A Gun for Sale
Raven is an ugly man dedicated to ugly deeds. His cold-blooded killing of a European Minister of War is an act of violence with chilling repercussions, not just for Raven himself but for the nation as a whole. The money he receives in payment for the murder is made up of stolen notes and when the first of these is traced, Raven becomes a man on the run. As he tracks down the agent who has been double-crossing him and attempts to elude the police, he becomes both hunter and hunted: an unwitting weapon of a strange kind of social justice. In doing so, he sets the stage for Greene’s next novel, Brighton Rock.
Stats for nerds
0recommend
2mentions
2people
2018–2021years
100% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Yep, it was retitled for the US market. That, incidentally, happened with a number of Greene's earlier novels (A Gun for Sale, for example, became This Gun for Hire). Later U.S. editions restored the original titles. Interestingly, a request from the publisher to retitle his late novel, The Human Factor, led to Greene changing publishers so while everything before that was published by Viking Penguin, beginning with The Human Factor, his U.S. publisher was Simon & Schuster (and later Reinhardt Books, owned by a friend, for his last novel and the miscellaneous books that gathered many of his uncollected shorter writings).
- > One thing that struck me is how much he reads. He had a list of suggested books to read in the back page, and there were probably hundreds
Here's the list, from the ebook I have at least:
- Abrahams, Peter: A Perfect Crime - Abrahams, Peter: Lights Out - Abrahams, Peter: Pressure Drop - Abrahams, Peter: Revolution #9 - Agee, James: A Death in the Family - Bakis, Kirsten: Lives of the Monster Dogs - Barker, Pat: Regeneration - Barker, Pat: The Eye in the Door - Barker, Pat: The Ghost Road - Bausch, Richard: In the Night Season - Blauner, Peter: The Intruder - Bowles, Paul: The Sheltering Sky - Boyle, T. Coraghessan: The Tortilla Curtain - Bryson, Bill: A Walk in the Woods - Buckley, Christopher: Thank You for Smoking - Carver, Raymond: Where I’m Calling From - Chabon, Michael: Werewolves in Their Youth - Chorlton, Windsor: Latitude Zero - Connelly, Michael: The Poet - Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness - Constantine, K. C.: Family Values - DeLillo, Don: Underworld - DeMille, Nelson: Cathedral - DeMille, Nelson: The Gold Coast - Dickens, Charles: Oliver Twist - Dobyns, Stephen: Common Carnage - Dobyns, Stephen: The Church of Dead Girls - Doyle, Roddy: The Woman Who Walked into Doors - Elkin, Stanley: The Dick Gibson Show - Faulkner, William: As I Lay Dying - Garland, Alex: The Beach - George, Elizabeth: Deception on His Mind - Gerritsen, Tess: Gravity - Golding, William: Lord of the Flies - Gray, Muriel: Furnace - Greene, Graham: A Gun for Sale (aka This Gun for Hire) - Greene, Graham: Our Man in Havana - Halberstam, David: The Fifties - Hamill, Pete: Why Sinatra Matters - Harris, Thomas: Hannibal - Haruf, Kent: Plainsong - Hoeg, Peter: Smilla’s Sense of Snow - Hunter, Stephen: Dirty White Boys - Ignatius, David: A Firing Offense - Irving, John: A Widow for One Year - Joyce, Graham: The Tooth Fairy - Judd, Alan: The Devil’s Own Work - Kahn, Roger: Good Enough to Dream - Karr, Mary: The Liars’ Club - Ketchum, Jack: Right to Life - King, Tabitha: Survivor - King, Tabitha: The Sky in the Water (unpublished) - Kingsolver, Barbara: The Poisonwood Bible - Krakauer, Jon: Into Thin Air - Lee, Harper: To Kill a Mockingbird - Lefkowitz, Bernard: Our Guys - Little, Bentley: The Ignored - Maclean, Norman: A River Runs Through It and Other Stories - Maugham, W. Somerset: The Moon and Sixpence - McCarthy, Cormac: Cities of the Plain - McCarthy, Cormac: The Crossing - McCourt, Frank: Angela’s Ashes - McDermott, Alice: Charming Billy - McDevitt, Jack: Ancient Shores - McEwan, Ian: Enduring Love - McEwan, Ian: The Cement Garden - McMurtry, Larry: Dead Man’s Walk - McMurtry, Larry, and Diana Ossana: Zeke and Ned - Miller, Walter M.: A Canticle for Leibowitz - Oates, Joyce Carol: Zombie - O’Brien, Tim: In the Lake of the Woods - O’Nan, Stewart: The Speed Queen - Ondaatje, Michael: The English Patient - Patterson, Richard North: No Safe Place - Price, Richard: Freedomland - Proulx, Annie: Close Range: Wyoming Stories - Proulx, Annie: The Shipping News - Quindlen, Anna: One True Thing - Rendell, Ruth: A Sight for Sore Eyes - Robinson, Frank M.: Waiting - Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azakaban - Rowling, J. K.: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone - Russo, Richard: Mohawk - Schwartz, John Burnham: Reservation Road - Seth, Vikram: A Suitable Boy - Shaw, Irwin: The Young Lions - Slotkin, Richard: The Crater - Smith, Dinitia: The Illusionist - Spencer, Scott: Men in Black - Stegner, Wallace: Joe Hill - Tartt, Donna: The Secret History - Tyler, Anne: A Patchwork Planet - Vonnegut, Kurt: Hocus Pocus - Waugh, Evelyn: Brideshead Revisited - Westlake, Donald E.: The Ax
