He does, a mix of fictional and actual figures who don’t really work for him. He confides in his one friend, Dr Hasselbacher, his dilemma and Hasselbacher suggest that he could invent them. Except he has to become an agent, recruit sub-agents, and send “reports” via code. Wormold finally realizes that the money he will be paid is the answer to his financial woes. Cuba is a hotbed of competing interests under the Batista regime of the mid-1950’s. Then Hawthorne, an MI6 agent walks into his life and tries to recruit him as an agent. At first, this appears to be another one of Graham Greene’s middle-aged men struggling to make some sense of their existence in a far-off foreign land. He struggles to sell vacuum cleaners named “the Atomic Pile,” a real loser, and come up with enough money to support his daughter’s expensive interests while guarding her against the romantic interests of police Captain Segura, known for his ruthless investigative techniques. His wife has left him and their teenage daughter Milly. James Wormold is a struggling proprietor of a vacuum cleaner business in 1950’s Cuba. Summary: A struggling Englishman in 1950’s Cuba is recruited to be a secret agent for MI6 and ends up deceiving the service only to find his fabrications becoming all too real. New York: Open Road Media, 2018 (originally published in 1958).
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