Ghostly short story published for first time sheds new light on Graham Greene

A short ghost story by Graham Greene described by analysts as "an eerie gem" was published for the first time yesterday, giving a rare glimpse into a largely uncelebrated side of one of the giants of 20th-century literature.

- Richard Luscombe

Reading at Night appears in the 75th issue of Strand Magazine, a Michigan-based literary quarterly that has built a reputation for finding and publishing "lost" writings of well-known authors.

Greene's tale delves into a resurrection of "childhood fears and imagined horrors" experienced by a terrified solo male traveller as he reads supernatural stories in bed on a stormy night on the French Riviera.

The story was probably written in 1962, the Greene biographer Jon Wise told Strand, during a relatively barren period of the English writer's career in which he said he "didn't have a novel in him". It is a departure from the deeper and more complex style of writing expressed in Greene's better-known psychological and political thrillers including The Third Man, Our Man in Havana, The Power and the Glory, and Brighton Rock.