Chapter Commentary Part 1 of Brighton Rock - Study Guide by Graham Greene

'He had been insulted. He was going to show the world. They thought that because he was only seventeen... he jerked his shoulders back at the memory that he'd killed his man, and these bogies who thought they were clever weren't clever enough to discover that. He trailed the clouds of his own glory after him: hell lay about him in his infancy. He was ready for more deaths.' (68)

Ida returns to Brighton on a mission. She lays a bet on 'Black Boy' at the bookies (Tate's). She picks up from bar room gossip a little information about Colleoni and Pinkie: that Colleoni is out for a monopoly on the protection racket and that Pinkie is trying to hold onto the racket that his predecessor, Kite, had set up. She goes to Snow's to find the girl that found the card that Hale had apparently left there. She talks to Rose who chats to her with her normal congeniality but suddenly remembers Pinkie's warning that she should be wary of people asking questions. Ida pursues her gentle interrogation but Rose is very much on her guard. She pretends to have a poor memory for faces and refuses to answer the questions that Ida asks about the appearance of the man that left the card: "I didn't talk to him. I was rushed. I just fetched him a Bass and a sausage roll and I never saw him again." (75). Unwittingly, she gives Ida a precious piece of information that confirms Ida's suspicion that it was not Hale that left the card for Ida remembers that Hale refused her offer of a Bass: "I don't like Bass." He had told her (10). She goes to the police with her evidence but is told that Hale's case is closed. The police will not investigate the case. It is her case.

'Spicer was restless these days' (81). Spicer was nervous. He disliked killing and he was worried by the easy conclusion of Hale's death. Without any sort of investigation, nothing to test their alibi, he was left uneasily free and suspicious. It seems to him that he and the others have a false sense of security. Pinkie carves Brewer only a week after Hale's death. Pinkie doesn't suspect that there might be something more sinister in the Hale verdict. Spicer is looking for cracks in their safety. He is unnerved, therefore when he meets Crab, one of the Colleoni mob, who tells him that Pinkie is at the police station. He returns to their lodgings and receives a call from Rose who tells him that a lady (Ida) has been asking questions. He is frightened, especially because he knows that Pinkie knows that he is frightened. He knows that he wouldn't betray them but also knows that they think he might. His situation seems very precarious. He feels threatened by the police, by Colleoni's mob and by his own mob. As he frets over his fears and dreams of security, away from the underworld of Brighton, running a pub in Nottingham, he does not notice the beach photographer taking his photo.

'The poison twisted in the Boy's veins. He had been insulted. He had to show someone he was - a man.' (86). Pinkie goes to Snow's and takes Rose out into the countryside just outside Brighton. On the bus, as they ride out of town, he clams down. She regards him with an awe and her admiration satisfies his insecurity but not for long: 'when he looked at the girl who admired him, the poison oozed out again' (88). Pinkie is not worried in quite the same way as Spicer but he is worried. He sees the threat to his security very clearly in the form of Rose. She characterizes the progression of time, the loss of the independence of youth. She represents the threat of marriage and sex and Pinkie is scared of both, but particularly sex. She also represents a world that he wishes to escape from. They both grew up in Nelson place, a Brighton slum. His thirst for power, for the opulence and ease of The Cosmopolitan is fuelled by a fierce desire to escape from his background, from the impoverished fate of his parents. His memories of childhood, witnessing the 'Saturday night ritual' - his parents' weekly sex - has cultured his disgust for sex. Rose represents, in her background, poverty and in her affection for him, the threat of marriage and sex. '... the prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements. Was there no escape - anywhere - for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.' (92).