Summary
In the English seaside resort city of Brighton, Charles Hale, a journalist for the Daily Messenger, is playing the role of "Kolley Kibber" -- he goes around to different places at designated times leaving cards, and readers of the newspaper who find those cards or meet the man himself and greet him with a predetermined message will receive a prize. However, Hale senses that some people, whom the narrator does not name, are trying to kill him; he nevertheless feels that he must continue with his newspaper mission. In a pub, he listens to a woman, Ida Arnold, sing. A boy starts talking to him. He goes outside and tries to pick up a girl to stay with him as protection as a witness, and when that fails because of the boy's reappearance, he eventually runs into Ida again and goes out with her. However, after she leaves him to use the restroom, she returns to find him gone. Thus ends the first chapter.
The second chapter shifts perspective to Pinkie Brown, referred to as "the Boy," who meets with his associates Cubitt, Dallow, and Spicer. The four are members of a mob, i.e. a gang. They discuss the murder of Hale they just carried out, with Pinkie making sure that everything has gone smoothly. Hearing that Spicer put one of Hale's cards in Snow's, a restaurant, Pinkie fears that the waitress may remember his, Spicer's face. He goes there and finds Rose, the waitress who served Spicer. Finding that she does, in fact, remember Spicer, he starts to seduce her.
In the third chapter, Ida Arnold reads of Hale's death in the newspaper and feels suspicious about the official report that he had died of natural causes, by a heart attack. Trying to figure out what kind of foul play may have been at hand, she attends his funeral, visits one of Hale's acquaintances to try to extract information, and then finally visits Old Crowe to consult a Ouija board for help.
Analysis
Already in this first part of the novel, Graham Greene displays his supple powers of narration, switching abruptly among different characters' points of view and forcing the reader to piece together the circumstances of Charles Hale's murder from sometimes conflicting sources of information. The first sentence, which plunges the reader straight into the action, is one of the most representative examples of Greene's skillful use of the techniques of thriller fiction: "Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him" (3).
Although this statement seems to blatantly give away the genre of the story, we never actually see anything explicitly threatening in that first chapter; rather, the scene of danger and violence is constantly postponed as Hale moves about trying to escape or find a woman to protect himself with. We meet Pinkie, and the narrator tells us that Hale sees Cubitt, but we learn nothing about their mob background and Hale's involvement with them. This is all is information that Hale knows but is denied to the reader for the time.
The shift in perspective -- as Hale has indeed been murdered -- in the following two chapters to Pinkie and Ida allows the consequences of this initial momentous event to begin to play out in the characters who, whether through past association (i.e. Pinkie) or chance encounter (i.e. Ida), came into contact with him just before his death.
Moreover, Pinkie meets Rose at the end of his chapter, while Ida consults Old Crowe's Ouija board as part of her amateur detective work; Pinkie's and Rose's relationship will develop, just as Ida's investigation does, throughout the novel, eventually leading to the final death of the story: Pinkie's.
