It’s a sad fact, but from its earliest days as a resort in the late 18th century, the seaside town of Brighton has been treated pretty unkindly by literature, film and art. If I didn’t live down here on the South coast of England, I reckon that on hearing the name “Brighton” I would conjure up any number of depressing images, among which would be sad, guilty couples in Graham Greene novels coming to the out-of-season seaside to be even sadder and guiltier; characters in Carry On films sniggering over sexual innuendos on the Palace Pier; Walter Sickert’s defeatist pierrots performing in the garish Edwardian footlights; and Sixties mods and rockers in the film Quadrophenia brutally smashing deck-chairs over each other on the beach. But mostly, I suspect, I would think of Brighton’s famous fictional criminal underworld: of Bob Hoskins in the film Mona Lisa being chased by mobsters, and of the young Richard Attenborough in Brighton Rock having his cheek slashed by a razor, and looking incredibly annoyed about it. As an outsider, I would think of Brighton and automatically wince at how tawdry it is. Somehow or other, that’s how it’s always been.
Nowadays, the observable reality of Brighton is somewhat at odds with this received notion. It’s a thriving seaside destination, home to many media types and rock icons, famous for being only 50 minutes on the fast train from London. Currently we Brightonians complain a lot about the road works and seafront development (which are making the place a permanent building site) but we are still proud to live here. The garish, neon-pulsing Palace Pier is regularly described by locals as “the second most visited landmark in Britain” (although we don’t know what came top); the faux-oriental Royal Pavilion is in a class of its own as a heritage curiosity; and no national Bank Holiday passes without London newspapers printing pictures of the insanely over-crowded Brighton beach. Brighton is also the LGBTQ capital of the country. All in all, it would be fair to say that the City of Brighton and Hove (to give it its modern name) is very well known within the UK. And as an interesting side-issue, there are so many published writers concentrated in the area that I was once (seriously) asked by a worried German interviewer whether the book-blurb description, “She lives in Brighton” was actually code for something, because he came across it so often.
So why, over two centuries, have writers consistently shaken their heads and warned the world against visiting this cheery resort? Writers have continually told us, both implicitly and explicitly: bad things happen in Brighton. Nowadays, the first thing anyone sees in bookshops down here is a wall of moody, sinister black-and-white images of Brighton landmarks as depicted on the bestselling crime novels of Peter James—books with foreboding titles such as Not Dead Yet, Dead Simple, Dead Like You, and Not Dead Enough. We love Peter James, of course: he’s very popular, he’s well respected for his excellent research vis-à-vis police procedure, and he’s hugely admired for the way he keeps finding new ways of using the word “dead” in a book title. But for obvious reasons, he is not a great publicist for a pleasant, crime-free visit to the seaside. If you’ve ever picked up a book thinking, “I wonder if anyone actually dies in this?” it won’t have been a novel by Peter James.
It was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) that struck the first, heavy blow against the town, when the flighty young Lydia Bennet begged to visit Brighton and then fell almost automatically into sin, dragging her devastated family after her.The beware-Brighton cautionary note, however, predates Peter James by a couple of hundred years. It was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) that struck the first, heavy blow against the town, when the flighty young Lydia Bennet begged to visit Brighton and then fell almost automatically into sin, dragging her devastated family after her. Even before that, Dr Johnson had famously warned his friend Mrs Thrale, who owned a house in West Street, that living in Brighton would make you want to hang yourself, but good luck finding a tree. Thus, from the very beginning, it was somehow built into Brighton’s reputation that behind the thin, bright façade of the gay seafront lay dismal vice and despair. This was a town where immoral people came to get away with things; where no one was innocent. As the writer Keith Waterhouse so beautifully put it: “Brighton has the air of a town that is perpetually helping the police with their inquiries.”
So to set crime novels in Brighton (as I do) shows little originality, I’d say; and I’m honestly surprised that authors try to set them anywhere else. After all, if you plump for a tiny Cotswold village or a remote Scottish island, there is surely the problem that everyone knows everyone else, and that murders can realistically occur only about once a century? Whereas in Brighton, anything goes. You have the all-important liminal quality of any coastal place—where desperate people have, by definition, run out of road. You have the “dirty weekends” in impersonal hotels, followed by ghastly post-coital remorse, and the abundance of pubs, and also the dog track and the race course, where passions can run dangerously high. Also, one must never under-estimate the deleterious effects of sugar rush from all the sticks of rock, boxes of fudge, peppermint humbugs, and so on.
And then, if as a crime novelist you require a colorful cloak of anonymity, of course, Brighton has crowds, crowds, crowds. The very first paragraph of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock sets the action on a warm, Whitsun weekend, when people are arriving in trainloads from London every five minutes:
[They] rocked down Queen’s Road standing on the tops of the little local trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air: the new silver paint sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a pale Victorian watercolour; a race in miniature motors, a band playing, flower gardens in bloom below the front, an aeroplane advertising something for health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky.
So that’s terribly handy: you have thousands of excited strangers milling about in Brighton all the time—moreover, they mill about with no one taking any notice. Because that’s what happens to a place that is treated, for centuries, as a kind of playground by pleasure-seekers: it becomes indifferent and heartless, and people learn to ignore each other. This is another great aspect of Brighton, from the crime-novelist point of view. Honestly, if any town can be labelled psychopathic, this one can. “COME TO BRIGHTON, WE CANT STOP YOU” it ought to say on the travel posters, “BUT DON’T EXPECT US TO CARE”. This also explains why famous people are drawn to Brighton as place to live: it’s great to be somewhere where no one gives a damn about you. However, if you are the sort of celebrity who seeks attention, you’re in trouble. It was hugely enjoyable in the 1990s to see the spotlight-seeking boxer Chris Eubank driving around town in ostentatious American trucks. We all used to nudge each other and say, “Oh God, Eubank again. Look the other way.”
Writers have caught on to all this, down the years. The coolness. The anomie. Taking examples at random, Brighton is where the would-be revenge-murderer Norman Scase in P.D. James’s brilliant Innocent Blood (1980) goes to buy his equipment of knife, waterproof coat, and so on—because he reckons (correctly) that no one will remember him. In T.S. Eliot’s cryptic The Waste Land (1922), “a weekend at the Metropole” is shorthand for tawdry adultery. In Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934) poor Tony Last goes through the humiliating ritual of taking a woman to a Brighton hotel so that his selfish wife Brenda can obtain her divorce. In Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square (1941), George Harvey Bone invites the dreadful Netta to Brighton for a romantic weekend, with predictably horrible results. On the plus side, Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair (1848) has a fairly productive time in Brighton—but then you have to remember that Becky is a very, very, very bad person.
The great text, however, will always be Brighton Rock (1939). Although the town can lay claim to many notorious real-life crimes, the main image of underworld Brighton from literature has long been—and will always be—of organized gangs in cheap mobster suits slashing each in broad daylight, and incidentally receiving scant attention from the authorities. When the shocking Boulting Brothers film of the book was released in 1947, the town’s identity in the popular imagination was sealed. Oddly, the local newspaper—the Evening Argus—declared at the time of the film’s release that Brighton Rock was NOT bad publicity, and that anyone who argued for banning it (on account of the violence) was just a stick-in-the-mud. But in taking this haughty position, the Argus was, surely, idiotically wrong. Thanks to the Boulting brothers, people have associated Brighton with sensational levels of violence ever since.
Personally, though, I have to say I was equally influenced in my idea of Brighton by the dark, alienating books of Patrick Hamilton (1904-1962), in which the horror and cruelty are considerably more subtle—and much worse. I started reading him in the 1980s, when The Slaves of Solitude (1947) was re-issued by Oxford University Press, and I soon got round to The West Pier (1952) which is set in Brighton, and Hangover Square (1941), in which an initially harmless dipsomaniac is driven to murder (and Brighton plays a part). Hamilton had grown up in Brighton, and he used its geography to vivid effect in his work. In Hangover Square, the Earl’s Court-based George Harvey Bone dares to believe he will have a wonderful weekend by the sea with the woman who has infatuated him. Journeying down to the coast ahead of her, he spends a pleasant day in town by himself and plays a terrific round of golf; against all the odds, his spirits lift. And then, when he meets Netta at the railway station, she is not only already drunk, but has brought two men with her, one of whom she hatefully entertains in the next room to Bone’s in the hotel.
I find that the real-life crime profile of Brighton acts far less on my imagination than such vivid literary stuff. And to be frank, writing my (comic) crime novels set in the 1950s, I certainly wouldn’t get very far if I depended on the actual crimes committed in Brighton in July 1957, which were mainly drunken punch-ups between disaffected youths, and the odd bottle of milk stolen from a doorstep. In the newspapers for the period I did find one quite interesting case of a hospital doctor stealing pound notes from his patients (he was caught thanks to a clever policeman marking planted notes with invisible ink). But there were no sensational murders of any sort.
Luckily I am not striving for realism in my own depiction of Brighton in the 1950s. And yet, every detail about the genuine look and sound of the place I am avid for. There is a wonderful film available on line from the British Film Institute called Brighton Story (1955) which I watch repeatedly—and I recommend it as a useful corrective to the rather one-sided account of the place I’ve just outlined. Brighton Story shows a beautiful, sun-baked resort, with impressive Regency architecture, and happy children with swim-hats playing in paddling pools. People drink cups of tea; a boy sings “If You Were the Only Girl in the World” in a talent show; a man sells candy-floss, and guarantees (worryingly) that there’s no dust in it.
And is that a corpse slumped in that deck-chair with its throat cut? Well, no. No corpse on this occasion. But when it’s Brighton, don’t you feel that it just has to be? Maybe I’ve watched too many films by Alfred Hitchcock, but surely everyone knows that when you’re at the English seaside, and the soundtrack peaks to combine jolly fairground music, and overhead bunting fluttering in the breeze, and children screaming in the sea, and a brass band playing, the next thing you hear just has to be a woman shrieking in fear, and then—oh no!—as the crowd shrinks back in horror, that bleeding corpse in the deck-chair will definitely be there.
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Lynne Truss is the author of The Man That Got Away: A Constable Twitten Mystery 2 out on October 15, 2019 from Bloomsbury.
