

Hale meets middle-ageing Ida Arnold by chance in a pub and then on the Palace Pier as the mob is closing in, but he is snatched away without her realising what has happened to him.

Now Hale has been sent to Brighton to distribute cards anonymously for a newspaper competition and realises that he is being hunted by Pinkie’s mob.

The murder of Kite had been brought about because of a report by Charles "Fred" Hale in the Daily Messenger about his slot machine racket. There is an incidental link between this novel and Greene's earlier A Gun for Sale (1936), in that the murder of the gang boss Kite, mentioned in A Gun For Sale, allows the seventeen-year-old sociopath Pinkie to take over his gang and thus sets the events of Brighton Rock in motion. The first of Greene's works to explore Catholic themes and moral issues, its treatment of class privilege and the problem of evil is paradoxical and ambivalent. The novel is a murder thriller set in 1930s Brighton. Brighton Rock is a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1938 and later adapted for film and theatre.
