Pinkie Brown is a fictional character, the main character and antihero of Graham Greene's 1938 novel Brighton Rock.
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In the novel, Brown is portrayed as an up-and-coming gangster, the teenaged leader and enforcer of a powerful gang in the Brighton underworld. A violent sociopath, he brutalizes and murders people, even his own henchmen, without compunction or remorse. In the beginning of the novel, he kills Fred Hale, a chronic gambler who assisted the rival gang in dispatching Brown's predecessor; that crime sets the rest of the story in motion.
Brown is depicted as severely neurotic. 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 idea 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, even as he thinks himself incapable of it, and his phobia of sex does not prevent him from being as preoccupied as any other teenaged boy with losing his virginity.
Although clearly named by the other characters, within the narrative Pinkie is never referred to as such; he is only ever called "the Boy".
Brown is faced with two main conflicts throughout the course of the novel, in the form of the two other main characters: Ida Arnold, a local busybody who wants to bring him to justice because it's "the right thing to do"; and Rose, a young waitress who falls in love with him. Brown does not really love her and looks down on her as his inferior yet uses her without a second though to cover up Hale's murder.
Brown eventually contracts a civil marriage with Rose, mostly to make sure she doesn't go to the police. It is a dysfunctional union from the start: he degrades and abuses her, can find no common ground to relate to her on, and is sexually inadequate. Arnold appeals to Rose to leave the marriage, but Rose refuses, even though she knows deep down that her husband is a monster; a devout Catholic, she sees his abuse as a punishment for "living in sin", and fantasizes about going to Hell with him.
By the novel's conclusion, Arnold has unraveled Brown's gang and brought the police down upon him. Cornered, Brown inadvertently splashes acid in his own face while attacking Arnold, subsequently falling to his death in his pain and confusion.
Brown was portrayed by Richard Attenborough in the 1947 film adaptation of the novel and by Sam Riley in the 2010 adaptation.