The details of the affray, in which a gang of 16 men (armed with hatchets, hammers and iron bars - but not razors) attacked a bookmaker and his clerk, resemble the assault on Pinkie and Spicer by Colleoni's hoodlums. He got the idea for the story from newspaper accounts of a case at Lewes Assizes in July 1936 - a case at which, as he later remarked, 'the Brighton race gangs were to all intents quashed forever as a serious menace'.

'The first fifty pages of Brighton Rock are all that remain of the detective story,' Greene recorded: after that it became something more complex. These two events 'inextricably involved religion in contemporary life', and his novel, though utterly remote from such news items, pursued the same involvement. Looking back, he speculated that the Catholic theme had entered the novel because of two developments in world affairs - the persecution of Catholics in Mexico, and Franco's attack on Republican Spain. It was also - a fact vital to its stature - his first novel seriously to engage with Catholicism. It turned out, though, to be his first masterpiece.

The thriller was Brighton Rock, and Greene's slighting reference to it confirms that, like Stamboul Train (1932) and A Gun for Sale (1936), it was meant as a money-spinner, not serious art. 'THE BABY is crying & I have ten books accumulated for review and this damned thriller to write,' Graham Greene complained to his brother Hugh in a letter of 31 October 1936.

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