A hitherto unpublished short story by Graham Greene has received some very welcome press in the past week. ‘Reading at Night’, which the author wrote in 1962, is a ghost story – a genre which one does not usually associate with Greene. He wrote it shortly after he had finished A Burnt-Out Case (1961) at a time when he was struggling not only with physical tiredness but probably more importantly with fragile mental health. He decided that writing another novel was beyond him and that in future he would concentrate exclusively on short stories. This, of course, was a short-lived decision. ‘Reading at Night’ has some conventional ghost story tropes: a stormy night, creaking furniture, footsteps real or imagined, a story within a story etc. It is quite short and not immediately identifiable as “Greene-ian” – the only clue for the more knowledgeable reader is its setting, namely an out of season Côte d’Azur.
Greene’s bibliographers Mike Hill and Jon Wise re-discovered the story at the Graham Greene Archive at the Harry Ransom Center, part of the University of Texas at Austin, on a research visit in 2014 sponsored by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust. The results of their research at Austin’s very large Greene archive was used extensively in the writing of the second volume of their bibliography, The Works of Graham Greene Volume 2: A Guide to the Graham Greene Archives (2015). A paperback version of this indispensable work is now available.
‘Reading at Night’ is published in the May 2025 edition of The Strand Magazine, a quarterly journal based in Birmingham, Michigan. If the magazine name is familiar that may be because it was originally a British publication dating from the 1890s when it carried, amongst other things, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. After subsequently passing between several different owners it was brought fully back into publication in 1998 as a quarterly magazine featuring stories from emerging crime and mystery writers in addition to rediscovered stories by established writers. An incomplete Greene short story/novella The Empty Chair was similarly discovered by the late Professor François Gallix and also published in a serial version in The Strand in 2019-2020.
The Greene ghost story ‘Reading at Night’ has received unexpectedly wide press thanks to the efforts of the The Strand editor Andrew Gulli. Here is a particularly good review from The Guardian.
Unpublished writings by Graham Greene are now comparatively few and far between – although a few short stories and essays do still exist. It is clear from the papers held at Austin that Greene fully intended that ‘Reading at Night’ should be published. It is a very good read and illustrates Greene’s flexibility in producing a story in a totally unfamiliar genre.