Greene (Graham) The Confidential Agent, first edition, occasional spotting and light toning to text, original cloth, slight shelf-lean, light spotting, first issue dust-jacket priced at 7s. 6d., light sunning to spine, spine ends and corners chipped, chip with loss to foot of lower panel with loss to 2 letters of text, some chipping, creasing and fraying to head and foot of panels, patch of soiling to upper panel, rubbed, [Wobbe A15a], 8vo, 1939.

⁂ Among the rarest of any Greene titles to find in the first issue dust-jacket.

Greene wrote The Confidential Agent against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. He had begun writing The Power and the Glory but anticipated that it would not bring in the revenues he usually hoped for from his "entertainments". With the Second World War on the horizon Greene anticipated a need for some financial security and so began writing The Confidential Agent in the morning and The Power and the Glory in the afternoon, the frenzy of writing allegedly fuelled in part by Benzedrine.