[5] D, a former university professor from the Continent who speaks English, is sent by his government, two years into a vicious civil war, on a secret mission to buy coal in England.

Traumatised by the war, in which his wife was executed in error and he was buried alive in an air raid, England to him is a place of peace and happy memories.

Impatient, she hires a car and offers D a lift, but when they stop at a hotel a man in the washroom tries to rob D. Deciding to drive on alone, he is followed by L, whose chauffeur beats him up and leaves him by the roadside.

In a final effort to stop the deal with L, he takes a train to the Midlands town where Benditch's mine is and attempts to dissuade the workers by telling them where the coal is going.

"D", a patriot from a country suffering a civil war, is in England to secure a contract with coal magnate Lord Benditch that will greatly assist the faltering loyalist cause.

However, the reader could have little doubt – and Greene himself admitted as much[6] – that the Spanish Civil War was his main inspiration for the book's depiction of a left-leaning, popular revolutionary republic.

Underscoring the Spanish connection, in the novel's final section, a ship travelling from England to the unnamed country must sail westward in the Channel and then cross the Bay of Biscay.

[7] Without promoting a left-wing agenda, Greene shows a distaste for the authoritarian militaristic regime of the Nationalists in Spain and, readers then would quickly have made the connection, that of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

As in Stamboul Train, Greene uses a rich and sensual older Jewish man who fails to win the young Gentile girl he wants.

[7] The novel was the basis for the 1945 film Confidential Agent, starring Charles Boyer, Lauren Bacall, Katina Paxinou and Peter Lorre.