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
Graham Greene of which nothing came. In 1925, while he was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, his first work, a poorly received volume of poetry titled "Babbling April", was published. Greene suffered from periodic bouts of depression while at Oxford, and largely kept to himself. Of Greene's time at Oxford, his contemporary Evelyn Waugh noted that: "Graham Greene looked down on us (and perhaps all undergraduates) as childish and ostentatious. He certainly shared in none of our revelry." He graduated in 1925 with a second-class degree in history. After leaving Oxford, Greene worked for a period of time as a private