Book review: “This Gun for Hire” by Graham Greene

The Chief Constable and Sir Marcus are minor stars of Graham Greene’s 1936 novel This Gun for Hire in the way of bit players in Shakespeare’s plays, such as the Fool in King Lear and Dogberry, the constable, in Much Ado about Nothing.

Greene’s Chief Constable in Nottwich, a fictional Nottingham, is a very specific, very individual type of a British doofus, a fuddy-duddy who intrudes himself where he’s not wanted and puffs himself up as if he is wanted — but, it turns out, he has surprising depths.

Early in This Gun for Hire, Jimmy Mather, a London detective, has come to Nottwich following the tracks of Raven, an armed man sought for passing counterfeit money. The police don’t know it, but he’s also the assassin who, a short time earlier, killed an Eastern European minister and sparked rapidly increasing and seemingly unstoppable war fever. Indeed, the future conflict casts a pall over the actions of all of the novel’s characters.

The Chief Constable, Major Calkin, has come to the police station to meet Mather:

The Chief Constable was fat and excited. He had made a lot of money as a tradesman and during the war had been given a commission and the job of presiding over the local military tribunal. He prided himself on being a terror to pacifists.  It atoned a little for his own home life and a wife who despised him. That was why he had come down to the station to meet Mather: it would be something to boast about at home.

 

Dark powers and blind forces

It is important to understand that the “war” mentioned here is what we think of as World War I.

That was a term not known in June, 1936, when Greene’s novel was published in the United States and, a month later, in the United Kingdom under the title A Gun for Sale. At that time, the horrific world conflict of two decades earlier was called the Great War, but fears of a second great war were rising across Europe and around the world because of Adolf Hitler, Naziism and the German military machine.

This gave the novel a nervy, unsettling edge for its first readers since, like Greene’s characters, they were going about their lives with a cloud of imminent war hanging over their heads.  Indeed, the people in the novel seemed pushed about and twisted up by dark powers and blind forces in a way that must have resonated with those first readers.

“His fat thighs”

“Keep a bottle of whisky here, super?” the Chief Constable asked. “Do us all good to ‘ave a drink. Had too much beer. It returns. Whisky’s better, but the wife doesn’t like the smell.” He leant back in his chair with his fat thighs crossed and watched the inspector with a kind of child-like happiness; he seemed to be saying, what a spree this is, drinking again with the boys.

This is the Chief Constable after worming his way into a meeting between Mather and the Nottwich police superintendent.

He’s more than a bit of a fool.  And so he is later at his home when he is talking with his dinner guest Sir Marcus, the richest man around who doesn’t usually deign to accept invitations.

Sir Marcus entered on the tips of his toes. He was a very old, sick man with a little wisp of white beard on his chin resembling chicken fluff. He gave the effect of having withered inside his clothes like a kernel in a nut. He spoke with the faintest foreign accent and it was difficult to determine whether he was Jewish or of an ancient English family.

Like the Chief Constables, Sir Marcus is something of a British type, the doddering old duffer who’s not quite all there.

Both men seem to be fools.

 

“Shoot on sight”

And, then, in what starts as a desultory discussion of the search by Mather and the police for the gunman they think of as a counterfeiter, Sir Marcus leads the Chief Constable step by step to an unexpected twist.

“It would be much better, Major Calkin, if your men take no risks. If they shoot on sight. One must take up weeds — by the roots.”

The Chief Constable seems to sort of agree for conversation’s sake but lets talk go in other directions until Sir Marcus, plying his listener with liquor, brings it back where he wants it.

He whispered abruptly, “So you’ll telephone now to the station and tell them to shoot at sight? Say you’ll take responsibility. I’ll look after you.”

“I don’t see as ‘ow, as how…”

 

“Nonsense”

But Sir Marcus is insistent, promising to make the Chief Constable a colonel in charge of a nearby training depot in short order, once the war starts. The Chief Constable, though, is unsettled by the request, and, for three more pages, the two men go back and forth.

“I couldn’t ask them, Sir Marcus, not like that. Why, it’s like murder.”

“Nonsense.”

And the Chief Constable begins to fear that, if he continues to refuse, Sir Marcus will make his life hell.

So much stolen from him already, surely there was little more he could lose by acquiescence. But he sat there doing nothing, a small plumb bullying henpecked profiteer.

There’s something almost biblical about this story. This rich, doddering old man trying to push around a smaller man — for reasons that aren’t at all clear at this point midway through the novel — and the small man, “plumb and henpecked,” confused and bedeviled, almost against his will, saying, no.

Scenes like this make it clear that This Gun for Hire is no routine thriller.

 

Entertainments

Greene wrote six thrillers or, as he called them, entertainments, to distinguish them from his eighteen other more serious literary novels. (There were also two early novels he later repudiated and never re-published.)

This Gun for Hire was the second of these entertainments, after Stamboul Train (1932), also published as Orient Express. The other four were The Confidential Agent (1939), The Ministry of Fear (1943), The Third Man (1949) and Our Man in Havana (1958).

He wrote the entertainments to make money — and he did (especially when they were made into movies) — but, as This Gun for Hire shows, these thrillers are literary in the richest and grittiest ways in terms of description, characterization and psychological depth.

The Chief Constable and Sir Marcus are bit players, but they are key to the story. Indeed, the novel’s plot is complex and yet straight-forward, full of action, yet all of it reasonable. It’s quite a contrast to many a thriller, even the bestselling of bestsellers.

 

The movie version

And quite a contrast from the strong and well-done 1942 film This Gun for Hire, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake — which is how I got to Greene’s novel.

The movie was an early and important entry in the film noir genre, and, in its dark and moody way, it’s very good.  Ladd’s role as the gunman Raven was his breakthrough to stardom.

But I wish I’d read the novel first.

Greene’s artistry is apparent throughout the novel. The characters, of greater and lesser importance, are people you’d recognize if you met them in your own life, such as Sir Marcus and the Chief Constable. The plot is tight and tense, and everything makes sense. And over it all is the cloud of war coming.

 

Less compelling

There are many aspects of the movie that make the story different and less compelling.

For instance, by 1942, the war was already being fought so that outer, extra tension was dissipated.

And, instead of carrying out a killing that sparks a war, Raven murders a chemist for a secret formula for someone who, unknown to him is going to sell it to the enemies of the U.S. This makes for a muddier plot with less at stake. (The setting for the film, by the way, has been moved to California instead of England.)

In the novel, Raven has a harelip that is a constant source of psychic pain for him. In a movie, though, that would make him much less attractive, so he was given a permanently injured left arm. That’s awkward but can’t haunt him the way his marred upper lip does.

 

Strong acting

As is the way with strong noir films, Ladd, Lake and the other actors paper over the confusions and erratic aspects of the script, and the result is a much-admired film.

However, it was clear to me when I started reading Greene’s novel that, while I enjoyed the film, there was much that I’d missed.

Such as the Chief Constable and Sir Marcus.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

6.12.26