In The Third Man, Rollo Martins is invited by a school friend Harry Lime to post-war Vienna, a dreary place at that time occupied by Allied troops. Martins finds that Lime was one of the worst racketeers and has just been killed, but was the death an accident? The truth is more that Martins can bear. In The Fallen Idol, a small boy named Philip is left in a large house with Baines, the butler, and Mrs. Baines, thin and menacing. And soon Philip becomes caught up in other people's secretive lives.