Good early Greene dealing with right/wrong vs Good/Evil. A Noir-lke book filled with suspense. The end is really gripping and Greene finally finds his future voice near the end. Great read. ( )

The more I do not read Contemporary Fiction, the more important the predecessors become. Case in point: Graham Greene. Never has the degradation of every but one of the dramatis personae been so trepidatiously depicted. Imagine someone writing in those years between the apexes of Hammett and Chandler, a British Catholic, setting his terrors at the most cliched of sites, the seaside resort. Impotent wanna-be gangsters collide with both semi-professionals and well-meaning interlopers. Being me, I knew how it all would end. Graham Greene proved me very wrong, to my delight. ( )

I enjoyed visiting Brighton on my one trip to England, so I liked being reminded of that town through this book. I also like Greene's writing style, from all the other books of his I've read so far.
This one is a murder-mystery/crime thriller, with a citizen sleuth, a middle-aged woman named Ida who spends some time hanging out with a nice stranger just shortly before that man dies. She realizes that the story about that man's seemingly natural death doesn't tally with what she knows of the victim's last hours, and when the police ignore her concerns she sets out to investigate on her own. An unlikely avenging angel, she nonetheless pursues a gang of toughs whose gang is going through the power struggles and adjustments that follow a regime change. In addition to the adventure/thriller elements, this book also explores the nature of mortal sin and good/evil, looking at the many complications and gradations that make it hard to hold to strict, black and white concepts of good and evil, while still also showing how maybe evil is still real, no matter how complicated real life can be.
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A boring and tedious read. ( )

Bleak, but brilliant. ( )