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private man, confiding his fears and beliefs to a lover; the priest Leopoldo Duran has shown us Greene in his later years, tooling around Spain with his clerical friend in a spirit of fun and theological enquiry. Bernie Diederich gives us here the final and perhaps most important piece of the puzzle, an indelible portrait of the novelist at work, taking everything in, treating the dark streets as his confessional, intuitively reading those who cross his path even as they vie to become characters in the next Graham Greene novel. As Diederich points out, Greene could combine, almost in the same breath, the ‘boyish exuberance’ of the lifelong adventurer and the watchful, penetrating gaze of a man who was taken in by very little.
    When I put down the pages you hold in your hand I felt that I had myself travelled with the man who lives on in so many of us and felt the warmth of his fond, but always unsparing, glance.
    Pico Iyer
Author of
The Man Within My Head: Graham Greene, My Father and Me

2012

|    INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD GREENE
    This story about Graham Greene begins in the high tops of the
Pamir.
The vessel’s arrangement of sails and ropes would have made perfect sense to Drake or to Nelson, but its hull and its four masts were made of steel — the ship belonged to two ages. One of its sailors was Bernard Diederich, a sixteen-year-old New Zealander who had quit school and family to sail across the Pacific in the majestic barque.
    Diederich went on to serve the rest of the Second World War aboard an armed American tanker fuelling the Pacific war machine. The young sailor came ashore in more ports than I can imagine and saw for himself what Greene called ‘the dangerous edge of things’ — outposts of the modern age where greed and cruelty made no effort to hide themselves. Diederich was himself a mixture of old-fashioned virtues — courage, endurance and a sense of justice — all of them toughened by the demands of his life at sea. In the years that lay ahead his work would put him in the position of Conrad’s Marlow — reporting on things seen in ‘the heart of darkness’.
    In 1949 Diederich decided to make his home in Haiti where he established his own newspaper, the
Haiti Sun,
and worked as a resident correspondent for the
New York Times
and other news agencies. In those days Haiti was free of crime and promised to become a paradise for tourists. The country had memories of freedom going back to the revolt of 1791 when Toussaint L’Ouverture led slaves to overthrow their colonial masters. Despite an American occupation from 1915 to 1934, Haiti was a democracy in the 1950s. As a newsman covering the visit of a celebrity, Diederich met Greene briefly in 1954 and then became much closer to him on a second visit in 1956 when Greene brought with him his mistress Catherine Walston, the inspiration for Sarah in
The End of the Affair.
    That was the last of the good years in Haiti. In 1957 François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, a quiet and mannerly physician, took power and began to transform the country on psychopathic principles. He promoted a myth of terror based on elements of the Voodoo religion. Diederich tells us he became known as the
zombificateur,
the zombie-maker. His henchmen, the Tontons Macoutes, robbed, beat, tortured, abducted or killed thousands of his real and supposed opponents. The rest of the world paid little attention to events in this obscurecountry, and the United States was disinclined to act for fear that Duvalier might be replaced by another Castro. It was impossible for his victims to regard Papa Doc as a ‘lesser evil’.
    By 1963 the butchery in Haiti became widely known, largely owing to Diederich’s reporting. The regime decided that he, too, was an enemy. He was arrested and locked in solitary confinement while it was decided whether to kill him. He was cut off from his Haitian wife and young son — both of them