The Man Within, Graham Greene’s first published novel, appeared in 1929. It is a story of smugglers set against the Lewes Assizes in the 19th century. A good third of the book takes place in Lewes itself. But if there is one place in Sussex associated with the author it is, of course, Brighton. And not just Brighton Rock. Two examples: early on in Travels with my Aunt (1969) there is a scene that takes place in a pub in The Lanes, and in The Captain and the Enemy (1988) the narrator, noticing a faint Yankee ring in Mr Quigly’s pronunciation of certain words, asks him: “You are English?”. Quigly replies: “You can see my passport. Born in Brighton. You can’t be more English than that.”

Writing about the reception of Brighton Rock, Greene says of Brighton: ‘No city before the war, not London, Paris or Oxford had such a hold on my affections.’ And though initial sales of the book were not spectacular, and the Brighton tourist authorities took a dim view of how the city had been portrayed, it did establish Greene’s reputation. In a letter to his brother Hugh, dated April 7, 1939, he writes: ‘A new shade for knickers and nightdresses has been named Brighton Rock by Peter Jones. Is this fame?’

Graham Greene first knew Brighton as a six-year-old when he was sent there with an aunt to convalesce after an illness. He reminisced: ‘It was then I saw my first film, a silent one of course, and the story captured me forever. Sophy of Kravonia, Anthony Hope’s tale of a kitchen maid who became a Queen’. Greene’s lifelong attachment to Brighton came to be mirrored in an enduring interest in film.

For four and a half years from July 1935 he was the film critic of The Spectator and for six months performed the same role for the short-lived Night and Day. His reviews are immensely entertaining. The very first one savaged The Bride of Frankenstein. This, perhaps otiose, addition to the original story comes with a prologue which Greene describes: ‘Mrs. Shelley tells Byron and her husband, who has been writing poetry rapidly by the fireside, that she has imagined a sequel to her novel. “To think”, says Byron, “that this little head contains such horrors”.’

It’s interesting that Greene is very dismissive of Hitchcock’s early films. In a letter to Hugh, dated October 31, 1937, he describes Hitchcock as ‘a silly harmless clown’. He goes on: ‘I shuddered at the things he was doing to Conrad’s Secret Agent’. But in fact Greene approved of the film, released under the title Sabotage: ‘For the first time he has really come off’.

Film adaptations of Shakespeare are especially problematic for Greene. Either much of the poetry is jettisoned or, even when retained, accompanied by over-literal visuals. He gives, as an example, Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. ‘When Helena declares: “No, no, I am as ugly as a bear; For beasts that meet me run away for fear”, we see a big black bear beating a hasty retreat into the blackberry bushes’. But Greene concedes: ‘All the same, I enjoyed this film, perhaps because I have little affection for the play, which seems to me to have been written with a grim determination on Shakespeare’s part to earn for once a Universal Certificate’.