My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It takes me such a long time to read books of short stories I can never quite get into them because they are always like little fragments. Some of these ones I really loved – The Destructors, I spy, The Basement Room, When Greek meets Greek are all five star stories. Lots of the others are very good too – I liked Brother and The Blue Room. The only stories I thought failed were the few where he tried to do something a bit gothic and a couple of others that seemed very dated. But I like Greene’s writing, he’s a master of free indirect style and descriptive phrases. I want to reread more of his novels – a few of which I read as a teenager.