Vienna after the war, the city carved into four occupation zones and half of it rubble. Rollo Martins, a broke writer of pulp westerns, arrives to take a job from his old friend Harry Lime and finds Lime’s funeral instead. Witnesses disagree about how many men carried him from the street. Then Martins learns what Lime was selling on the black market — diluted penicillin — and where it ended up. Greene wrote this as the treatment for Carol Reed’s 1949 film rather than as a novel and the two have different endings, so read it and then watch the movie.
The Third Man