Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

“Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him…”  such is the opening line of Greene’s Brighton Rock and it certainly grabbed me.

Following Green’s A Gun for Sale, which I did not have the pleasure of reading, Brighton Rock is a thriller that has very few moments of peace before Graham catapults the reader into a violent world where lawlessness and justice eventually intertwine.

In describing The Boy, Pinkie, the word punk comes to mind.  Obviously troubled and most likely a socio path, he’s someone I would certainly not make eye contact with.

Spicer, an aging mobster seems to have concerns about the gang’s turf war with a much more powerful gang, led by Mr. Colleoni.  He eyesPinkie quite cautiously and with good reason as things don’t turn out well in the end.

Rose is a sad and tragic 16-year-old waitress who falls in with Pinkie and eventually marries him, not because he loves her, but rather he hopes to use her as an alibi.  Her destitute family is more than happy to accept Pinkie’s money to allow the young couple to wed and feel no remorse at doing so.

Ida Arnold is a driven woman who decides that the newspaperman Hale’s death was a homicide, not one of natural causes as was reported. She is relentless in her pursuit of the truth and takes risks for herself and others in delivering the justice even the local police seemed to take no interest in.

Quotes:

He had a fair smooth skin, the faintest down, and his grey eyes had an effect of heartlessness like an old man’s in which human feeling has died.  

Her large clear eyes (a spot of drink now and then didn’t affect them) told nothing, gave away no secrets.

They took his mind back and he hated them for it; it was like the dreadful appeal of innocence, but there was not innocence; you had to go back a long way further before you got innocence; innocence was a slobbering mouth, a toothless gum pulling at the teats; perhaps not even that; innocence was the ugly cry of birth.

Time with Mr. Greene would be sheer delight for me where I would likely bombard this prolific author with question after question.  I’d also thank him for somehow learning to live with his depression allowing him to compile such magnificent works.

My rating for Brighton Rock is an 8 out of 10.

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Next up, Hubert Selby Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream…