Pinkie is a teenage gangster in the criminal underworld of 1930s Brighton. Fred Hale is journalist who has inadvertently incurred Pinkie's wrath and is now in fear of his life. When Pinkie does indeed assault Hale, the older man dies of a heart attack. Only the blowsy, life-loving Ida Arnold, with whom Hale had spent some of his last day, is suspicious of the circumstances surrounding the journalist's death and she tries to track down the truth behind it. Meanwhile, Pinkie realizes that evidence exists that could lead to him and that the only way to protect himself is to court and marry the young waitress Rose who, unknowingly, possesses it. As Ida closes in on Pinkie's gang and Pinkie overcomes his aversion to women in order to win Rose, the narrative moves towards a sequence of terrible events and illusion-shattering revelations. In one sense, Brighton Rock, like many of the books Greene labeled his 'entertainments', is a straightforward thriller, but it is complicated by the Roman Catholicism that underpins the plot. Pinkie is Catholic and believes firmly in damnation and the torments of hell (he is less certain about heaven) and so too is Rose, who knows that the suicide which Pinkie at one point in the novel urges upon her is a mortal sin. Brighton Rock is a novel in which the moral drama matters as much as the twists and turns of the plot. Greene, one of the most widely admired English novelists of the 20th century, produced a wide range of fiction in his life, from the mordant satire of the world of espionage in Our Man in Havana to the bleak analysis of a doomed relationship that is The End of the Affair but he published nothing that holds readers' attentions better than Brighton Rock, with its relentless intensity and dark ironies.

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