Ascetic Killer

BRIGHTON ROCK -- Graham Greene -- Viking ($2.50).

Graham Greene, good-looking, slender, 33, is a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson. His first novel, The Man Within (1929), a psychological study of a cowardly smuggler, bore strong resemblances to Treasure Island. His psychological-action novels have continued to show a Stevenson influence. But though he got off to a flying start with his Stevenson inheritance, he has never been able to travel far on it.

At its best, Brighton Rock, a psychological gangster novel, creates an atmosphere as sinister as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; at its worst it is melodrama with coincidental cracks through which a cat could be thrown with ease. Laid against a background of Brighton Beach, London's Coney Island, the story has for central character a hollow-chested, downy-cheeked 17-year-old called Pinkie, a gangster ascetic who turns killer as a release from slum-made inhibitions: disgust with sex originating with his father and mother, religious neurosis originating with his early ambition to be a priest.

The story opens with the murder of his first victim, a seedy reporter, who is mixed up with a rival gang. A neat strangulation, this murder goes on the police records as heart failure. But two flaws turn up. One is a buxom, sentimental blonde, a sort of Mae West figure of Justice, who suspects that her friend the reporter has met foul play, gradually uncovers the evidence herself. The other is a mousy, 17-year-old waitress who knows the weak point in Pinkie's alibi. To shut the waitress' mouth, Pinkie cold-bloodedly makes love to her, meets with complete and, to him, nauseating success. "She loves me, she loves me not," he muses with characteristic humor, carefully pulling off the wings and legs of a fly. To shut the mouth of one of his own gang, Pinkie, pushes him off a staircase. Before long he is on a murder merry-go-round. But his worst experience, the high point of a lifetime's bitter humiliation, is when, in order to insure the waitress' loyalty, he has to suffer the hideous pangs of marriage.

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