cursed with one of the cruellest fates that can befall a young writer – he had written a very well-received first novel.
‘Don’t give up the day job till your fifth novel,’ John (Room at the Top) Braine once gruffly advised me adding, with the characteristic short ‘a’ of his Bradford upbringing, ‘Frances, you don’t know if you can do it till then.’ But Graham Greene thought he did know, and made the painful discovery that, though one book about your own psyche may interest the punters, three on the trot has them bulk buying J. B. Priestly instead.
Frances Donnelly on Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train (Issue 22)
