Brighton Rock

A razor-gang thriller set in the seaside Brighton of the 1930s, where the seventeen-year-old gangster Pinkie kills a man in the Whitsun crowds and marries a waitress, Rose, to keep her from testifying, while the cheerful Ida Arnold sets out to bring him down. Greene maps the town precisely: the Palace Pier where it starts, the racecourse where the gangs slash each other, the grand seafront hotels of the rival boss Colleoni, and the poor streets off Nelson Place that made Pinkie what he is. The chase ends on the cliffs at Peacehaven, east of town.

Ida Arnold

The Palace Pier

Part 1

Hale, going under the name Fred, hands out cards for a newspaper competition along the packed Palace Pier, knowing Pinkie's gang means to kill him. It is here that the blowsy, good-natured Ida Arnold picks him up for an hour, and later, convinced his death was no accident, appoints herself his avenger.

Part 1

explicit The novel opens among the Whitsun crowds on Brighton's Palace Pier, the real pleasure pier on the seafront, where the journalist Hale is stalked in the hours before his death.

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Rose

Nelson Place

Part 1

The dead-end poverty of Nelson Place is the world that formed Pinkie's cold Catholic damnation and Rose's helpless devotion. Greene keeps returning to it to explain them both: two children of the same slum, one certain of hell, the other ready to be dragged there for love.

Part 1

inspired by Pinkie and Rose both come from Nelson Place, the poor streets off Albion Hill that were a real Brighton slum since cleared; sited in that district east of the Old Steine.

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