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Chapter 1: Who are the guests featured in this episode?
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Hello, welcome to A Good Read, where we talk about some books we love. Today, to introduce you to a wartime double agent, a teenage gangster and a parlour maid with attitude, I'm joined first by criminal barrister-turned-author Harriet Tice, whose best-selling psychological thrillers include Blood Orange, A Lesson in Cruelty and, just out this year, Witch Trial.
Also recently, Harriet was a contestant on The Traitors. With her is the broadcaster Matt Edmondson, who besides hosting weekday afternoons with Molly King on Radio 1, has presented a plethora of TV programmes, invented board games, written a musical and hosted podcasts.
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Chapter 2: What is 'Brighton Rock' by Graham Greene about?
The latest of those, again with Molly King and described by them as comedy meets crime, is Matt and Molly's novel Idea. Harriet Tice, would you start us off? What are you suggesting is a good read?
I have chosen Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, which is set in 1930s Brighton. And I think poisoned me against Brighton from the start because I read it before I had ever been to Brighton. I know. And I haven't been able to understand that in my head, Brighton is a mouth of hell. And having reread Brighton Rock before today's recording, I have realised why.
It's because the seedy underbelly of Brighton is categorically a huge character in this book. This book is essentially about the teenage gangster Pinky, who's 17 years old.
Chapter 3: How does the character Pinky in 'Brighton Rock' represent good and evil?
And it starts with a line that I think is one of the most compelling openings of any novel, which is Hale knew before he'd been in Brighton three hours that they meant to murder him. And sure enough, the hapless Hale does end up dead. And the rest of the novel is it's we see Pinky, who is it's no spoiler to say that he's responsible for Hale's death.
And we also meet Ida Arnold, who is a middle-aged, big-hearted, big-bosomed lady who decides that she is going to discover what's happened to Hale. She met him the day before he died. And, you know, the rest of the novel is this...
Brighton is beset by gangland warfare, that there are two competing gangs who are trying to take control of the very lucrative underbelly in terms of race course betting and all of that kind of thing. And Pinky has taken charge of the smaller gang. Pinky is essentially a psychopath.
He's a lapsed Catholic who fits a razor blade under his long thumbnail before going out to deal with money defaulters. He is without any kind of pity or remorse. He is totally chilling. And I think the most evil thing that he does is that he hooks up with a 16 year old waitress called Rose, who's one of the primary witnesses against him in terms of Hale's murder.
And he decides that the one way he can protect himself is to marry her so that she can't be compelled to give evidence against him. but she falls entirely in love with him. And I will say that it leads to an ending to a novel that is, with the most compelling of openings, possibly one of the most harrowing endings that I can think of in any book that I've ever read.
When you said it's one of the most terrible things he's done, I was thinking, I can think of one more terrible thing he's done, and it's how the book ends.
It's how the book ends. It's that entire relationship. And so it's a battle of good and evil, essentially.
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Chapter 4: What themes are explored in 'Agent Zigzag' by Ben Macintyre?
Well, Matt, what did you think of it?
Well, good and evil is interesting because the Catholicism at its core... I went to a Catholic secondary school and I didn't have a Catholic upbringing. And I found the rituals and the turns of phrase that get used and all of that quite overbearing and quite strange to come into.
And actually seeing the world through Pinky's kind of skewed vision where he is on one hand this awful character and on the other a man really repressed by Catholicism. So repressed. And a man who has sort of accepted that he is going to hell. Yes. And he's going to drag everyone, including Rose, along with him. I found that that question that runs through it all the way of good versus evil...
sort of runs parallel to Ida's journey of right and wrong. You know, she's trying to... I think she's agnostic or, you know, she's not a religious person. And she is trying to do right by this guy that she, for all intents and purposes, barely knew, but has that compulsion to do the right thing. I mean, I...
I can't work out whether Green, the author, is suggesting that it's more virtuous to have belief in God and do bad things than not have belief in God and do the right thing. And I found that quite puzzling.
I mean, I would say that the fact that Ida is not repressed, I mean, Ida quite happily goes out and drinks, quite happily goes out and has sex. She doesn't see any harm in it. I mean, she is a bit of a caricature in some senses, but yet her drive to save Rose from Pinky is at its core something that is... Good, you know, in the sense that Graham is in favour.
But what I mean is that I feel that Graham is on her side.
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Chapter 5: How does Eddie Chapman’s story differ from Pinky's in 'Brighton Rock'?
That's very interesting.
You don't agree. You think that he's pro-Pinky and you think there's a nihilistic idea to the back of it.
You see, I do. I think he dislikes Ida intensely. And she's, after all, she's a harmless, nice person, but she's superstitious.
She does do the Ouija rules. She's sentimental.
He really doesn't like that. And I think he likes Pinky, not because Pinky is good, because Pinky is... quite clearly evil, actually. But listen, I've read this book four times now, maybe five, and every single time I read something slightly different in it. And this time there was a phrase that leapt out at me.
What's happening is Pinky is remembering Kite, who is this gangster who was Pinky's mentor and Pinky's protector and probably the only person who's ever liked Pinky or looked after him and certainly the only person Pinky has ever loved. Kite's been murdered. And it says of Pinky, it had been as if a father had died, leaving him an inheritance. It was his duty never to leave.
And that I suddenly thought, of course, this 17 year old boy has been left in charge of a gang and a rather hopeless, uncontrollable gang, it has to be said. There's a much more sophisticated, slick gangster in town. And he can't cope.
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Chapter 6: What makes 'Clooney Brown' by Marjorie Sharp a unique read?
And he's trying his best. He's trying to impress Kite, even though Kite's dead. And I felt for the first time ever reading this book, compassion for Pinky and I think actually Graham Greene means us to think that.
I think what's hard I've got a nine-year-old daughter and 16 isn't that far off nine so when I was thinking about Rose you can't help but see her as a child who is not worldly wise who's sort of swept up by by Pinky and then you remember oh he's only a year older he's a he's still a child as well he's 17 and
And his prefrontal cortex is not developed enough for him to know right from wrong, other than what he's read.
There is that very touching passage when they are both eating their ices and they look like two children being told to get out of the way. I still feel, though, that it's ambiguous. It's ambiguous. And I think that that is why I love the book, that it isn't clear what you're meant to think.
I think you can. I think you can read it all sorts of different ways, which is one of the brilliant things about this book.
Exactly that. Exactly that. And I think that... And, I mean, the reason I chose it was precisely because it isn't entirely clear-cut, because Pinky isn't likeable, yet it is possible to have the compassion. The passage near the end when he talks about something with great wings beating at him, that if he were to let it in, it would smash everything up. And, you know, there are flashes where...
his cold, dead soul is perhaps not as cold and not as dead as it might appear. And what I love is that it is crime fiction. It is a thriller, that there is this sort of gang warfare, but yet it is something that
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Chapter 7: How do the characters in 'Clooney Brown' reflect societal changes?
that elevates a what's going to happen, who done it, why done it kind of chase into a true study of good and evil and where it lies and who it is that we judge and with whom it is that we sympathise. And it is not clear. He's probably one of the first people to have married genre with
high literary concepts and you know that is why I chose it because I hate genre snobbery I you know as a crime writer obviously it's something that I despise and you know I point to Brighton Rock as being one of the earliest and best examples of something that is literature but at the same time is actually a really good story.
Well, we've been talking about Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. You're listening to A Good Read, where my guests today are Harriet Tice and Matt Edmondson. Matt, your turn.
Agent Zigzag. So this is the true wartime story of Eddie Chapman. Lover, traitor, hero, spy. I feel like there could be more descriptive words that go after that for Eddie. He is sort of in contrast, actually, to Pinky. He, I think, is a criminal who... if you cut through him, is mostly good. He detests violence of any kind.
And he's the sort of criminal, and it's a true story, you know, sort of criminal where you kind of root for the brazen behaviour that this person goes through to bend the universe to their will. So it starts in Jersey, and our character Eddie, who has had a life of crime already up until this point. He's been part of a gang, the Jelly Gang, that used to use explosives to crack open safes.
Nothing violent, always basically Ocean's Eleven heisty type stuff. And he finds himself on a date in a nice cafe with Betty Farmer, a lady that he's met, and...
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Chapter 8: What are the overarching themes of the books discussed in this episode?
The police walk in and he immediately realises, ah, they're there for him and he escapes. And it sounds like a scene from a movie, but it's before scenes from movies like this existed, which is that he hurls himself at a pane of glass, goes through the window and escapes into the night, although not for long, because he does get arrested and he does end up in prison in Jersey.
And that is where his story probably should have ended. But it's wartime. and the Nazis invade the Channel Islands. And so suddenly he's gone from being a prisoner under British rule to a prisoner under German rule. And he thinks, in the way that he often does, how can I exploit this for myself? And so he writes to the Germans and says, I will become an agent for you.
I will turn my back on Britain. And he gets recruited. And he obviously has a charm and charisma that persuades everyone in his orbit that he's trustworthy, despite the fact that he isn't, and that he can do the things that he says he can do. And he winds up becoming very close with a group of German spy trainers, effectively, who deploy him into the field.
And the minute he sets foot on British soil, having been given the mission to come and destroy an air base, he hands himself in, defects and says to the British, I'll be an agent for you as well. and therefore becomes Agent Zigzag, the greatest double agent that this country or any other has ever produced.
And the rest of the novel tracks the autobiography, although it's sort of written like a bit of a spy caper thriller, it tracks his journey bouncing back between England and Germany, playing both sides against each other, For his own ends, you know, he's the only British soldier to get the Iron Cross medal from the Germans because they thought that he was on their side.
And he also got paid very handsomely by MI5 for his efforts in genuinely saving thousands of lives. You know, the things that he did in terms of subterfuge and giving the Germans incorrect information. sort of tied in with the Bletchley Park codebreakers. You know, thousands upon thousands of lives were saved by this man who should have been rotting in a prison cell somewhere.
Harriet Dice, Agent Zigzag.
Loved it. Absolutely cracking. I've only got one complaint about the book, which is that it has photographs at two places in the book, which give away the ending rather, because it reads so much like a thriller. You simply can't believe that this man is real. I learned so much from this, particularly about the V2, the second round of flying bombs. That was fascinating. Yes.
And to understand that one man carried the weight of expectation of him, of not just the Germans, but also the British. He's an absolute hero. And it was a cracking read.
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