A review by sbelasco40
A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene

4.0

Graham Greene is, as far as I can tell, the king of mid-20th-century moral ambiguity. Yes, it's the Catholic thing, anyone who's read Greene knows he's bound to get kind of Catholic at some point, but it's more than that - it's the way in which he understands the complexity of the human psyche. In this book, which is more straight up hard-boiled than anything I've ever read by him, he pulls the reader into the mind of a killer. It's not a comfortable place to be, but he keeps the story moving, enough to push the reader along so you don't get too caught up in the mindfuck, and the mystery itself is more of an extended chase sequence than anything too intricate. A couple things I thought about while reading this: the ways in which Elmore Leonard is a lot like Graham Greene in terms of the tightness of narrative, the no-bullshit dialogue; and also the fact that Greene wrote so much about the exact time period he was in, giving his books an immediacy that's quite striking. How fascinating to read a book published in 1936 where every page is weighed down with the threat of imminent war.