Anything by Greene is worth reading, but Brighton Rock is especially good. He managed to write very Catholic novels that could speak to atheists just as effectively as to Catholics.
I meant catholic more with a small c, as in 'all-embracing', but I also think Greene's choice of Catholicism for Pinkie and Rose was a perfectly judged element to the story.
I always think of Greene as a quintessentially Catholic, as in Roman Catholic, author. He might not have been a conventional Catholic, but that element is there is just about all his books. Issues like grace, original sin, redemption, our relationship to God, etc, but somehow he managed to do it without the end result sounding like a religious tract. I can't think of any other author so obsessed with Christian religion who was able to deal with those issues without alienating non-Christian readers. Compare him to G. K. Chesterton, who always comes across as sermonising.
Pace other comments: I only think of him as catholic with a capital C towards the end of his life, but your telling phrase "one murder too many" carries a marvelous implicit idea that might inhabit the mind of more recent and famous couple who converted to the faith that there are exists a legitimate number of deaths one might cause in the pursuit of some higher goal that goes to the essence of Greene before his faith consumed him.
I suspect this is for you what American Tabloid (Ellroy) is to me: a moralising yet thrilling narrative with some prose that stuns.
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I suspect this is for you what American Tabloid (Ellroy) is to me: a moralising yet thrilling narrative with some prose that stuns.
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