SOURCE: "Short Stories, Plays, Essays," in Understanding Graham Greene, University of South Carolina Press, 1990, pp. 149-76.

In the excerpt below, Miller analyzes three of Greene's short stories, including "The Basement Room," "The Destructors," and "Under the Garden," which the critic believes represent the themes and techniques of Greene's short fiction as a whole.

Graham Greene is one of the most successful short story writers of all time. Very few writers achieve the ability to rivet readers' attention to a dramatic situation, turn it into meaning through ingenious manipulations of plot, and in the end leave them astonished, breathless. His range is extensive, moving from the introspective to the bizarre to the shocking. Greene's output is contained in five collections, issued from 1935 through 1967: The Basement Room and Other Stories (1935), Nineteen Stories (1947), Twenty-One Stories (1954), A Sense of Reality (1963), and May We Borrow Your Husband? and Other Comedies of the Sexual...