The opening of Graham Greene’s masterful novel, Brighton Rock, first published in 1938, contains the essence of noir fiction within that memorable first sentence. Hale is a nobody, a face in the bank holiday crowd, a shabby sort of man with ‘inky fingers and bitten nails.’ There’s an inevitability about his story, a character certain of his fate, yet still he comes to Brighton. Why? Because he must. The decision isn’t his to make. Welcome to noir.
Of course, as anyone who’s read Greene’s novel or seen either film adaptation knows, Brighton Rock is less about the (briefly) living, sweating and twitching Hale than it is his violent nemesis, the teenage gangster, Pinky, and his crew. Pinky is an archetypal noir protagonist, holding court in tattered backstreet lodgings. His story is one of gang violence in the streets and arcades of a grubby pre-war seaside underworld. It’s about the corruption of innocence. Society beyond the drawing room and the comfortable certainties of traditional crime fiction.
Raymond Chandler wrote, ‘The crime story tips violence out
