Brighton Rock is a novel by Graham Greene, published in 1938 and later adapted for film and theatre. The novel is a murder thriller set in 1930s Brighton. 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. Plot 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 murder of Kite had been brought about because of a report by Charles "Fred" Hale in the Daily Messenger about his slot machine racket. 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. 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. To confuse the police investigation, Pinkie has gang member Spicer distribute Hale's cards about the town and then tries to retrieve one card from the café in which sixteen-year-old Rose is working as a waitress. Since Rose had spotted Spicer leaving the card, Pinkie realises that she can now disprove his trail of deception and must take measures to prevent this. He therefore courts Rose until she falls in love with him, his aim being to marry her so that she cannot testify against him. In reality he looks down on her, since she comes from the same socially deprived neighbourhood as himself, and is even repelled by her physically. Back in London, Ida reads about the inquest on Hale's death, which had found that he died of heart failure. Remembering the state of terror that Hale was in when she last saw him, she decides to go down to Brighton and discover the full story. While there she recruits the help of one of her old bed-fellows and manages to finance her trip with a lucky bet at long odds. Her enquiries soon establish the broad outlines of the story, even though Rose consistently refuses to co-operate and warns Pinkie of Ida's investigation. Pinkie is summoned to an