interview with Colleoni, a leading mobster whose aim is to take over all the illegal operations in Brighton. At the time Pinkie is too cocksure to take up Colleoni's invitation to join his operation. Afterwards he pretends to have reconsidered in order to get Colleoni to murder Spicer, whom Pinkie suspects of being close to turning informer. In fact both men are set up for a razor attack at the horse races but escape separately. Discovering that Spicer is still alive, Pinkie throws him to his death from an unstable staircase in their lodgings and implicates their terrified solicitor Prewitt into helping him cover up the murder. Prewitt has also helped Pinkie and Rose avoid the legal obstacles to their marriage and Pinkie now discovers that Rose has known of his criminality all along but not minded. Feeling trapped, and with what remains of his gang disintegrating, Pinkie proposes a suicide pact to Rose, on the pretence that Ida is close to having him arrested by the police. His plan is to get her to shoot herself at the developing resort of Peacehaven but not to fulfil his part of the pact. Ida meanwhile has tailed them, in order to free Rose from what she perceives as a loveless marriage, and has brought a policeman along with her. Pinkie's attempt to throw vitriol at his attackers misfires and, blinded by it himself, he runs over a cliff to his death. Rose later goes to confession and explains to the priest that she had wanted to accompany Pinkie even into damnation. She is told that since Pinkie had loved her, then there was good in him and she might become the means for his ultimate salvation. She leaves, looking forward to playing a recording he made on the day of their marriage, not realising that it really contains the declaration of his hatred. Themes Although ostensibly an underworld thriller, the book is also noted as the first of Greene's series of religious novels and deals with Roman Catholic doctrine concerning the nature of sin and the basis of morality. Pinkie and Rose are Catholics (as was Greene), and their beliefs are contrasted with Ida's sentimental sense of right and wrong. Greene is also initiating here the series of moral problems with which his later novels wrestle. In this case he is asking what place has a creature as heartless as Pinkie