As the story opens, the narrator, British Colonel Calloway, recalls meeting British writer Rollo Martins. The entire work is written from Calloway’s perspective, distant from the events. He recalls Martins as “in normal circumstances a cheerful fool” (1), though he indicates that most of their time together was far more eventful than the norm. They met in Vienna, in February, at the funeral of Martins’s best friend, Harry Lime. No year is given, but as the story takes place during the Allied occupation of Austria, and the film The Third Man premiered in 1949, sometime in the early postwar years is most likely.

Calloway describes the weather as incredibly cold, “as if even nature were doing its best to reject Lime” (1-2). He notes that Martins might have averted tragedy had they become more acquainted then but that fundamentally Martins was consumed by his strong fidelity to Lime. Calloway then describes Vienna in the early years of the postwar occupation, recovering from the destruction of World War II: The Allied forces have divided the city into four zones, and a different superpower (Russia, Britain, America, France) controls each one.