Brighton Rock is Graham Greene’s 1938 novel depicting gangland conflict in 1930s Brighton.

I’ve read that Graham Greene novels can be divided into ‘entertainment’ and ‘serious’. Brighton Rock seems to be included in the entertainment category. The plot involves a murder, the police messing up, a determined, amateur lady sleuth stepping in. The part-time lady sleuth idea goes back to Andrew Forrester’s Mrs Gladden character created in 1864, and had plenty of mileage in the 1930s with Miss Marple, Nancy Drew, Harriet Vane, and others.

If this is a familiar genre thriller, does that mean it can’t be a serious book? Graham Greene was a serious fellow. I think he saw himself as better than some workaday writer of detective fiction. If he was going to write a commercial lady detective story, he was going to use it to reflect on popular culture in general.

What is the popular outlook according to Brighton Rock? In broad outline, it involves an intense, black and white conception of right and wrong, combined with a tendency to emotive superstition, and a trust in ordinary people over experts. The amateur lady sleuth, Ida Arnold, is rigid in her judgements, thinks the police are incompetent fools, and uses seances to provide guidance and clues. So, there’s a scary sense of seeing the world in stark categories of good and bad, who’s in or out, all caught up in a vague wash of emotion and credulity. It’s a combination of the judgemental and a lack of anything substantive on which to base judgements.

Brighton Rock portrays a chaotic society, as strident as it is superficial. This all sounds painfully familiar. Does Greene provide any answers? Well no not really. The mob lawyer character, Prewitt, well educated, with a penchant for quoting Shakespeare, is as much part of this gritty milieu as the young mobsters. And talking of Shakespeare, it has been noted, not just by me, that Brighton Rock, as well as feeling like a violent Miss Marple story, is also reminiscent of something much more high end – Macbeth, no less. Ambitious young man commits murder and then gets pulled into more murder to cover it up. There doesn’t seem to be any meaningful divide between high and low brow in the world of Brighton Rock. Pinkie the young aspiring gangland boss even comes out with Latin phrases on occasion.

So does modern consumer culture swallow everything? That might be one way to look at it. The gang leader Pinkie is a Catholic, and even the ancient Catholic Church might become another expression of the popular outlook. After all, an intense, judgemental, black and white conception of right and wrong, combined with a tendency to emotive superstition, might not just apply to secular Ida and her seances.

I spent a long time thinking about this book, and had a few tries at writing a review. I suppose in the end I came to think of Brighton Rock as a prescient portrayal of how the popular can become the populist. That was certainly interesting. But the bleakness was a bit much. Popular culture isn’t necessarily rubbish. In his time Shakespeare was very much a popular playwright rather than an academic one. Then again maybe Greene would grudgingly agree, since he mixes high and low brow in the way he does. It’s not a gentle mixing, it’s like a scrapyard crushing a Rolls Royce with a Ford Fiesta and presenting a reader with the compacted result. But still, there is a lot to think about here as you look into the tangled mess of what was once Rolls Royce and Ford Fiesta.