Episode 100: The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

SPEAKERS
Sarah Harrison, Carolyn Daughters

Sarah Harrison  00:12

Welcome to Tea, Tonic and Toxin, the only book club and podcast dedicated to exploring mysteries chronologically from Edgar Allan Poe to the present, we’re discussing the best mysteries and thrillers ever written, as well as interviewing some of the world’s most talented contemporary mystery and thriller writers. I’m your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters  00:33

And I’m your host, Carolyn Daughters. We aim to educate, entertain, and reignite interest in exceptional and often overlooked authors who shaped the genre. Check us out at teatonicandtoxin.com and on our socials to find tons of great content and take part in the conversation. We love hearing from listeners, and we’re excited you’re joining us on our journey through the history of mystery.

Carolyn Daughters  00:57

Today’s sponsor is Linden Botanicals, a Colorado-based company that sells the world’s healthiest herbal teas and extracts. Their team has traveled the globe to find the herbs that offer the best science-based support for stress, relief, energy, memory, mood, kidney and joint health, digestion, and inflammation. U.S. orders over $75 ship free. To learn more, visit lindenbotanicals.com and use code MYSTERY to get 15% off your first order. Thanks, Linden Botanicals! Carolyn, welcome to Virginia.

Carolyn Daughters  01:33

I’m in Virginia. I’m so excited to be here.

Sarah Harrison  01:37

If you are seeing a clip on YouTube at some point in the future, you will see our little log cabin studio Virginia. So excited that Carolyn and I are recording in person today. It’s been too long since we both moved out of Denver.

Carolyn Daughters  01:57

It’s my second time out here to the cabin. We’ll call it the cabin, maybe, yes. And I’m thrilled to be here. It’s always fun to record, even if we’re from a distance. But I just always think it’s fun to be in the room together, and we were for the first several years for every single episode.

Sarah Harrison  02:23

Yes, it’s weird doing it remote. But we’re not remote right now.

Carolyn Daughters  02:32

Today we’re going to talk about Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear from 1943. But before that, I think we want to introduce our listener of the episode.

Sarah Harrison  02:41

We have a great listener. She reached out, I believe it was over the website, which was exciting.

Carolyn Daughters  02:48

We love getting mail. Snail mail, email.

Sarah Harrison  02:53

Social media, absolutely social. Try us and see. “I wonder if they’ll give me a sticker?” Yeah, I bet we will.

Carolyn Daughters  03:01

Phyllis wrote us and said, “I happened to come across your questions for The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins.” We read and discussed that book in our very first year. She said, “And those questions are different than the usual set on the interwebs. You all have highlighted several key passages that really stuck out to me, and I’ll be sharing your page and podcast with my book club today.” And that’s what we want, right? We are a book club.

Sarah Harrison  03:28

Phyllis, we are sharing you with our listenership today. Thank you so much. We love even if they’re years apart, book club we we’d love to hear how the discussion went. So reach back out to us. Fill us in. Let us know. We’ll send you a sticker. We’d love to hear about other book clubs that are discussing The Moonstone.

Carolyn Daughters  03:51

Really cool, right? And so for some people, the mysteries that we are discussing are integrated into their own book club, which may or may not be focused on mysteries, and in some cases, these are mystery book clubs. And the books that we’ve chosen through our history of mystery progression would be a really great baseline for a mystery book club. Wherever you want to start or dip in and out, that’s awesome. Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone is a 19th-century gem. We loved Wilkie Collins. We loved The Moonstone. And I also loved, and I think you liked, The Woman in White.

Sarah Harrison  04:30

I had a struggle some time with that one. But definitely worth the read.

Carolyn Daughters  04:34

We had a love/like relationship with the female characters in The Woman in White. So book clubs, keep reaching out to us. Tell us what you’re interested in. We’ll be happy to send your book club some bookmarks and some stickers and all the swag.

Sarah Harrison  04:55

We love it. And let us know what questions stood out to you. We’d be happy to incorporate them into our episodes. Today’s episode, I’m pretty excited about. We read The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene. This is our first book for 2026, isn’t it?

Carolyn Daughters  05:12

It is. I know it’s very exciting. I loved The Ministry of Fear so, so much.

Sarah Harrison  05:22

I’ve been describing it as transcendent, and we’ll get into that a little bit. But first I want to give you the summary. If you haven’t read it, we are going to spoil it. So if you want to read it, go read it. But today we’re going to discuss Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear, published in 1943. For Arthur Rowe, the trip to a charity fete was a nostalgic step back into adolescence. It was a chance to forget the nightmare of the Blitz and the aching guilt of having mercifully murdered his sick wife. (That’s a lot.) He was surviving alone in London until he happened to win a cake at the fete. From that moment, he is ruthlessly hunted by Nazi agents and finds himself the prey of malign and shadowy forces from which he endeavors to escape, though his mind remains obstinately out of focus.

Carolyn Daughters  06:21

Born in 1904 Graham Greene is recognized as one of the most important writers of the 20th century, achieving both literary acclaim and popular success. His best known works include Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American, and The Power and the Glory. After leaving Oxford, Graham Greene first pursued a career in journalism before dedicating himself full time to writing. With his first big success, Stamboul Train, he wrote adaptations for the cinema as well as original screenplays. The most successful being The Third Man. Religious, moral, and political themes are at the root of much of his work. Throughout his life, he traveled to some of the wildest and most volatile parts of the world, which provided settings for his fiction. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honor. He died in 1991.

Sarah Harrison  07:11

This was my first Graham Greene book. I know he has a huge fan base, and we’re going to do these episodes a little different. We’ve started doing a couple this way. Carolyn and I will have our discussion. And then, moving forward, we are going to have a special guest that I’m pretty excited about, but I’ll keep the details a secret right now.

Carolyn Daughters  07:33

Yes. I have read The Power and the Glory. And then, of course, like many of us I have seen a lot of the films and I think there are some BBC series out there. There are a lot of adaptations of Graham Greene that really translate well to film. I love the genre. I love spy thrillers. I think it’s my absolute favorite part of the mystery and thriller genre is the spy thriller. There’s something about it, the heightened or elevated importance of this story that really resonates with me.

Sarah Harrison  08:18

There are two stories going on in The Ministry of Fear, that and maybe more. Maybe you found multiple stories in here, but there’s this story of the spy thriller, there’s the story of amnesia, which is a different twist than our last amnesia spy thriller. And then there’s a story of underpinning it all of this man who murdered his wife, which he himself is suffering from. He’s questioning whether or not it was morally justifiable. I think this is still a really modern topic of dissension, and he can’t seem to reconcile it with himself. But that whole thing, the way that that’s foundational to his character, the way that the Nazis are using it in the plot line.

Carolyn Daughters  09:27

We’re jumping right in, but we’ll come back, because we’re not going to be fully scattered here, just be partially scattered. There’s a seance that happens in the book, and these Fifth Column individuals in the room have already learned the background of Arthur Rowe, and they’re using it against him, as if they’re channeling his dead wife, Alice. I thought, wow, this is incredible. That scene, it really felt especially painful to me to read, because not only was he living with this pain, but these individuals were purporting to be innocent. “We don’t know anything. We’re just channeling the spirits.” The spirits are supposedly throwing back at him something that he already feels intense guilt about, which is the mercy killing of his wife, who was quite ill.

Sarah Harrison  10:32

Yes. Do we want to talk about the killing? Let’s, let’s start with that. Let’s just dive in.

Carolyn Daughters  10:39

I think we should, because I it’s key to who this character is, Arthur Rowe, because we see him, even in chapter one, in the first section, he’s just, he’s a regular guy. He has the deportment of a married man. There’s something about him that looks like a married man. We learn and a bachelor, and simultaneously, in a bachelor, and he’s just, he’s defeated. He is, he is guilt ridden. He is, I don’t know, there’s just something about him that reads as tragic, and we get this from, I think, the first page. And so I think it’s important to understand

Sarah Harrison  11:19

He’s clearly as he’s walking around, he is he’s nostalgic, he’s sad. And that’s, I would say, another theme of The Ministry of Fear is who you are in your youth and who you grow up to be. And that’s also woven into the plot in this brilliant way that so that we’re already talking about the death, and I’m like, moving on to another but no, that’s, that’s right in I think at the beginning, I wasn’t sure. Was he so sad because of the war? Is he so sad? I don’t think so. No, you come to find out that he’s so sad because he killed his wife, and he just not forgive himself.

Carolyn Daughters  12:05

It’s not as if the war isn’t affecting him. It’s certainly affecting him as it’s, I mean, literally affecting him. And that every night there’s the Blitz, and every night, many people are running to shelters and undercover, or they stand the chance of being killed in the building in which they’re living or working. So, I mean, there is a day to day danger, and so the war hits you, literally hits you in this way. But also you’re watching 20,000 people dead already, and are you going to be the next and or your landlady, or somebody that you care about, or strangers that you just you feel for your fellow Londoners, your fellow your fellow human beings? It’s affecting him. But really at its core, Graham Greene is talking about this man, and what is hitting him viscerally. It’s what he’s dealing with or grappling with every day.

Sarah Harrison  13:10

It’s so interesting. It’s a little bit different, I think, from the current conversation around assisted suicide in that, what surprised me was his wife didn’t ask for that. She said. He described her as saying something at the beginning with her diagnosis, Oh, I’d rather die.

Carolyn Daughters  13:34

But that might have been hysterics, he said, just a gut response to bad news.

Sarah Harrison  13:40

She dealt with this so patiently and gently and never complained, it was almost worse. It was very wild to me, and it unfolded throughout The Ministry of Fear, right? And start learning about this, and as he’s reflecting going on and on and on and on and on throughout, going deeper into this by intrigue, you learn all kinds of things. She didn’t ask for it. He didn’t mention it. He and then he did it in such a stereotypically British way that you would attribute to a stiff upper lip.

Carolyn Daughters  14:19

So what describe what you mean by how he did it as in a stereotypical British way?

Sarah Harrison  14:25

He got the poison ready. He was ready to deliver it, and he thought. He never asked her. They didn’t talk about it. They didn’t talk about it at all. It’s easier to kill her than to talk about what she wants.

Carolyn Daughters  14:41

But also he suspected that she understood what he was doing? And it was easier instead of confronting the fact that your husband was taking your life, it was easier to drink the milk with the poison in it?

Sarah Harrison  14:55

And he reflects that back to what we’re saying about the sand. Sentence, he experienced that himself. Arthur Rowe walked into the seance in The Ministry of Fear. Things didn’t feel right, but it was easier to let them murder him, which is what he thought was going to happen? Then to make an uncomfortable situation? So he’s like, of course she could let me murder her, then make me uncomfortable, right? And I was like, that’s not a sentiment I actually identify with, although it’s one I have observed.

Carolyn Daughters  15:29

It’s one I identify with, and one I’ve written about in my own fiction, where you have this gut sense of something that’s about to happen, or maybe you have a gut sense that something is off, but you’re too sheepish or embarrassed. I have been in the past. I know other people, and in my fiction, I’ve written about this with characters. You’re too hesitant to speak up because you laugh yourself off. Okay, every everything’s usually fine. This is going to be fine. Everything’s fine. And then sometimes, on the back end, you regret that you didn’t honor your gut. And so they say this with people who are attacked, say, in a parking garage going to their cars, is they have this sense of, oftentimes, of being watched. They have a sense that some other person is there, that they can it’s palpable. They can feel it in the air. They’re like, something’s off, but they’re like, Ah, okay, I’ve walked to and from my car without any issue a million times. This is 1,000,001 it’s fine. And so we don’t honor that gut response, and I think so that really resonated with me that sitting I would have been the person, I think, at the seance thinking something’s off, something bad is going to happen. Anna gave him a quick call and said, hey, when, when it goes dark, something bad is going to happen. And I would have been the guy saying, I’m sure it’ll be fine. I’ll go home tonight. It’ll be fine.

Sarah Harrison  16:59

Yeah, I understand that sense. And I think maybe when I was younger, I was a little more like that, but in all honesty, I’m a lot more like the watcher person. I’m a lot more I feel like an obligation for aggression sometimes, and I’ve seen that. I’ve seen that play out. And I even teach my kids how to look everyone in the eye when they’re walking down the street, you’re always watching. And you never avoid a gaze. You always watch a shadow. You know where the sun is. You see the shadow, and you’re like, if someone coming up behind you, someone coming from the side, how ready are you? Do you look them in the eye? Do you smile? Let everyone know that you’ve seen them and who they are.

Carolyn Daughters  17:44

Does that in your mind make you less of a target? Tell me what that does?

Sarah Harrison  17:49

Oh, yeah, in my mind.

Carolyn Daughters  17:50

It might be in reality. I think in reality.

Sarah Harrison  17:53

I think there’s some research around it does make you less of a target, and it does make you ready for action, which I have been attacked from behind before, and I got very aggressive very quickly. I understand the discomfort with discomfort, but I feel like it’s something you have to grow past. So it baffled me that he’d take it all the way to murder and being murdered.

Carolyn Daughters  18:21

I didn’t think Arthur Rowe was going to be murdered at the seance in The Ministry of Fear. I mean, he thought it.

Sarah Harrison  18:25

He did at the seance, he thought he was going to be murdered. He even says that

Carolyn Daughters  18:28

I think he thought it.

Sarah Harrison  18:29

But he might have talked himself out of it, because he didn’t want to make a new situation.

Carolyn Daughters  18:35

That’s what we do. And also, on some level, just taking it one step further. For Arthur Rowe, if he had been murdered, he would have been okay.

Sarah Harrison  18:45

I don’t think so. I don’t think so, because that’s where this all started, right? Because he was, they tried to murder him. He won the cake. The guy came in to try and talk cake, eat cake, smash cake. And then tried to murder him. And he was so mad. He was like, I’m a murderer. You can’t go murder in a murderer, like, I don’t know murder.

Carolyn Daughters  19:08

But he also wants to be punished for the thing he did, not punished for the wrong thing. He’ll commit suicide.

Sarah Harrison  19:13

But he doesn’t want to be murdered, right?

Carolyn Daughters  19:16

Right.

Sarah Harrison  19:16

He got really mad about it, and he pursued it doggedly. He didn’t even just the whole thing stems off of somebody tried to murder him. He didn’t understand why. He’s trying to figure it out. He could have let himself be murdered several times, but he didn’t.

Carolyn Daughters  19:32

But as much as he has given up on life at that, at the fact at the beginning of The Ministry of Fear, where he claims the cake, and then several people as he’s leaving are trying to talk him out of the cake, including a pastor. If you give the cake back, we can do one whole other contest for it. And he says, But everybody’s gone. Oh, well, it can be the people. Who are already volunteering here.

Sarah Harrison  20:01

Or you should share it with us. Really, it’s just for the money. You should just donate it and share the cake.

Carolyn Daughters  20:06

He claims that cake. And I thought that was really interesting, that he did that, because I think it was an opportunity for him to just say, I am me and this is mine. Like, I’m making a stand here that in this world of chaos, there are some things that are just core and true. I won the cake. I am taking this cake.

Sarah Harrison  20:34

How do you think because he definitely made that an uncomfortable situation for everybody. How do you think that plays into his character, of not wanting to create those kinds of situations.

Carolyn Daughters  20:46

They made it really awkward for him. I don’t think he made it awkward. Could you imagine?

Sarah Harrison  20:50

But he didn’t play into the awkward. And then that’s the thing. I mean, that’s a tactic, and I have also used that is to make someone uncomfortable enough that they’re going to behave well, they’re going to behave in a situation because there’s this discomfort hovering over them.

Carolyn Daughters  21:05

Okay. Well, yes, because so this man shows up at his apartment and says, Hey, I was hoping, hoping to listen to the radio, to listen to the news, and, oh, there’s cake. Oh, I’d love cake. That the landlady does the exact same thing when he brings the cake in. She’s like, Oh, cake. He says, sure, have a piece.

Sarah Harrison  21:27

It was the landlady that offered it to the guest.

Carolyn Daughters  21:31

He tends to cave. But when it came to his ownership of the cake that he had rightly won, he’s he digs his heels in, which I thought was really interesting.

Sarah Harrison  21:43

Yeah, what do you think’s behind that?

Carolyn Daughters  21:47

I think there was when he’s at the FET he’s, he’s hearkening back to his childhood. He’s, he’s thinking back to these days of innocence, these days of just pure happiness that weren’t complicated by real life. And I think he even says at one point when he’s leaving with the cake after several people confront him, he said they’re ruining, they’re ruining this experience. And it was a break from the war, a break from his past. He even says to the fortune teller, I don’t want to talk about my past. I don’t want you to tell me my past. I want to know the future. Tell me the future, because the past is where he lives. It cycles in his head nonstop. But he got to move far enough in the past, at this fete where he was returned almost to childhood, to this pre-war, pre-death of his wife, period where things were simpler, or at least seemed simpler because he was younger, and he won a cake, and he was like, this is pretty cool day. I want a cake. And he was taking that cake home.

Sarah Harrison  23:01

Real eggs.

Carolyn Daughters  23:02

Real eggs, I know, and heavy. I don’t know how heavy cakes normally are, but turns out, the actual weight of this cake was maybe just under three pounds.

Sarah Harrison  23:11

I don’t remember.

Carolyn Daughters  23:12

The landlady weighs it, because there are all these different numbers thrown around. Oh my gosh. Okay, so he says, oh, it’s four pounds and eight and a half ounces or something like that. You won. You’re the closest. And then they run up to him at the end, and because they realized they meant to give the cake to somebody else, he said the code word.

Sarah Harrison  23:33

When he’s with the fortune teller in The Ministry of Fear, he wanted to hear about the future, not the past, and that was, stupidly, the code word. He should maybe make it unrelated.

Carolyn Daughters  23:46

But then they say, well, the weight was actually and they give some other weight, three pounds and something ounces. And so this person’s only three ounces over, and this other man won it, and it’s a man who looks a little bit looks like Arthur Rowe. So the fortune teller mistook one man for the other, and he says, well, then I still also want it, because I did a second bet. My first bet was closer than that other man. No matter which of those two weights is correct, I want it. And then he brings it home, and the landlady weighs it, and it’s neither of those two weights. It’s under three pounds, or something like that. So, yeah, I loved that. I had a very strong sense of who he is and how infused with sadness and guilt he is, and also this potential for hope and the potential for something different that I saw also in that first chapter.

Sarah Harrison  24:42

He’s very focused. And maybe we want to get into this. He is very focused throughout The Ministry of Fear on his childhood, especially after his amnesia case. And so unavoidably, of course, I was comparing it the whole time to Traitor’s Purse by Margery Allingham. We read that amnesia case where the detective just eluded me.

Carolyn Daughters  25:09

Oh, and it didn’t until you just said that.

Sarah Harrison  25:13

Sorry, where that amnesia case …

Carolyn Daughters  25:17

The case which we’re experiencing here?

Sarah Harrison  25:19

Yeah, our amnesia case, he becomes introspective. He starts to learn about himself based on other people’s reactions to him. He starts to learn about himself from an unclouded mind, a blank. He has all of his instincts in place, but his character is a little bit of a blank because he relearns who he is. Arthur Rowe in The Ministry of Fear is very different. In his amnesia case, he reverts to who he was pre wife murder, who he was in childhood. And so he’s constantly seeing everything through this childhood lens and looking at what must be a really dystopian landscape of the Blitz in London. How is this possible? Who are people? This isn’t at all like The Little Duke, which I love that The Little Duke by Charlotte Yonge was quoted at the start of each chapter, which I haven’t read, but you said you got a copy, right?

Carolyn Daughters  26:15

I have a copy of it. After I read it, and after you read it, maybe we should do another little mini episode. Awesome.

Sarah Harrison  26:21

I would love to do, honestly, because one, I’m obsessed with children’s fiction, but reading these quotes from The Little Duke, I was like, this book is for real. This is gonna be a great I want to read The Little Duke by Charlotte Yonge. How did it fall out of children’s literature that it’s not read anymore?

Carolyn Daughters  26:38

I think it’s probably just because there are so many children’s books that some fall out, some because the one, the copy that I have is not large. It’s really a slim volume, but walls of text and a little bit dense. And so I think it’s, it’s even a writing style thing where it didn’t convey in the 20th, 21st centuries.

Sarah Harrison  27:02

I can completely see that, because, as this was our long time, listeners, know, I read all the old stuff to my kids, and I actually show them all the old movies first, before we get to stuff currently designed for kids, because it’s just a different style. And I think you can go forward, but it’s hard to go backward. If you’ve become accustomed to modern writing and modern reading and modern TV shows, it’s hard to go back and take a deep interest in of iWorks, dancing black and white eggs.

Carolyn Daughters  27:41

It’s Albert Campion.

Sarah Harrison  27:43

Albert Campion, that’s right, yeah, first amnesia case.

Carolyn Daughters  27:48

I thought it was interesting with the amnesia in The Ministry of Fear, because there’s that pure happiness of that return to childhood, and Anna visits him and even says, this is how I want you. If she could snap a photo, keep it frozen in time. Here, this is what I want for you. And amnesia was a very different thing for Albert Campion in Traitor’s Purse, where it was revelatory and it was it moved his character in ways that without the amnesia, he might never have moved.

Sarah Harrison  28:24

I’d love the introspection there, but it’s an interesting reflection here, he just didn’t think, based on who he was in childhood, that he would be the person that he is. What do you think? To me, that’s this whole aspect of The Ministry of Fear is what I’ve been calling transcendent, this self-reflection on who we grow into, the choices we make, how we’ve shaped ourselves. The only thing that really starts to give him a clue is he does remember he had a real issue with pity.

Carolyn Daughters  29:01

Pity is a major theme in The Ministry of Fear.

Sarah Harrison  29:04

What were your thoughts around the fact that he doesn’t want to be pitied?

Carolyn Daughters  29:08

He pities many other people, and a lot of his actions have to do with pitying someone. If his landlady crave sugar, as she does, and sees this cake made with real eggs. She’s staring longingly at it. He’s like, please have a piece. He pities other people, but he does not want to be pitied. I don’t think he thinks he has earned it or deserves it well, and it’s not.

Sarah Harrison  29:36

I feel like in most cases, pity is a benign emotion. It moves you to kindness, but him, it does not. It moves him to murder. Pity is what drove him to kill his wife, and he remembers this incident in his childhood where there was some, I don’t remember what kind of animal was, a hurt animal, and he killed the crap out of that animal.

Carolyn Daughters  29:56

A rat.

Sarah Harrison  29:59

Not in his dream. No, that was a real thing. He really killed this.

Carolyn Daughters  30:06

Because he wanted to make sure it was dead. The worst, the worst thing is, if you attempt to kill an animal out of pity, say, an animal is injured and is going to die, you don’t want to half kill the thing.

Sarah Harrison  30:20

You don’t want to create suffering.

Carolyn Daughters  30:22

You don’t want the creature to suffer.

Sarah Harrison  30:24

But it’s next level to take that to the human side. You don’t you don’t just kill the people when they’re suffering. You help ease their suffering.

Carolyn Daughters  30:37

But Arthur Rowe in The Ministry of Fear is worried that he did it for himself.

Sarah Harrison  30:40

I agree with him, honestly, when he comes down to that assessment and he’s like, Was it her? I was doing it for because I couldn’t bear to watch the rat, it was too painful for me. She could bear it, but I couldn’t I was I thought, yeah, I think that’s it. I was glad he came to that realization and it, it’s really the only thing, I think that makes sense on why he cannot live with himself.

Carolyn Daughters  31:07

Yes, because if she had wanted it and was in severe pain with no hope of reprieve, and together, they determined they were going to take this step. That is one thing. Another thing is she’s not party to the decision, but is a potential sound mind, and he takes action alone. From my from my mind. So I don’t know whether he did it for himself or for her or for many things, nothing is so clearly black and white, I don’t know, but I identified greatly with that sense of inner accountability for and the questioning always question. I identified with it so strongly. Because even when I am firmly in some camp, and I say, Well, this is, this is what I’m going to do, and this is why, and this is the right thing, even afterward I’m constantly running it through my database. Was that correct? Was it correct? Did I do the right thing? Did I do it for? Did I deceive myself, or Did I did I really do the right thing for the right reasons, or was it more complicated than that? And was I pretending otherwise? I’m constantly asking myself those sorts of questions.

Sarah Harrison  32:32

I think if you don’t like I have a hard time relating to some people. Oh, man, I have so many fingers in The Ministry of Fear. I was looking for a passage, and I kept seeing so many great passages. I used to my whole land, and I still didn’t find the passage, but that I have my finger in one right now where rose the murder rose considered slowly and painfully, he had never felt this man’s confidence about anything, which was the guy trying to kill him about the cake, and being very cavalier.

Carolyn Daughters  33:08

There’s some adjective he used to describe that confidence right around there. And I can’t remember what it is. It’s overbearing confidence or something like that.

Sarah Harrison  33:16

It was intolerable.

Carolyn Daughters  33:18

Intolerable confidence.

Sarah Harrison  33:21

He said he had an intolerable confidence, right?

Carolyn Daughters  33:24

Because if you are so fixed in whatever the thing is that you are going to do, whatever you’re thinking, whatever you believe, that you can’t entertain the possibility of something else. For Arthur Rowe in The Ministry of Fear, that’s intolerable. But for me, in my, my entire, certainly adult life, probably child life as well, this I’m the same.

Sarah Harrison  33:52

He’s questioning his own motivations. That deeply, I think, shows an understanding of the ways that we trick ourselves all of the time.

Carolyn Daughters  34:06

How easy it is to make ourselves the hero of our story. I get that from Arthur Rowe in The Ministry of Fear. Well, why did you do this thing? Well, my friends, my family, my workplace, they needed this. And I stepped in and I did the thing, it’s your hero role, and he calls a lot of that into question, and certainly doesn’t want to be perceived as a hero himself, somebody who relieved his wife, who he adored, relieved her of pain and suffering. He doesn’t want that, because he knows the story is more complicated. But he as an extrapolation of that, I think he would say many stories are more complicated than whatever the byline is.

Sarah Harrison  34:59

I’ve been thinking about my behavior a lot lately.

Carolyn Daughters  35:03

I’ve also been thinking about your behavior.

Sarah Harrison  35:06

I have actually given it zero thought. I’ve been catching myself and all these tricks I play on me, and it’s been really frustrating.

Carolyn Daughters  35:18

Give me an example of a trick you’re playing on yourself.

Sarah Harrison  35:21

I try to live on a low-sugar diet, very low, extremely low. Because it’s dementia and Alzheimer avoidance.

Carolyn Daughters  35:31

It’s extremely low. Generally, I have to say, as her friend and somebody who is, at least fairly aware of your dietary restrictions.

Sarah Harrison  35:41

Yeah, my goal is to avoid Alzheimer’s and dementia, okay? And that’s, that’s one approach, and I know this is the goal, right? And then I’ll trick myself into eating something, and I’ll come up with all of these ideas and justifications and reasons and explanations, like in the moment, almost like I’m mentally bombing myself in my mind about why I need to eat.

Carolyn Daughters  36:10

What’s the reason you would need to eat a chocolate?

Sarah Harrison  36:12

Oh, well, I deserve it because I’ve done something, or I’ve been good, or I want it, or I didn’t eat dinner. So it really won’t make a difference.

Carolyn Daughters  36:24

Talk about your not eating dinner.

Sarah Harrison  36:29

Sometimes you’re busy taking the kids somewhere, you just got busy. Didn’t eat much for dinner? And so then I want this piece of chocolate, and then I’ve eaten it. Or they’re like, I stopped the thing I was doing. So now I can eat this chocolate I have sitting here, and I’ll just eat the whole chocolate, and then I’m like, What did you just trick yourself into? What’s your goal? And if, if you can do that at that little piddly level, am I gonna eat this piece of chocolate when your spouse is dying, what are you capable of tricking yourself into? Right?

Carolyn Daughters  37:06

We’re, each of us, a compilation of the stories we tell ourselves, and some of us tell ourselves stories like Arthur Rowe, which are very self damning and self-critical and highly, highly accountable. And other people tell themselves stories that are the complete opposite of that. And many of us live somewhere in that murky in between. I’ve seen people in all of these different camps, people who feel guilty for every single thing they’ve ever done, and people who feel very little, if any, guilt in areas where they should feel in, from my perspective, a whole lot of it.

Sarah Harrison  37:51

To me, that’s the aspect of The Ministry of Fear that really makes this a book for the ages. Some books are great reads. They’re page turners, but they’re not gaining at a deep moral unearthing of something, and this one really does it.

Carolyn Daughters  38:16

I mean, it does. And just for our listeners to know we have 10 pages of notes. We’ve just turned page one. So this, this episode will only go on for four to five more hours. Oh, we turned two pages.

Sarah Harrison  38:32

There are so many questions that I want to say for our guest. Yeah, there’s so many aspects of this that we can talk about, I want to return to pity. Do you identify with how moved by pity?

Carolyn Daughters  38:51

There’s so much about him that I feel, I feel, I don’t know, I feel like some of some of what he’s experiencing, I have experienced. And so he has this friend whose name is escaping me, but is on our first.

Sarah Harrison  39:17

Henry is Arthur Rowe’s only friend in The Ministry of Fear.

Carolyn Daughters  39:19

Henry is his only remaining friend, and it’s still a friend he hasn’t seen since the day before the court, before he went to court for the murder of his wife. And it’s his friend is Henry Wilcox, and Henry’s when we meet Henry, it’s right after his own wife has died. And Henry says to Arthur Rowe, I identify with you. I understand because I could, I killed my wife. Essentially, I could have prevented her from going to his wife was a hockey player, and she was playing for England, and so the greater cause, and she’s a hero. And you. Says I could have stopped her from going and I didn’t. So I understand and I identify with that. I think back to people I’ve cared about, who I’ve lost, and the experiences I’ve had with those people, particularly near their ends, and replayed those events over and over again in my mind, why didn’t I say things that were more heartfelt, that were more, I don’t know, spiritually uplifting, more honest, more caring? Why didn’t I hold their hand more. Why didn’t I hold their hand at all? Why did I ever leave the room if I was there for two minutes, two hours, two days, why wasn’t I there for two weeks I constantly do this, and there are three people in my life in particular who have passed. My fiancé, back when I was in my 20s, my grandmother and then my dear friend, Larry. And there are three people who I have loved with all my heart, who I feel to this day, not rationally per se, but truly I let down at their ends, I was one of the people with those three people at their end in the room, and I just didn’t I feel like I could have done better by them. And so I feel immense guilt about that. To be fair, I probably feel at this point less guilt than sometimes I think I should. I don’t know if that makes sense. I feel like day to day, I’ve given myself a pass, and then I’ll have some breathing room, or my day will open up. And if I’ve been particularly busy and my day opens up. Sometimes I’m flooded with the thoughts of what was left unsaid, how I didn’t make their final moments easier, how I didn’t so when I was reading The Ministry of Fear, I was there with Arthur Rowe. I felt it. I felt it so deeply. And I also, in the case of my fiancé who died, I understood how hard it is to watch someone else’s immense pain, day in and day out for an extremely long period of time, and how it weighs on the person you love and how it weighs on you. I felt it. I understood it. The Ministry of Fear resonated deeply with me. In addition to being a spy thriller, which I my favorite part of the genre, I love a spy thriller, is it’s so much more than that. It’s, I mean, it’s Graham Greene. It’s beautiful, this book, and it really resonated with me.

Sarah Harrison  42:51

It reminds me of another aspect of Rowe that comes in at the beginning, right? Not the beginning the end, sorry, where he’s oddly found this new love. I think Anna is her name. He has struggled. And his friend brings this out too. I believe he struggled to forgive himself. He said you’ve got to forgive yourself. And Henry says this, I think, while he has amnesia and doesn’t even remember, and he’s like, okay, but I’m like, how he and he never does, he never does forgive himself. The way The Ministry of Fear resolved, Well, I’m gonna live a lie. I’m going to pretend to be happy now for the sake of this person, and she’s going to pretend to be happy for the sake of me. Her brother died, and she’s going to have a pretense.

Carolyn Daughters  43:54

I don’t even think it’s that that they’re going to pretend to be happy. I think it’s that they’re going to lie to each other forever. So she will always think that her brother was dead when Arthur found him, and she will always think that he still doesn’t remember that his wife died. And so they’ll have these illusions that they will carry. She will be lying to him, and he will be lying to her, and neither one will admit to the other that the lie exists. And in this imperfect structure, they will live together as happily as I guess they can.

Sarah Harrison  44:44

He says he was pledging both of them to a lifetime of lies, but only he knew that.

Carolyn Daughters  44:53

It’s a huge weight to carry.

Sarah Harrison  45:00

It occurred to him that perhaps, after all, one could atone, even to the dead, if one suffered for the living, enough. And to me, I felt like, that’s horrible. I get it, but it’s horrible. And he never does. There’s never a moment that he figures out how to forgiveness isn’t really self-forgiveness isn’t an aspect of The Ministry of Fear. It’s like, well, no, but atonement becomes one.

Carolyn Daughters  45:32

This is his eternal atonement. Essentially is, is he says. So there’s this idea that we live for other people, that without this person we love, there’s nothing, not nation state, not Britain. None of this is important enough without this person. And so for this person, you might lie, cheat, steal, commit a crime, lie for the rest of your life, you the things you will do for this person that you love, it’s infinite what you would do. And I think that this sense of atonement, that that, I think it brings him some strange comfort to be able to know that he is atoning every day by not telling Anna that he knows the truth about his wife, because, of course, her brother. Right before he takes his life, he tells Arthur Rowe, yes, you were married and yes, you killed your wife, your dear Alice, he says, I mean, it’s, again, like at the seance. It’s using a person’s guilt as a weapon, and weaponizing someone’s guilt, and which is the last thing that that Willy, her brother, Anna’s brother does before he takes his life.

Sarah Harrison  47:04

There’s this great quote in The Ministry of Fear. I’m flipping through constantly, because everything you’re saying, oh, there’s this great quote. Luckily, I had my pen most of the time, and I put a big box around this one. Again toward the end, one can’t love humanity. One can only love people.

Carolyn Daughters  47:28

There’s the Tolstoy that he finds, which was the key to everything.

Sarah Harrison  47:33

To everything.

Carolyn Daughters  47:36

This is another thing that I want to read. Is the Tolstoy, because I’ve never read, and I’m trying to find the name of it. Oh, it’s on. It’s we’ve turned many pages. We have so many notes. It’s incredible. Tolstoy is what I believe. So Tolstoy said, one of the causes of conflict, inequality and discontent in the western world is this importance attached to state government law. When you own property, you have possessions and love of country. And so Tolstoy wrote. Tolstoy wrote, remembering all the evil I have done, suffered and seen resulting from the enmity of nations, it’s clear to me that the cause of it all lay in the gross fraud called patriotism. As long as we praise, as long as we praise patriotism and cultivate it in young people, there will always be armaments which destroy physical and spiritual life, and there will be vast, awful wars. And Arthur Rowe is debating how he feels about this. And maybe he thinks Tolstoy is too busy saving his own soul and so forth, but really, there were these notes in the margin of the book that had been erased. And it’s the erasure of thought, the erasure of questions and of analysis that really and he’s Digby at this point, because he doesn’t know his actual identity, and he’s asking these questions. Well, why? Why am I being denied a newspaper to read each day? Why am I being denied information? Why? Where are the notes in the margins? He wants to have the dialog. He wants to have the conversation. And I think that’s what really triggers him, while in this ward, to say something is off, and this simplicity of childhood and of this innocent life is not real life.

Sarah Harrison  49:32

He loved the ward at first. This is so great. I love it here. I love being here. It’s so wonderful. And he sees this book by Tolstoy, the contents of which are important. The renunciation of patriotism is important. And then the notes were in, and I believe it was the doctor, Dr. Forrester was agreeing with the sentiment and then questioning that, crossing it, erasing it out. And so he, to me, the difficult part was knowing that that was Dr Forrester’s book. It wasn’t in his office. It was in in his own room or something. I don’t know how you can make quite that jump, but that aside, understanding suddenly some insight into Dr Forrester’s politics and his character at the same time, I thought was very, very good, very intuitive in The Ministry of Fear.

Carolyn Daughters  50:41

It’s an interesting growth that happens fairly rapidly for Digby in that ward, where he goes from this complete blank slate of innocence to a much more questioning, much more demanding patient in a fairly short period of time, yes.

Sarah Harrison  51:05

And much more action oriented. I know this might be like my imagination, but the way in which his pity resonated with me, because he’d always feel pity. First he’d feel pity, and then it would shift. He’d feel pity, and that would motivate him to action. He’d feel pity, pity for Stone, the other inmate, and then that’s going to move him to action. And it made me think, like I said, pity is this guy’s primary emotion. It is the emotion by which he’s like, it’s pivotal. It activates him in different ways, and he takes different actions based on his pity. And in that way, it resonated with me, not in that it’s pity, but I’ve been thinking a lot about. I tend to have a primary emotion, and that emotion is anger. I will be angry first, every time, all day, I’m angry first, and then I move in a direction, okay, right? Maybe I’m taking an action, or I’m stepping back, or I’m dialing down my anger, or I’m reaching out, or it’s like I have the anger, I access it, and then it moves me into the next path.

Carolyn Daughters  52:25

So anger is, I think, a secondary emotion. What do you think your primary emotion is?

Sarah Harrison  52:31

No, I think it’s anger. Oh, I’m always angry first, okay. And then through that anger, I move in a direction, and I felt like he’s that with pity.

Carolyn Daughters  52:41

So when I think of anger, I think it’s for many people, people are actually scared or sad. It’s expressed as anger, but you’re actually …

Sarah Harrison  52:49

I think I’m angry, okay? I’m almost always angry. And then I can’t through the anger. I can feel something else, okay? And maybe I’m singing in a weird way, maybe he’s sad, maybe he’s sure afraid, but it feels pity. He’s what he’s feeling first, the first feeling he feels and can identify as pity, and through that, he takes a path.

Carolyn Daughters  53:10

I think “pity” is this weird word in The Ministry of Fear because sometimes when he was talking about pity, I felt like you could replace a phrase like “human connection.” So for example, he may pity his friend Henry, or he may pity Anna or somebody, but really it’s, I think, that desire to if you’re rather than kill for country, you kill for the person you love, you kill, kill for somebody who you care about you. I mean, Digby says, at one point with Stone in a straitjacket. So he says, a terrible sense of pity moved him. He felt capable of murder for the release of that gentle, tormented creature. That’s pity, but it’s also he can, he can identify with a human being, the person in front of him, not that, not the archetype, not that, not the idea of country and patriotism, but the person. At the beginning, he’s looking for this fortune teller, and he meets Willie and Anna, who are, I guess, Austrian, and he meets them and decides to put his trust in them, because he thinks to himself, If you can’t trust anyone, you are truly alone, and there’s no meaning to this world unless you have Some trust. And so he chooses to put his trust in, in these two people. And I think it’s, it’s the connection, it’s that he is after his wife dies, completely dissociated from any other human being. His closest connection is arguably his landlady, yes. And I think, I think at times. Yes, pity could be replaced with the phrase human connection, not everywhere it’s used. But I think it might be worth looking at, well at times.

Sarah Harrison  55:09

For sure, not with the rat though, no. Sure, this pivotal idea in a nutshell of what pity can move you to it can move you to lie to the person you love forever. It can move you to kill the person you love for him, for him, because I think he’s using that. You feel a gut feeling, at least I feel a gut feeling first, and then your more introspective self-dissects that. For him, I know, yes, the human connection involved, but I think that’s almost a driver of his pity in The Ministry of Fear. And for me, it’s anger, and they’re like, in that way, I felt like, okay, I get why you’re always feeling this, and then it’s determining the shape of your next actions, like how you process it.

Carolyn Daughters  56:06

For me, it’s and I think you would probably be aware of this about me, but it’s justice and equity. How do I get closer to that, if at all possible, in whatever interaction? And so if I see something that I perceive as unjust.

Sarah Harrison  56:22

What’s your feeling? You feel fight.

Carolyn Daughters  56:27

I want to fight. I don’t feel angry necessarily, though I can. I don’t feel scared necessarily, though I sometimes do. I feel fight. I feel something in me wanting to push harder so that fill in the blank makes more logical sense. And I’m not. I’m not talking about, like some political scenario. I’m secretly a socialist or communist, or whatever. I’m not talking about that. I’m saying I want justice and equity and or something resembling it, in all scenarios, and with for all people, making up a weird scenario, like if promotions are being given out at work, I want them to be done justly. I don’t want one person to get an extra big boost because they are friends with the owner of the company. I’m making up a weird scenario there, but I, I’m, I’m all about assessing what I think now and then. Once I do that on the back end, I may question, well, did I assess it correctly? What did I miss? I’m constantly asking these sorts of questions. So it’s not finite. It’s not it’s not fully defined in my in my mind. I know what justice looks like, or I know what an appropriate distribution of promotional dollars at the company looks like using that weird example, it’s I’m constantly calling into question my own assessments. But as close as I can get, giving my best, I would like to influence that. So that’s where my fight comes out. But not fight like I’m angry and screaming and cursing. I don’t do a whole lot of that. More like I can work longer and harder. I will work long and hard for whatever this thing is that I believe.

Sarah Harrison  58:38

I wouldn’t say for me, it’s even determined on the issue, right? If he sees a suffering rat, if he sees the suffering wife, his instinct is pity. If I see a suffering rat, mindset is going to be anger, right? I Who left this animal to suffer? I might do this. I might kill the rat, but then I’m going to be like, who did this? And how do we avoid it happening? Because the anger is going to, it takes it helps create the shape of the path, okay, right? And if, um, if my spouse is dying, his pity might lead him to in the spouse’s life, okay, I’m probably going to feel anger, and then I’m going to figure out what my path is based on, that maybe my anger is a misdiagnosis.

Carolyn Daughters  59:22

I’m just making stuff. So there will be a direction. Your anger will channel itself.

Sarah Harrison  59:27

Anger will create the shape of the path, okay, depending on. It’s like it’s emotion by which other ideas are access, okay, but there’s not necessarily a thing that triggers it. It’s just the first one felt.

Carolyn Daughters  59:43

I feel like you and I are almost saying similar things, but channeling a different way, because you’re like, there is a right thing, and it the right thing did not happen here because of this diagnosis, or because someone let this rat in, or someone did not get the promotion they deserve. Right? So we’re responding the same way. Are we responding to the same things, but maybe in a different way? But some of we have maybe some resonance in how, in the ways we see the world, and maybe the responses are different.

Sarah Harrison  1:00:17

I think that’s fair.

Carolyn Daughters  1:00:18

Either that or we just, we have nothing in common, that’s what it is. And on that note, …

Sarah Harrison  1:00:29

Carolyn, it’s unbelievable that we are out of time discussing The Ministry of Fear.

Carolyn Daughters  1:00:33

I’m glad we’re going to have a guest to come back, because of our 10 pages, I’m pretty sure we’ve covered two and a half pages.

Sarah Harrison  1:00:40

There are a lot of other aspects. We haven’t even dived into the war. There’s a lot of interesting stuff about the blitz this by intrigue, the actual The Ministry of Fear, which I think is worth talking about. So, listeners, I hope you’ll come back for the next episode.

Carolyn Daughters  1:00:59

For sure. Our next book after this one, it’s probably worth mentioning, is Green for Danger by Christianna Brand. The Blitz is going to play a big role in that book as well. It’s amazing. I say this every year, but I’m just so excited about our books this year. If you’ve not checked it out, go to our website. We have all of our 2026 offerings. We have links to all the books. You can buy them online. You don’t pay any extra. We get the tiniest little kickback.

Sarah Harrison  1:01:31

Yeah, we do. We have them on Amazon and now for your reading enjoyment, on bookshop.org.

Carolyn Daughters  1:01:37

Which is independent booksellers.

Sarah Harrison  1:01:39

It gives the commission to independent booksellers.

Carolyn Daughters  1:01:43

Which is very cool, but do check out the books that we’re reading this year. It’s a great, great, great list, and we’re in the height of the World War Two era with these books, so I’m excited about our mystery guest coming up.

Sarah Harrison  1:02:01

All right. Stay tuned.

Carolyn Daughters  1:02:03

Thanks so much for listening to our episode on The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene. Please help other mystery lovers find our show with a like, subscribe, share, or rating. It’s totally free, and it means the world to us.

Sarah Harrison  1:02:14

If the spirit of mystery so moves you, we have a few ways you can financially support our labor of love. Click the link in the show notes to support this podcast. Buy your books through our Amazon store or join our Patreon, where Subscribers have access to additional episodes that include bonus content and discussions of the movies inspired by some of the greatest mysteries ever written.

Carolyn Daughters  1:02:37

Thanks for joining us on our journey through the history of mystery. Until next time, Stay Mysterious.