From The Man Within (1929) to The Captain and the Enemy (1988), Graham Greene engaged in a lifelong dialogue with Joseph Conrads political, psychological and melodramatic fictions. Repressing Conrads political anxieties, his early work displaces the protagonists existential dilemma into the form of the thriller or - alternatively -the Catholic novel. After The Quiet American (1955), however, Greenes novels return to politics, introducing comic variations which transform Conrads masterplot into a mixed genre uniquely his own, a process charted in this book, the first full-length study of the subject.