Pinkie Brown

Pinkie Brown
Brighton Rock (1947) character
Created by	Graham Greene
Portrayed by	Richard Attenborough Sam Riley
Information
Occupation	Mob leader
Spouse(s)	Rose Brown

Pinkie Brown is a fictional character, the main character and antihero in Graham Greene's 1938 novel Brighton Rock.

In the novel, Brown is portrayed as the 17-year-old leader and enforcer of a small-time gang in the Brighton underworld that runs numbers and protection rackets for Colleoni, the local kingpin. A violent sociopath, he brutalizes and murders people, even his own henchmen, without remorse, and is incapable of feeling love or taking pleasure in life. In the beginning of the novel, he kills Fred Hale, a chronic gambler who assisted a rival gang in dispatching Brown's predecessor; that crime sets the rest of the story in motion.

Brown is depicted as severely neurotic. He regards everyone he meets with hatred and contempt, and yet envies them for feeling emotions he cannot experience. He abhors sex; as a child, he spied on his parents making love, and was both aroused and disgusted by it. He is obsessed with the concept of sin, his idea of which is shaped by his Roman Catholic upbringing, and believes himself to be pure evil. He has no friends, and has nothing but contempt for women, thinking of them as the embodiment of weakness. He is not without normal desires, however — he wonders what it would feel like to love someone, and his phobia of sex does not prevent him from being as preoccupied with losing his virginity as any other teenage boy.

Although clearly named by the other characters, within the narrative Pinkie is never referred to as such; he is only ever called "the Boy".

In the beginning of the novel, Brown kills Charles "Fred" Hale, a chronic gambler who helped the mob dispatch his predecessor, Kite. Soon afterward, he kills one of his henchmen, Spicer, when his alcoholism becomes a liability. He dodges the police, but makes an enemy in Ida Arnold, a friend of Hale's.

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