This Gun for Hire

Published 1936

This book is grim. War is in the air. Everyone blames the Serbs (how original) for murdering the peace-loving foreign minister of some never-specified German-speaking country in Central Europe. From the second chapter of the book on, ultimata are flying, countries are mobilizing, England is providing gas masks to all citizens and performing gas mask drills. War looks certain. Just days or maybe a week, tops.

Raven is a hitman. He took taken a job to kill an old man on the Continent. He returns to London, gets his £200 and goes back to his sordid life. But they double-crossed him. The £200 are from a bank robbery and the police have distributed the serial numbers to all the shops of London. His face was front page in all the papers until the sudden threat of war pushed it to the back pages. He is now a wanted man for a crime he didn’t commit and he is out for revenge against the people who paid for the hit and double crossed him. Raven follows his employer’s contact to the little town of Nottwich, home of a large arms manufacturer.

Anne Crowder is an actress scrounging for gigs. Mather, detective of Scotland Yard, is her boyfriend. They hope to be married soon, but money is tight. Similar to all detectives with girlfriends, Mather needs a lucky break in his career. Anne will be out of London for two weeks because she just found a job in a little theater in the sleepy town of Nottwich.

Despite this book’s many tropes and, at times, forced emotions, it manages to be a very able thriller. Beyond the exciting uncertainty of what will happen to Raven, Anne and Mather, a sense of impending doom pervades the book. One idea that this book explores is that the expectation of war distorts those who expect and may end up itself being the cause of war. Everyone expects war and expects it to be brutal and total. The enemy will gas cities and everyone will be mobilized. The humdrum life of Depression era England is about to come to a climactic end. Once we expect terrible things, are we less likely to try to prevent them from happening? Throughout much of this book, only a single character sees the possibility to prevent war.

The other idea that Green explores is how Raven, a doer of evil with a terrible background, can be capable of accomplishing good, even if unintended. To use modern terminology, Raven suffered from multiple adverse childhood experiences. He was born with a hair-lip that cheap surgery as a baby did not improve and which has made him repulsive to others. His father was hanged when he was six and then his mother committed suicide and he found her body. His years in the orphanage were not happy. He is angry at the world but his anger is searching for an end to itself. His anger wants to find someone to trust, some corner of the world that accepts him, some community within which he can live with mutual respect. He is selfish, but no more than any of the other characters. And despite the hope that motivates Raven to effect the book’s denouement, he is betrayed in the end.