Thoughts on "Brighton Rock" by Graham Greene

Brighton Rock  by Graham Greene, first published in 1938, is both a dense, exquisitely written suspense novel and an unusual book for our more explicit age. In elusive, poetic style, it tells the story of a cold-blooded young murderer, his sordid milieu, and the passions and events from within his world and without that finally do him in.

We first experience the bleak underworld hiding behind the hectic, colorful façade of Brighton, the famed English resort, through the eyes of Fred Hale. Fred is a small-time crook who’s returned to Brighton for a legit gig as a wandering mark for a newspaper competition.

But Fred’s return home turns out to be a bad idea. Before he left the first time, he’d grassed a local gang leader to the law. Fred tells himself all has been forgotten, but, as he learns, memories die hard—especially for Brighton’s new underworld boss, someone far outside both law and decency.

“Pinkie,” as the new boss is called, is but a boy of seventeen, but what a boy! Raised in a pious Catholic household, he rebelled and signed up with the devil, full stop. A pure sociopath, he seethes with cold rage and disdain for all forms of decency. Ironically, his severe Catholic upbringing has left him with a prissy revulsion toward booze and sex, making into him a perverse monstrous ascetic.

Pinky cuts through it all like his treasured razor and with which he rules his gang. They’re a grubby lot who, considering they’re all older, should be his mentors, but are too dissolute and half-witted to resist Pinkie’s ambition.

“He wasn’t made for peace,” Greene writes in his exquisite prose. “he couldn’t believe in it. Heaven was a word. Hell was something he could trust.”

But once poor Fred falls under Pinky’s knife, the boy finds he can’t put much trust in Hell either, as his actions have consequences far beyond his control.

For one, the alibi Pinky’s constructed to cover the murder starts to crumble, thanks to the innocent actions of Rose, a naïve young waitress who crosses paths with both victim and killer in the hours before the murder.

Desperate to cover his tracks, Pinkie concocts a daft scheme to seduce and marry Rose to keep her from testifying against him. Hopeless, on the one hand, because both of them were raised Catholic; on the other hand, Pinky, despite his hard heart, can’t keep Rose’s blind dedication from prying open his soul and letting the light in.

Pinky faces yet another threat from Colleoni, a big-time London gangster who’s moving in on Brighton. To him, Pinkie and his gang are mere grubs.

As for the good guy, Greene pulls a neat surprise by offering up an inverted Miss Marple. Her name is Ida, a classic free-spirited prostitute with a heart of gold and driving sense of justice and decency. (In Greene’s world, she’s as good a Catholic as any and certainly better than some.) She befriended Fred and saw both him and his killer together just moments before the murder and now burns with a desire to find justice for the victim, with the help of the other knockabout denizens of her world.

With Ida on his trail, Pinkie doesn’t stand a chance.

Brighton Rockis gorgeously written, with Greene’s precise prose brilliantly capturing Brighton’s underworld and its sun-splashed funhouse facade.  The novel may be slow for modern tastes. The violence is handled with British restraint: Some of it takes place off the page, while other incidents are captured in elusive, impressionistic fashion. There are some muddled moments: The official inquest brushes away Fred’s murder as a heart attack while the police seem remarkably absent until the stormy windswept climax (all the more to keep our eyes on Ida).

Richard Attenborough before he was "Sir"

Greene called Brighton Rock one of his “entertainments” as opposed to his dramatic interior-set novels, such as The End of the Affair. It's been adapted for the stage once and twice for the screen: once with noirish flair in 1948, starring Richard Attenborough, who makes Pinkie into a most chilling cherub. (I've not seen the adaptation from 2010.)

Nowadays, that notion has been flipped, with Greene’s “entertainments” drawing much more attention. Brighton Rock  is a serious work with a strong sense of emotional and moral claustrophobia, of a world hermetic, seemingly remote, but as close to the everyday as a window pane.

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Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown,a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel is now out! His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Arkwon the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil and Dracula: Endless Night (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon,Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journaland The Strand and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.