Indeed Greene, who described himself as a manic depressive, seemed to provoke extreme reactions in others. There is something slightly absurd about Shelden’s accusation but it illustrates, not the virulent misogyny for which Shelden condemns Greene, but the powerful effect that Brighton Rock exerted on an otherwise sober academic, previously best known for his biography of George Orwell. Shelden’s evidence is culled from Brighton Rock and other fictions of the 1930s as well as the ‘dream diary’ which Greene kept between 19, in which he continued to record nightmares of being found guilty of murder and of incriminating body parts being discovered in railway stations (244-51). Michael Shelden’s The Man Within: A Life of Graham Greene seriously proposes Greene as a suspect in the unsolved case of a pregnant young woman whose torso was found in the left luggage office of Brighton station in June 1934.
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