The Third Woman

The 12-year affair between Graham Greene and Catherine Walston, the sexually adventurous 1940s and 1950s society hostess, was only made public in a silence-shattering article in "The Sunday Times" after Greene's death in 1991. It was a relationship that was to have crucial creative and destructive effects on the lovers and also their contemporaries - in particular their partners - and was the direct inspiration for a work regarded by many as Greene's masterpiece, "The End of the Affair", dedicated to "C" and praised by William Faulkner as "one of the most true and moving novels in anybody's language". Exploring the creative debt that literature owes to adultery (what Greene himself called "the necessity of sin") and re-encountering the physical landscape of their romance - from Rules restaurant in Covent Garden where they had dinner before making illicit love for the first time in a cheap Paddington hotel in 1947, to Tuscany where it is alleged that the couple had sex behind a succession of church altars (Greene's unusual way of dealing with Catholicism) - this volume seeks to unravel the enigma of Graham Greene as well as offer a compelling literary detective story.