SOURCE: "History Over Theology: The Case for Pinkie in Greene's Brighton Rock," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 67-77.

In the following essay, Williams draws attention to the sociopolitical context and value of Brighton Rock. According to Williams, "Brighton Rock remains one of Greene's most ambitious achievements for its ability to encapsulate an historical movement, namely the collapse of the British economic power in the 1930s with the consequent paralysis and the poverty that crept like a cancer across the normal social boundaries."

Brighton Rock (1938), reprinted countless times, remains one of Greene's most intriguing novels, eminently teachable in the classroom, mixing as it does the detective novel genre with adolescent sex hang-ups, and complicated by the claims of religion. It is also a period piece, evoking with the starkness of a black and white movie the feel of the 1930s in England, a country already...