Pinkie Brown

Pinkie Brown is the villain protagonist of Graham Greene's 1949 novel Brighton Rock, and its two film adaptations.

Novel
Pinkie Brown (referred to in the narration of the novel as "The Boy") is the 17-year-old leader and enforcer of a criminal gang in the English seaside town of Brighton. He runs numbers and protections rackets for the Mob kingpin Colleoni. He murders his henchmen Fred Hale and Spicer, a pair of weaklings who threatened his control of the gang, and these crimes set the plot in motion.

When he finds out that a local waitress named Rose saw him with Hale, he begins dating her in order to intimidate her into silence, and eventually marries her to make sure she cannot testify against him. His union with Rose makes an enemy of Hale's friend Ida Arnold, a good-hearted woman who wants to save Rose from the monster she married. Pinkie nevertheless controls Rose, a fellow devout Catholic, by persuading her that the abuse he inflicts upon her is her punishment for "living in sin", and that she is destined to go to hell with him.

Pinkie eventually decides to get rid of Rose, and lures her out to a nearby moor on the pretense of a date. He tells her that Arnold has brought the police down on both of them, and the only way out is to commit suicide together; he in fact intends to escape after she has killed herself. When Arnold arrives with the police, however, he panics and threatens them with a bottle of acid. He accidentally splashes the acid in his face, however, and plunges to his death off a cliffside as he reels from the pain.

Personality
A violent psychopath, Brown regards everyone he meets with hatred and contempt, and yet envies them for feeling emotions he cannot experience. He was raised in a devout Catholic household, and his view of the world is based on a warped view of that faith: he abhors sex, views women as weak and stupid, and believes himself to be pure evil.

Portrayals
Brown was portrayed in the original 1947 film by Richard Attenborough. In the 2007 remake, he was portrayed by Sam Riley.