The Heart of the Matter (1948). Graham Greene (English, 1904-1991). It deals with Catholicism and moral change in Scobie (a police officer) in a British West African Colony. Greene, a British intelligence officer in Freetown, Sierra Leone, drew on his experience there. The book’s title appears halfway through the novel: “If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?”