A Gun for Sale
Authors: Graham Greene
Contents
About the Book
Raven is an ugly man dedicated to ugly deeds. His cold-blooded killing of the Minister of War is an act of violence with chilling repercussions, not just for Raven himself, but for the nation as a whole.
The money he receives in payment for the murder is made up of stolen notes. When the first of these is traced, Raven is a man on the run. As he tracks down the agent who has been double-crossing him, and attempts to elude the police, he becomes both hunter and hunted: an unwitting weapon of a strange kind of social justice.
About the Author
Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as sub-editor on
The Times
. He established his reputation with his fourth novel,
Stamboul Train
. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in
Journey Without Maps
, and on his return was appointed film critic of the
Spectator
. In 1926 he was received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote
The Lawless Roads
and, later, his famous novel
The Power and the Glory. Brighton Rock
was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the
Spectator
. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. This later produced the novel,
The Heart of the Matter
, set in West Africa.
As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography –
A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape
and
A World of My Own
(published posthumously) – two of biography and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in the collections
Reflections
and
Mornings in the Dark
. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and
The Third Man
was written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in April 1991.
Also by Graham Greene
Novels
The Man Within
It’s a Battlefield
The Confidential Agent
The Ministry of Fear
The Third Man
The End of the Affair
Loser Takes All
The Quiet American
A Burnt-out Case
Travels with my Aunt
Dr Fischer of Geneva
or
The Bomb Party
The Human Factor
The Tenth Man
Stamboul Train
England Made Me
Brighton Rock
The Power and the Glory
The Heart of the Matter
The Fallen Idol
Our Man in Havana
The Comedians
The Honorary Consul
Monsignor Quixote
The Captain and the Enemy
Short Stories
Collected Stories
Twenty-One Stories
The Last Word and Other Stories
May We Borrow Your Husband?
Travel
Journey Without Maps
The Lawless Roads
In Search of a Character
Getting to Know the General
Essays
Yours etc
.
Reflections
Mornings in the Dark
Collected Essays
Plays
Collected Plays
Autobiography
A Sort of Life
Ways of Escape
Fragments of an Autobiography
A World of my Own
Biography
Lord Rochester’s Monkey
An Impossible Woman
Children’s Books
The Little Train
The Little Horse-Bus
The Little Steamroller
The Little Fire Engine
GRAHAM GREENE
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Robert Macfarlane
Introduction
A Gun for Sale
starts with a bang. ‘Murder didn’t mean much to Raven. It was just a new job.’ It is an opening which places us unmistakably in the world of the detective thriller – the world of the gung-ho gumshoe, the sassy moll, and the smiler with the knife, where dialogue is as hard-boiled as a twenty-minute egg, and the action moves quicker than whisky over ice. In those first lines, we can hear a practice run of the celebrated beginning to Greene’s
Brighton Rock
(1938): ‘Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.’ We can hear, too, advance echoes of unnumbered dark-minded thrillers, all the way down to James Ellroy’s 1997 masterpiece,
The Cold Six Thousand
, which starts, abruptly: ‘They sent him to Dallas to kill a nigger pimp named Wendell Durfee.’
It places us, to be absolutely precise, in the world of noir. You will be familiar with the images of noir, even if you do not know the films and the novels which make up the genre. Two silhouetted hit men in overcoats and fedoras approach a diner. A G-car cruises at walking pace down a street. A faceless figure in a belted coat stands in a white circle of street-light. A man cups a hand round a flaring match. ‘Film noir’ was first used as a phrase in Paris in 1946, when French cineastes were looking for a label for a new type of Hollywood product. In the late 1930s, the feel-good world of mainstream Hollywood had begun to spawn a dark filmic alter ego. Noir cinema moved in a world of fear, neurosis, and depthless dishonesty. Its ‘heroes’ were sleazy private eyes, informers, hit men, gangsters or crims. Policemen were bent, institutions were authoritarian tending to evil. The setting was sordid, confused, almost always urban. Dialogue was terse. There were few verbs, and
no
happy endings. Action drove character, not the other way round. Everything was cast in extravagantly stylised greyscale, with sudden Caravaggio-contrasts of light and dark.
The 1940s was the decade of the classic noir films, the 1930s the period when the genre was forming in cinema and in literature.
A Gun for Sale
was part of that formation. ‘All you need for a movie’, in the loaded phrase of neo-noir director Jean-Luc Godard, ‘is a girl and a gun’. It was out of these two ingredients that Greene made his fifth novel.
The ‘gun’ is an assassin called Raven, who is hired to kill the Czech Minister for War. Raven returns to England after a successful hit, only to be paid off in stolen notes by his contact, Cholmondeley, and nearly arrested as a consequence. Bent on revenge, and unaware that his assassination has tilted the world towards war, Raven tracks Cholmondeley down to the Midlands city of Nottwich. En route, he takes hostage the novel’s ‘girl’, Anne Crowder, who happens to be the partner of a detective-sergeant named Jimmy Mather. Mather sets off to Nottwich after Raven, who is himself chasing Cholmondeley and his shadowy pay-masters. As this double-pursuit tapers to a violent climax, so the world edges closer to war.
A Gun for Sale
was published in 1936; in 1942 it would be adapted into the less subtly titled
This Gun for Hire
, with a script co-written by the American pulp master W.R. Burnett (author of
Little Caesar, High Sierra
and
The Asphalt Jungle
). The promotional poster for the film showed Alan Ladd as Raven, standing in a grainy bright angled light, and casting a corvid shadow onto the white wall behind him. Greene did not approve of Burnett’s script, but he can hardly have objected to the existence of the film, for his novel – like its 1934 predecessor,
Stamboul Train
– was clearly written with a eye to adaptation.
Cinema’s influence on
A Gun for Sale
is visible everywhere. It is there in the B-movie strap-lines: ‘His most vivid emotion was venom’; ‘He had been made by hatred’; ‘He bore the cold within him as he walked’. It is there, too, in the frequent cutaways, and in the long panning shots through the streets of London and over the suburbs of Nottwich. And it is there most obviously in the dozens of sudden leering close-ups:
the
zoom-ins on expressions, objects and body parts – the ‘furious dewlapped face’ of Mr Davenant, the harelip of which Raven is so violently ashamed, the ‘jewelled fingers’ of Cholmondeley, or the alien gas masks in which the medical students perform their strange carnival.
The thriller movie is the first of the two great cultural influences which converge in
A Gun for Sale
. The second is the adventure novel. Greene often spoke of H. Rider Haggard, Marjorie Bowen and John Buchan as among his favourite writers. It was from Buchan’s
The Thirty-Nine Steps
– with its pursuit scenes over the moors of the Scottish borders, themselves a homage to Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Kidnapped
– that Greene learned how to pace a chase, and learned also how powerful excitement could be as a way of bringing the reader to attention. These writers showed Greene that, as he once put it, ‘action has a moral simplicity which thought lacks.’
Greene’s adventure novels, however, diverged from their Edwardian antecedents in one important respect. The spy thrillers of Buchan and his like featured impeccably clubbable heroes: chaps with a patriot’s sensibility and an ethic of fair play. Greene’s, by contrast, starred anti-heroes – men driven by self-interest and self-loathing – of whom Raven is the first and one of the darkest. This was a necessary revision: the old, reassuringly simple value-systems of the Edwardian-era thriller, it seemed to Greene, could not hold in the predatory, paranoid, rudderless 1930s. In 1936, Greene wrote, Britain was ‘no longer a Buchan world’:
Patriotism had lost its appeal, even for a schoolboy, at Passchendaele, and the Empire brought first to mind the Beaverbrook Crusader, while it was difficult, during the years of the Depression, to believe in the high purposes of the City of London and of the British Constitution. The hunger-marchers seemed more real than the politicians.
For all its firecracker action and popular influences,
A Gun for Sale
is an intensely literary novel. While Orwell was mastering his style of artful plainness, and while Auden was coupling left-wing messages to popular verse forms, Greene
was
combining the tricks of the thriller-writer with the subtleties of the belletriste. His ambition – like so many British writers of the 1930s – was to hitch high-culture ambitions to the higher-powered vehicles of low culture.
Greene’s literary hand can be seen in the novel’s careful patterning: the images – red berries, sourness, facial disfigurements, speech slurs – which recur, speaking to one another across the novel, and amplifying its themes. So, for instance, Sir Marcus, the villainous armaments mogul, hides a scar beneath his beard; a flaw which binds him symbolically to his nemesis, the harelipped Raven. Then there are the numerous images of globes: the light-fitting like a ‘dull globe’ in Anne’s room, the ‘naked globe’ which illuminates Dr Yogel’s grubby surgery ‘globe’, the earth which seems to move like ‘an icy barren globe, through the vast darkness’ – an image which quietly but deliberately invokes the post-apocalypse world of Byron’s poem ‘Darkness’, where ‘the icy earth/Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air’. All these globes are there, of course, to prime us for the repercussions of Raven’s actions. We slowly come to know what Raven never does: that his assassination of the Czech minister – passed off as the act of a Serbian militant – has been commissioned by Sir Marcus precisely in order to trigger global warfare, and thus boost the fortunes of the armament industry’s fortunes. This is a world of Lorenz-Effect geopolitics, where a single assassination can trigger the slaughter of millions.
