Getting to Know the General. The Story of an Involvement.

First edition. 8vo. 224pp. Dark green boards, lettered in gilt to spine. Dust jacket photograph by Bernard Diederich (priced £8.95 net to front flap).

"In August 1981 my bag was packed for my fifth visit to Panama when the news came to me over the telephone of the death of General Omar Torrijos Herrera, my friend and host... At that moment the idea came to me to write a short personal memoir... of a man I had grown to love over those five years." Greene's account of his enduring friendship with General Torrijos, president of Panama from 1968 through 1981 during whose premiership the U.S. surrendered its mandate over the Canal Zone.

The author hoped a novel to emerge out of time spent in Torrijos's company and that of his colourful security guard Sergeant Chuchu. It never did and all that remains of that project is a short story called 'On the Way Back' published in 1982 in the collection Firebird 1: Writing Today. As an aside to history, Greene was a member of the Panamanian delegation to Washington in 1977 for the signing of the Canal treaty.