Brighton Rock: Crime Writing And Cultural Value

Published in 1938, Brighton Rock is a tense and dark murder thriller set against the murky backdrop of inter-war Brighton. From the pages of the novel emerges the larger-than-life figure of Ida Arnold whose casual encounter with Fred Hale and whose inimitable sense of adventure plunge her into a world of gangland violence, crime and guilt. Her ‘shadow’ is the outwardly timid but inwardly resolute Rose. In this article, Andrew Green considers Greene’s sophisticated use of the detective novel genre in Brighton Rock.

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Brighton Rock: Crime writing and cultural value

Brighton Rock is one of many novels Graham Greene wrote dealing with crime and criminality (others include A Gun for Sale, The Ministry of Fear and The Honorary Consul). Interestingly he chose to call these books ‘entertainments’ rather than novels. This seems to indicate that Greene thought of these books as inherently different from (and inferior to?) the works he styled novels.

If Greene had doubts as to the credibility of the crime thriller as a form, he is not alone. Like westerns, horror writing, science fiction, fantasy and romance, crime writing and thrillers are often dismissed as ‘lowbrow’ culture. The roots of the form are often seen as ambiguous in their credentials. Some crime writers (e.g. Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and John Buchan) were serious writers producing serious literature, but the form has always also attracted writers of poorer quality, sensationalist works. Such a dichotomy continues to exist, and crime writing and thrillers are often perceived as culturally inferior (because popular?) forms.

Writing of the works of the American crime writer Raymond Chandler, however, W.H Auden challenges the idea that writing about crime is necessarily culturally inferior. Chandler wrote that he intended ‘to take the body out of the vicarage garden and give murder back to those who are good at it.’ Auden takes issue with this as a basic premise, suggesting that the English ‘cottage murder’ does not need rescuing from itself, but then interestingly goes on to consider Chandler’s work as something other – not so much detective fiction as ‘serious studies of a criminal milieu’. Through these ‘studies’ Chandler engages, Auden suggests, with what he calls the ‘Great Wrong Place’ and it is in doing this that Chandler’s works cease to be ‘escape literature’ and become ‘works of art’.

Similarly, Greene’s portrayal of Brighton allows him to explore a number of significant and serious matters within another ‘wrong’ place. With its kiss-me-quick reputation, its seedy cafés, its run-down apartment houses and its huddled depressed terraces, Brighton is a dark and often threatening place. At the same time, however, the bar of The Cosmopolitan, the tawdry glamour of the race-course and the myriad bustling public houses show that it is nevertheless a vibrant and vital city. This ‘wrong’ place, in other words, becomes precisely the ‘right’ place for Greene to unfold his tale.

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Crime in Brighton Rock

As in much of his work, Greene battles in this novel with problematic areas of his Catholic faith and what it might mean in the real world. Concepts such as good and evil, guilt and salvation lie at the heart of Brighton Rock and have a significant impact on the ways in which Greene and the characters within the novel perceive the nature of crime. Law encodes concepts of legality and illegality – what is and is not considered criminal – around secular notions of right and wrong. Religious belief, however, additionally deals with spiritual forces of good and evil. This proves a very significant distinction within Brighton Rock. Ida Arnold establishes her principles of justice on Old Testament notions – ‘an eye for an eye’ (Exodus 21: 24) – as she investigates Hale’s mysterious death. Pinkie (the leader of the gang that has murdered Hale) and Rose (his girlfriend, then wife) – both Catholics – function along different lines. For them, as for Greene, transgression (the act of sin, centred on evil desire) appears to be a stronger and more problematic concept than simple right or wrong. Pinkie, for example, has formed a strongly personal moral universe where sex poses more of a moral problem, is a more troubling ‘sin’ and ‘crime’ than murder. The legitimacy of such a view is, of course, deeply questionable, and Greene certainly does not condone Pinkie’s actions. What Greene does recognise, however, is the reality of as faith which functions less in terms of right and wrong than it does in terms of what Rose calls ‘stronger foods – Good and Evil’. As such, Rose is perfectly happy to accept the charge Ida levels at her – that right and wrong mean nothing to her – and she is able to reconcile her relationship with Pinkie and his actions: ‘she knew by tests as clear as mathematics that Pinkie was evil – what did it matter in that case whether he was right or wrong?’ Greene does not offer an apology for Pinkie’s and Rose’s perspective – the fact of Pinkie’s spiritual choice simply negates the importance of what is perceived as a subordinate question. Ida’s and Rose’s responses to the death of Hale and Pinkie’s role in it thus becomes an artistic vehicle for exploring the problematic distinction between Ida’s socially/bodily-constructed legal model of crime and criminality and Rose’s spiritually/mentally-informed code.

In exploring such profound issues of morality and society, Brighton Rock clearly demonstrates its cultural credentials. Whilst it plays with the recognizable character ‘types’ of crime and detective fiction, the ethical trials and temptations the characters face are not mere plot devices (as they can be in less sophisticated crime fiction), they become the philosophical centre of debate. Whereas in many traditional crime tales the solving of the crime results in a return to the status quo (a metaphorical Garden of Eden which has been temporarily threatened by the criminal act), Brighton Rock offers no such comfortable reassurances. Greene’s fictional (and spiritual) world is one where crime cannot be so easily dispensed with and where evil remains as a powerful and transformative force. ;

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Detection in Brighton Rock

The process of investigation and detection can be seen as an act of ‘reading’. The successful investigation of crime depends upon an investigator’s ability to ‘read’ and ‘interpret’ a set of clues that will enable them effectively to reconstruct the ‘story’ of the crime. Tzvetan Todorov in his fascinating book The Poetics of Fiction, explores how detective fiction simultaneously employs two narratives operating in contrary motion: 1) the story of the crime, which begins at its end and must be reconstructed by the investigator; 2) the story of the investigation, which moves forward as it works its way backwards through the story of the crime.

In Brighton Rock, Greene explores the multiple narratives at play in the construction of his crime fiction, and ‘reading’ becomes in itself a thematic concern of the novel. The police adopt a ‘closed book’ policy. They rapidly accept the surface ‘meaning’ and ‘interpretation’ of Hale’s death – that he has died of natural causes – perhaps because to explore too deeply would open up other awkward ‘narratives’ about what occurs in the town. Ida Arnold, however, refuses to accept the apparent certainties of their ‘reading’ and persists in the view that there are other ways of understanding what has happened to Hale and the reasons for it. The ambiguous words she is ‘given’ by the Ouija board and her ‘understanding’ of Hale from her brief yet significant encounter with him, lead her to believe that there is more to the story of his death, quite possibly involving a stick of the enigmatic Brighton rock that provides the novel’s title.

‘Writing’ is also a significant concept in the novel. Hale, in Brighton under the incognito of Kolley Kibber (Colley Cibber was the name of an eighteenth century actor, playwright and Poet Laureate), ‘writes’ his progress around the town by depositing a series of cards. These cards, which are part of an elaborate competition staged by a major newspaper, go on to play a central role in the more dangerous ‘games’ Greene depicts, allowing both Ida and Rose to reconstruct, read and develop their own interpretations of Hale’s last journey. Writing stories is also important for Pinkie. His determination to gain respect as a gang leader is driven by his wish to write a new ‘story’ for his life – a story that will allow him to escape from the seedy history of his existence to date and which will allow him access to a new life in what he perceives to be the glamorous world of Colleoni. When he murders Spicer, Pinkie ‘writes’ Dallow and the lawyer Prewitt into his own fabricated version of events, casting them as ‘witnesses’ to the fact that Spicer fell down the stairs – a version of events that out of fear they collude with. He also manages to write Rose out of any potential legal proceedings against him by marrying her and thus taking advantage of the law that makes it impossible for a wife to testify against her husband.

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Conclusion

Brighton Rock takes the concerns and the genre properties of crime writing far beyond the limitations (entertaining as these may be) of traditional crime fiction. The particular inflections crime, transgression, belief and guilt that his Catholic faith opens up allow his explorations of the criminal underworld to take on new spiritual dimensions. Greene’s portrayal of human nature as delineated in the opposing ‘forces’ of Rose and Ida – both of whom function as shadow ‘detectives’ paint for us a picture of a fallen world is both spiritually and physically compelling.

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