Graham Greene Dies; One of Century’s Great Writers : Literature: British expatriate’s novels included ‘The Power and the Glory’ and ‘Our Man in Havana.’

Graham Greene, one of the great novelists of this century, died Wednesday in a hospital near Lake Geneva, Switzerland. He was 86.

A master storyteller who wrote from his experiences roaming the back roads of the world, Greene had been hospitalized for several days. Greene had been suffering from a blood disease, said Robert Bertschy, administrator of La Providence Hospital in Vevey, but the specific cause of his death was not immediately given.

Born in England, Greene set the best of his two dozen novels amid decay and revolution in Mexico, Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, Cuba and Haiti.

Author of such celebrated novels as “The Power and the Glory,” “The Heart of the Matter,” “Our Man in Havana,” “The Comedians” and “The Quiet American,” Greene was an enormously popular novelist despite the gloominess of much of his work.

He created characters who are among the most tormented in modern fiction. They are exiles who have lost faith in their God, their country or themselves and who are goaded into action on behalf of a friend or a cause.

Greene’s work spanned half a century and inspired two generations of journalists, novelists and travel writers.

Sir Kingsley Amis, the British novelist, spoke for many when he said Wednesday: “He will be missed all over the world. He was our greatest living novelist.”

“He was a great and magical writer, hard to fit into any pattern,” said John Le Carre, the spy novelist who described Greene as his “guiding star.”

The crime writer P.D. James added: “Many people regard him as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, novelist of his generation, who achieved the double distinction of wide popularity and critical acclaim. It has always seemed reprehensible to me that he was never awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.”

Greene was one of a distinguished group of British literary expatriates--including D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley--who launched their writing careers after leaving England, which they found dull and stifling in the years immediately after World War I.

Greene, who eventually settled in the south of France, many years ago wrote of his wanderings: “We were a generation brought up on adventure stories who had missed the enormous disillusionment of the First War. So we went looking for adventure.”

Greene was so bored as a young man that he played Russian roulette with a loaded pistol. But he later came up with a better way to relieve the ennui: He began to travel--constantly.

He once told an interviewer that his trips were essential to his craft: “I travel because I have to see the scene. I can’t invent it.”

But he said his travels were also motivated by “the agreeable ingredient of fear,” and he once wrote: “Fear has an odd seduction. Fear and the sense of sex are linked in a secret conspiracy.”

Greene witnessed a number of this century’s violent upheavals and conflicts. He was in Prague in 1948 when the Communists took over Czechoslovakia; he witnessed the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in 1953; he was nearly hit by mortar fire while covering the 1967 Arab-Israeli war for a magazine.

And he was in Vietnam long before the parade of prize-winning journalists arrived there in the 1960s. Gloria Emerson, who covered the Vietnam War for the New York Times, recalled that as America’s involvement in the war increasingly dominated the news in the 1960s, she and her colleagues expected to one day see Greene sipping a vermouth cassis on the veranda of a Saigon hotel.

Greene had been in Saigon in the early 1950s. And for Emerson and other reporters, the novel that came out of that experience, “The Quiet American” (1955), was a disturbingly prophetic book. For although the French were fighting Ho Chi Minh when Greene was in Vietnam, his novel presaged that U.S. involvement and its tragic consequences.

The British character in “The Quiet American” is typical of the author’s protagonists--a shrewd observer struggling against a jaded passivity.

The book is written in the first person and, as with all of Greene’s novels, the very first paragraph draws the reader in:

“After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat: he had said, ‘I’ll be with you at latest by 10,’ and when midnight had struck, I couldn’t stay quiet any longer and went down into the street. A lot of old women in black trousers squatted on the landing. One trishaw driver pedaled slowly by towards the river front, and I could see the lamps burning where they had disembarked the new American planes. There was no sign of Pyle anywhere in the long street.”

Greene was also in Cuba just before the Batista regime fell in 1959, and he visited Fidel Castro’s mountain camp. But the author was not one to romanticize revolution. He later said of Cuba: “Many ordinary Cubans were definitely better off under Castro, but it was a shame about Havana. It used to be lively but became dreary.”

Sir Alec Guinness, who starred in the film version of Greene’s “Our Man in Havana,” recalled the author as a humble, far-seeing man who “spoke brilliantly for our generation.”

A critic of totalitarianism on the right and the left, Greene nevertheless befriended Cuba’s Castro, Panama’s Omar Torrijos and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. Often critical of American foreign policy, Greene strongly condemned the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama.

Greene’s first published novel was “The Man Within,” which came out in 1929 when the author was 25. Its success allowed Greene to quit his job as a newspaperman and write full time. More than 40 years later he was at the top of his powers with “The Honorary Consul,” published in 1973 to critical acclaim and bestseller popularity.

The publication of “Brighton Rock” in 1938 established Greene as a major novelist, and after that his books usually sold well. Over the years he also sold the film rights to a number of his novels, including “The Comedians” (1966), starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, about life under the terrifying reign of Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier in Haiti.

A critic of Greene’s first novels accused him of trying to imitate Joseph Conrad with his frequent use of metaphors. That criticism so jolted Greene that he completely changed his style, becoming over the years a master of lean, controlled prose.

Some critics have called the settings of his novels “Greeneland” because of their unrelenting squalor and bleakness. The label was meant to apply to psychological tone as well, for Greene’s view of the world was indeed bleak.

There was some speculation that this kept him from winning the Nobel Prize for literature, but he may also have been denied the prize because he was a hard writer to classify. An Anglican by birth, Greene converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926 and several of his novels focus on crises of faith and have priests as major characters.

But Greene, who wrote other novels that do not dwell on those themes, insisted he was not a “Catholic writer”--he was simply writing about characters who had “Catholic ideas.” He was assailed by some Catholics in 1948 when he implied in “The Heart of the Matter” that salvation is still possible for someone who commits suicide.

Although at different times in his life Greene embraced Catholicism and espoused communism, by the end of his life he had seemed to set both aside. He still had faith, he told an interviewer in 1982, and “faith is above belief.” But he admitted there was also doubt. He professed that to the end.

“I am riddled by doubts,” says the main character in Greene’s 1982 novel, “Monsignor Quixote.” The character is a priest, and he is speaking to his best friend, a Communist politician.

“I am sure of nothing,” Quixote says, “not even the existence of God, but doubt is not treachery as you Communists seem to think. Doubt is human.”

A shy, self-deprecating man, Greene once told an interviewer: “I have no talent. It’s just a question of working, of being able to put in the time.”

For many years Greene rose early and wrote in longhand for several hours. He wrote 500 words a day and stopped in mid-sentence so that he could pick up the thought the next morning.

When, in early 1985, he found that the well had gone dry, he kept up his daily writing schedule by recording his dreams, which he indexed by subject.

Greene was once married and had a son and daughter, born before World War II, but he called himself a “bad husband and a fickle lover.”

He was born Oct. 2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, a small town north of London where his father was headmaster of a school. Greene read modern history at Oxford and briefly belonged to the Communist Party there, which later led the U.S. government to label him a “prohibited immigrant.”

After college Greene worked briefly for a tobacco company and in 1926 took a job as an editor on the Times of London. The night desk work allowed him to write fiction during the day.

Greene worked for the British Foreign Office during World War II and was able to draw on that experience for several novels. About that time he met the Hungarian expatriate Alexander Korda, who rebuilt the British film industry after the war. Korda asked him almost casually one evening to write a screenplay about postwar Europe.

Greene wrote the following sentence on an envelope and handed it to Korda:

“I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.”

That was the beginning of “The Third Man,” a highly acclaimed film starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles.

The real third man was Kim Philby, a British intelligence officer who betrayed his country for years by passing secrets to the Soviet Union, to which he later fled and where he died in 1988. Philby, an old friend of Greene, was the last to be discovered in a notorious triumvirate of Britons spying for the Soviets in the 1950s. The others were Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.

Greene’s own admiration for the Soviet Union waned over the years but he claimed he still preferred it to the United States.

Philby said in a television interview once, “I won’t say that he (Greene) doesn’t like Americans as individuals, but what America stands for, American chauvinism, their conviction that they can teach people how to live--that is what he hates.”

Greene explained to the London Observer: “I would end my days sooner in Russia because there they pay writers the compliment of regarding them as a danger.” When pressed he said, “All right, yes. I would rather end my days in the Gulag than in California.”

In 1983, a stranger wrote to Greene and told him that “The Tenth Man,” a 30,000-word story Greene had written for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1944, had been discovered in the studio vaults. Greene had forgotten all about the story, which was about the French Resistance, and was delighted to see it published in 1985 when his best writing days were behind him.

Times staff writer William Tuohy contributed to this obituary from London.