All struggle with the modern world in their own way, none having found the perfect response to it. His characters in Brighton Rock all exist in an uncomfortable place between belief and unbelief Pinkie believes in Hell but not Heaven, Ida has her superstitions, and Rose puts her faith in Pinkie with an almost religious fervour. He grappled often with the big questions, and his view that the religious could often be guilty of the worst sins, and that redemption is available in many forms, set him apart from many ‘Catholic’ writers. With political ideologies taking advantage of the landscape across Europe, Greene was sceptical of inflexible doctrine, whether political or religious. The 1930s were a time of depression and austerity. His identity shifts he struggles half-heartedly against the inevitable. Hale’s attempted escape from death in the opening pages of Brighton Rock sets up neatly the notion of man’s struggle with existence, the need to protect oneself in the anonymity of the world in order to sustain life. Hale’s murder is a vengeance killing, preceded, in A Gun for Sale, by the murder of Kite, leader of Pinkie’s gang. A timid girl, Rose shows a blind faith in Pinkie, but Ida dogs the pair, struggling always to make Rose see sense and ‘save’ her. This spells trouble for Pinkie and to cover his tracks he must spill more blood, battle with local gangster Colleoni, and marry a sixteen-year-old waitress, Rose, to stop her testifying against him. Knowing in her gut that things are not right, Ida sets out to uncover the truth. Ida, who, when Hale disappeared, assumed she had been passed over, only learns of his death, reported in the local news as a result of a health condition, a few days later. Pinkie, a scrawny but sociopathically cold seventeen-year-old, is the (ironically) Bonapartean leader of the gang, and he doesn’t flinch as his crew murder Hale. But Ida Arnold cannot save him, and soon the gang catch up with Hale. Latching on to a buxom, good-time girl down from London, Hale hopes to escape the gang’s clutches. Later known by his real name, Hale, he has fallen in with the wrong crowd, and a quiet day by the sea soon turns into a race against death as a local gang pursue him.

Kolley Kibber, or Fred, is a newspaper man visiting Brighton for work. Brighton Rock (1938) is one of Graham Greene’s most famous works, and one of his ‘Catholic novels’.

Brighton rock 1938