Biographer who dedicated 30 years to Graham Greene

Norman Sherry, who has died Norman

aged 91, was Graham Sherry

Greene’s official biographer – 1925-2016

and spent 30 years trying to unravel the novelist’s secrets. He became so immersed in his subject that he began to think of himself as Greene’s adopted son but, in fact, the pair weren’t even on first-name terms for many years, said The Daily Telegraph – and Greene was deeply ambivalent about the project. Famously private, the writer had gone to great lengths to conceal the complexities of his personal life, to the extent that in his diary, he sometimes wrote two separate pages giving alternative accounts of the same day – “one containing sober observation and the other chronicling a visit to a prostitute”. Sherry was not an obvious choice for the job: head of English at the University of Lancaster, he had never written a formal biography. But in the early 1970s, Greene was under pressure to appoint a biographer, and had been impressed by Sherry’s research into the life of Joseph Conrad. So in 1974, he agreed to meet Sherry in London, at the Savile Club. “Follow me to the end of my life,” Greene apparently commanded. He then handed the young academic a map of the world with red dots marking his travels, and suggested that Sherry start by retracing his footsteps. A decade later, novelist David Lodge visited Greene, and found that he “seemed to derive a mischievous glee from the tribulations that poor Norman Sherry had suffered” as he doggedly pursued leads in remote parts of Haiti and Liberia.

Of course, there was often little evidence left in these places of Greene’s visits, decades earlier, said Michael Shelden in The Guardian. That didn’t deter Sherry: he spent seven years abroad, often risking his life in the process. He developed gangrene in Mexico; passed out from tropical diabetes in Liberia; and was held up at gunpoint, also in Liberia. At one point, Greene became so alarmed, he quietly intervened to stop Sherry visiting a leper colony in the Congo, for fear he would lose his biographer altogether. Yet it was Sherry’s detective work at home that reaped the most rewards, said The Daily Telegraph. Greene had refused to discuss his attempts at suicide as a boy; but as he discovered when the first volume finally came out, in 1989, Sherry hadn’t let that stop him. He’d tracked down 36 of Greene’s former schoolmates, two of whom had kept diaries, and got the details from them. It had taken 15 years for the first volume to appear; Greene had predicted that he would live to see the first, but not the second – and that Sherry would die before the third. He was partly right. Greene died in 1991, three years before volume two appeared. Sherry began to worry about Greene’s prophecy, and took the precaution of sending the third volume to his publisher with its final sentence incomplete. It came out in 2004. By that time, he’d fallen out with Greene’s family over his insistence on publishing details of the writer’s affairs. The literary world had grown bored with the project, too. The main criticisms were that the book was too much about Sherry, and had not captured the “true Greene”. David Sexton described his appointment as “Greene’s last, best joke”. Sherry’s obsession “blighted his life more than it graced it”, said Shelden. His health suffered, two of his marriages ended in divorce – and to cap it all, he’d recently heard that a new official biography was in the offing, which would supersede his volumes.