DETECTIVE FICTION

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Detective Fiction

Being Kite’s Boy

Brighton Rock

Detective Poetry

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Detective Fiction

“Eliot's willingness

to talk more openly

when the subject

turned to detective

fiction”—Michael Shelden

Graham Greene: The

Enemy Within

Brighton once a fashionable —

Resort in its Regency heyday

Now in the 1930s pretty much

Down-at-heel & extremely vulgar

The amusements are tacky —

A series of clichés: ghost-train,

Shooting-gallery, Kewpie dolls

Paper hats and sticks of rock

A supposedly festive location —

But more often just a dreary hole

Full of evil and gangster crime

With Pinkie as a ruthless shark

People are on holiday—

The sun is shining but there’s

A chill, foreboding fear of danger

A sense of cold isolation

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Being Kite’s Boy

“Being Kite’s Boy was

good enough for him”

—Michael Shelden

Graham Greene: The

Enemy Within

Down, down I go—

Further down into the

Fag noir labyrinthine

Queer Greeneland

No wonder Graham—

Ended up in Capri

Along with “South Seas”

Norman Thomas

Greene's "Brighton Rock"—

Picturing the modern

Mystery masterpiece

That Eliot imagined

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Brighton Rock

Was it going to be a—

Brighton Rock candy day?

Dark sticky sweet seamy

Shoved down my throat?

Or a bloody razor day—

Slice, dice and murderous

With young Pinky Brown

Leading the gang now

Richard Attenborough—

AKA “Young Scarface”

Teenage Brighton hood more

Ruthless than Colleoni gang?

Punks like Pinky Brown—

Are a dime a dozen but

They turn me on just like

They did Graham Greene

A greasy full moon slides—

Down the bedroom pane

Lying in bed I hesitate even

Fuckin getting up today

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Detective Poetry

“the position of the

matter of fact and

the fantastic”

—T. S. Eliot

Not just the yellow fog—

The gloomy bars and cheap

Hotels, the half-deserted

Streets, the rats, smells

The lonely typist in her—

Furnished room, random

Bits of convention and

Sordid popular tunes

Hyping such imagery—

The zither-maddening

Intensity, the vision

Of the modern Wasteland

The guilty pleasures—

Concealed in the pages

Of ordinary thrillers

Pulp fiction murders

Murder mysteries—

For the wrong reasons

Disillusion and despair

In the poetic air