Brighton Rock (novel) Brighton Rock (novel) Charles "Fred" Hale comes to Brighton on assignment to distribute cards anonymously for a newspaper competition (a variant of "Lobby Lud"; in this case, the name of the person to be spotted is "Kolley Kibber"). The antihero of the novel, Pinkie Brown, is a teenage sociopath and up-and-coming gangster. Hale had betrayed the former leader of the gang Pinkie now controls, by writing an article in the "Daily Messenger" about a slot machine racket for which the gang was responsible. Ida Arnold, a plump, kind-hearted and decent woman, is drawn into the action by a chance meeting
Matthew Hale (jurist) to uphold a conviction. William Holdsworth argues that it was his learning in Roman law and jurisprudence which allowed him to work so effectively; because he had seen other legal systems at work, he "could both criticise the defects of English law and state its rules in a more orderly form than they had ever been stated before". Hale's political neutrality and personal integrity has been attributed to his Puritanism, and his support of the common law; "Regimes come and go, the common law abides...For Hale...legal continuity was vital for civic identity". Much comparison has been made of Hale with