Graham Greene is one of those talented authors who has a remarkable ability to combine literary entertainment with moral and political commentary. That is to say, he wrote books that were popular, accessible, and fun to read, while simultaneously making generations of readers think critically about the world in which we all live and about our personal interactions with each other. Sometimes, when you read a Graham Greene novel you don’t even know that you’re doing that, you just read and relax and have a great time, but at the end of his books you feel somehow intellectually enriched. And in my books, that’s pretty impressive.

His 1938 novel Brighton Rock—one of his so-called “entertainments”—does precisely that: entertains, and at the end of it, you come away with a kind of moral insight. Set in pre-war Brighton, England, a holiday town, the story follows Pinkie, also called “The Boy”, a 17-year-old sociopathic gangster. He’s an evil character but you pity him anyway, pity him for the situation he finds himself in, despite it being a situation of his own creation. He’s also a Catholic, as was Greene himself, and there are subtle religious themes that flutter in and out of the story. Just before the book begins, Pinkie becomes the leader of his gang, the previous leader recently deceased. At the root of his hellish angst is the fact that he’s so young and few but his gang take him seriously, and even in his gang there are murmurs of dissent. The group targets and kills a writer who had betrayed the gang in print. A woman named Ida is drawn into the story when she meets the writer before his death and when he turns up dead she suspects foul play despite the fact that the police say the man died of a heart attack. She pursues the truth and eventually starts to track Pinkie. Along the way, Pinkie meets an impressionable girl called Rose who he uses for an alibi and as their relationship develops and Ida hounds his movements, the terrifying nature of Pinkie’s twisted character is revealed.

Brighton Rock’s themes are all centred on human behaviour and moral character and it’s a story that plays with your emotions as do so many stories where the hero is actually an antihero. A bad person. It’s also a captivating story because its thriller-style plot is told in what can only be described as a quintessentially Graham Greene style of writing.