A Gun for Sale: An Entertainment (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) [Mass Market Paperback]

On the face of it, A Gun For Sale by Graham Greene is a genre thriller, featuring a crime committed by a confessed and declared villain, followed by a police pursuit. In the hands of a great writer, however, even clichés such as this can be transformed into thoroughly satisfying novels.

First published in 1936, A Gun For Sale is set in a Europe over which war looms constantly and threateningly, casting a shadow of fear and even depression over all human interaction. Graham Greene appears to use this context to allow the book to make a significant, yet very subtle point, an assertion that conflicts, even grand conflicts like wars, are pursued by interests, instigated by an intention to profit. The grander the conflict, the greater the potential gain. As individuals vie for influence, prominence, control and dominance, so do societies, groups, companies, even countries. And some of the protagonists play dirty, rarely receiving the comeuppance of justice. When they do, we are gratified, sensing the same rightness that a happy ending might provoke.

A Gun For Sale has several important characters, more than a review can list. Raven is the first we meet, the blackness of his name immediately suggesting a functionality for the plot, for he is the anti-hero, the hired gun who completes the bloody assignment in the book's first pages. Hare-lipped and ever resentful of his disfigurement, both physical and, as a result of a painful upbringing, psychological, he suggests a figure that the reader might be invited to despise, perhaps a pantomime bogeyman of genre fiction, always accompanied by a threatening, trademark fanfare.

But Graham Greene is not that mundane a writer. We eventually come to know Raven well. Though we are never actually invited to like him, we eventually sympathise with his plight, if only by virtue of the fact that there are some apparent social heroes who in reality are a darned sight more deserving of our contempt. Raven is double-crossed and sets out to track down the perpetrator of his humiliation.

Raven leaves a trail and a policeman, Mather, takes up the pursuit. By chance Mather's girlfriend, Anne, boards the same train as Raven from London to Nottwich, an industrial town were she will appear in the chorus line of a pantomime. Raven and Anne meet and, viewed from the distance of the pursuer, become accomplices.

Mather's fellow copper, Sanders, is an interesting foil to Raven. Both are disfigured. Raven's problem is with appearance and he yearns to be rid of the hare-lip that disfigures his face, a disfigurement that Anne plays down, thus engendering his trust. The policeman Sanders, on the other hand, stammers. He is quick of wit, but not of voice, and is aware that his impediment has cost him promotion.

Mr Davis, also known as Cholmondley, amongst other things, is the greasy lackey employed by Sir Marcus. The latter is an industrialist, owner of a steelworks in Nottwich, a business that has seen better times. Mr Davis is a right cad, regarding theatre girls as fair game, regularly picking them up and persuading them into the grubby room he rents from a truly surreal couple in order to protect his reputation. The freemason Sir Marcus is barely clinging to life, but he retains sufficient pride, or malice, perhaps, to inflict untold suffering on others, merely to retain his own status in a future he does not have.

And so Raven pursues Cholmondley, who answers to Marcus. Mather and Saunders pursue Raven, and Anne seems to be on everyone's side. And it all works out.

But Graham Greene does much more than tell a tale. Through simple language and structure, and via a plot that would grace a b-movie at best, he penetrates his characters' psyches, locates them in social class and history, and manages with a deft lightness of touch to convey a remarkably strong sense of place, setting and context. Through his simply constructed prose, we see people, places and events from a multiplicity of perspectives and are left with a complexity of associations with every character. And that, precisely, is why cliché is left far behind.

From the start this book is Greene at his cinematic best. The writing really conveys the dark and cold environment, and the anti-hero is portrayed as one of lifes failures. In a world full of lies and betrayal he strives to right a wrong. The book reads in a slightly less complicated way than some of Greenes later works, but the impact is nonetheless powerful. It all serves as a wonderful companion to Brighton Rock.

This novel starts with the assassination of the War Minister of a European country, and the unplanned murder of his secretary, by a young Englishman called Raven (his character is clear from the colour of the bird). Disfigured physically by a hair lip, and psychological because of his childhood, he is a hired killer who has no hesitation about killing anyone who gets in his way. Back in England, Raven, oblivious of who he has killed, meets the man who hired him, Mr. Cholmondeley, and collects his payment. He buys a dress for a girl, unaware that the money has been stolen and their numbers have been circulated. He realizes this when police arrive at his lodgings, but he manages to escape. Raven is incensed that he has been double-crossed, and he determines to find Cholmondeley and take his revenge.

Raven tracks Cholmondeley to a fictitious midlands town called Nottwich, which is also where a young woman called Anne Crowder is going to work in a stage show. Anne is the fiancé of a Detective Sargent called Jimmy Mather, who is in charge of the banknote case and is looking for Raven. Anne's path crosses that of Raven when he forces her to help him leave the station without being challenged. Outside, to takes her to a new housing estate with the intention of killing her, but when an estate agent with a buyer arrive to view the house she manages to escape. However, because she feels some sympathy with Raven, she does not go to the police. Anne also meets Cholmondeley, now using his real name Davies. He is a backer of the show and she goes to dinner with him and then back to a room that he has rented for the evening. But when Davies learns from Anne that Raven is in town he tries to kill her.

Meanwhile, Mather has followed Raven's trail to Nottwich where he spots a woman with Anne's handbag and follows her back to the house where Anne was with Cholmondeley. But earlier Raven had also followed them to the house and had found her tied up. Together they escape, with the police hard on their heels. Mather begins to think that Anne has joined forces with Raven when the pair hole up for the night in a hut in some railway sidings. Anne has the naïve belief that by helping Raven she can somehow prevent the war that is threatening to follow from the assassination, and the following morning she acts as a decoy, allowing herself to be captured, so that Raven can escape. This confirms Mather's suspicions.

Eventually, Raven tracks Davies to where he works, Midland Steel, and tricks him to get into the office of Davies' boss, the owner of the steel company, the wheelchair-bound, crippled Sir Marcus. It is he who commissioned the assassination in the hope that it would start a war and so increase demand for steel. Raven kills both Davies and Sir Marcus and is himself shot dead by the police as they storm the room. Examination of Sir Marcus' papers reveals that Anne's unlikely story is true and she and Mather are re-united, the latter even being promoted. World War II does not start, at least not then.

This book is one of a series of classic short thrillers that Graham Greene wrote in the 1930s that he called `entertainments'. Many of the usual Greene ingredients are present (the difficulty of making moral choices, religion and redemption etc.), including some of the less attractive ones (racism and anti-Semitism). On the surface it is a very straightforward plot that relies heavily on coincidences (Midland Steel happens to be in the town where Anne is working, Mather spots a woman with Anne's bag etc.) and has a conventional feel-good ending. But the quality of Greene's writing raises it above that. The descriptions of not just the main characters, but also many lesser ones, such as Mather's hero-worshipping assistant Saunders, the odious twisted Sir Marcus, and the social-climbing, henpecked head of the Nottwich police, are excellent. This is a long way from being one of Greene's best novels, but is still a good read.