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GRAHAM Greene thought that Brighton Rock may have been the best book he ever wrote, and even his hostile critics like John Carey and Michael Shelden describe it as a "masterpiece." I agree; it seems to me by far Greene's finest novel, though it is not easy to define what kind of novel it is. It has many dimensions: a tough, realistic story of Brighton criminal life, a revenge tragedy, a mass-observing cross-section of the seaside resort in the mid-30s, a Catholic fable about damnation. Greene originally planned it as a detective novel and that aspect is evident in the arresting opening sentence: "Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him." Hale is an inkyfingered newspaper man, in Brighton as part of a publicity stunt for his paper; under the name of Mr. Kolley Kibber he goes through the town on a previously published itinerary distributing cards in hidden places. Anyone who finds one can claim ten shillings from the paper, but the big prize is reserved for anyone who recognizes and challenges Kolley Kibber with the right form of words.
Hale is right; only twenty pages into the novel he is dead, and we know who has killed him: the seventeen-year-old gangster Pinkie Brown and his little group of associates, Cubitt, Dallow and Spicer. They have been following Hale round Brighton and as protection he picks up Ida Arnold, a cheerful, pleasure-loving divorce (a Mae West lookalike, as Greene admitted) who has come down to Brighton for the Bank Holiday. She enjoys his company but has to leave him for a few minutes to go to the Ladies' near the Palace Pier; when she emerges, Hale has disappeared. Later his body is found in a shelter on the Front some way off towards Hove. According to the newspaper report of the inquest, which Ida reads in London, Hale died of natural causes, but remembering how scared he was she is skeptical and resolves to find out more. The gangsters themselves are baffled by the verdict; Spicer says, "That verdict sort of shook us all. What did they mean by it? We did kill him Pinkie?" Pinkie, otherwise the Boy, seems happy to accept the verdict but...