This Gun for Hire by Graham Greene

She never knew, he thought, that he had meant to kill her; she had been as innocent of his attention as a cat he had once been forced to drown; and he remembered with astonishment that she had not betrayed him, although he had told her that the police were after him. It was even possible that she had believed him.

These thoughts were colder and more uncomfortable than hail. He wasn't used to any taste that wasn't bitter on the tongue. He had been made by hatred; it had constructed him into this thin smoky murderous figure in the rain, hunted and ugly. His mother had borne him when his father was in gaol, and six years later when his father was hanged for another crime, she had cut her own throat with a kitchen knife; afterward there had been the home. He had never felt the least tenderness for anyone; he was made in this image and had his own pride in the result; he didn't want to be unmade. He had a sudden terrified conviction that he must be himself now as never before if he was to escape. It was not tenderness that made you quick on the draw.

Raven is a poor Londoner who has made an effective but fragile career out of contract killing: he has recently been tasked to travel to a foreign country and shoot an old minister. When he returns for his payment, he discovers he's been double-crossed: the bills he's paid with are reported stolen, and as soon as he uses them the police are on the trail. He pursues his double-crosser, a sensuous glutton named Cholmondeley, onto a train headed to a small town in the English Midlands. He evades capture by insinuating himself in with Anne, a young woman having left London to join a theater production, but he doesn't know that her fiance is the officer in charge of apprehending Raven.

This Gun for Hire is the most straightforwardly noirish novel of Greene's I've ever read. In fact, the UK title of A Gun for Sale was, if I remember correctly, changed in the US to match the title of the American film noir adaptation. Raven himself is a kind of anti-hero, a man whose harelip identifies him as lower class: he blames, with some good reason, all the frustrations of his life on it; he finds in his physical ugliness proof of his own moral ugliness. Anne surprises him with her failure to be shocked or disgusted by it, and in the face of her diffidence his carefully constructed ideas of himself begin to break down: is he really the person who he has said he is?

All of this takes place against a backdrop of mounting international tensions: the killing of the minister that Raven committed has been blamed on foreign agitators, and the world is ramping up for war. Everywhere Raven, Anne, and her fiance Mathis go, people are talking about the war to come, some with trepidation, and some with glee. When Raven finally tracks Cholmondeley to his employer, a shriveled old steel magnate named Sir Marcus, he discovers the truth: Sir Marcus has engineered the killing, and the incipient war, to increase the demand for steel. In this way Greene makes a shrewd illustration of the way petty crimes are punished in place of great ones. In one of the novel's most shocking moments, we learn that it was Sir Marcus who demanded the bills used to pay Raven be stole ones, saying, "[A] murderer should not be able to benefit from his own crime." The irony of this might be too strong or too obvious, if it weren't possible to think of a million ways this ideology remains a part of our political and moral culture.

As always, Greene talked a lot of guff about how his "entertainments" are distinguished from his more serious novels, but This Gun for Hire--surely one of the most "entertaining" in the sense he meant of of all his books--is full of the ethical, political, and religious complexities that animate all of his work. The scene where Raven takes a long tortured look at a creche--the novel is set at Christmas--is Greene at his Greene-iest.