When the twentieth-century British novelist Graham Greene divided his fictions into “novels” and “entertainments,” he implied a qualitative distinction familiar to all students of the novel. So, to give the examples of two books already mentioned, Greene's The End of the Affair, about an illicit wartime relationship ended by a religious conversion, was published as a “novel,” whereas, with its page-turning plot, its lowlife gangsters, and its seedy, sensational aura of degradation and crime, Brighton Rock was “only” an entertainment. But all readers of Greene know what's wrong with the distinction: that some of his “entertainments” are at least as complex and rewarding as his “novels,” rendering the terms useless for separating good fiction from bad. This interchapter makes a case study of one of Greene's best-known “entertainments,” The Ministry of Fear, a spy novel that reflects explicitly on the nature of genre fiction. While it's tempting to say that what differentiates literary fiction from the genre novel is that the former resembles life while the latter resembles only other novels, this is the very distinction that The Ministry of Fear overturns.