A Little Place Off the Edgware Road
by Graham Greene 
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An early Graham Green short story, with a possibly supernatural twist.
The aptly-named protagonist, Craven, is walking up swanky Park Lane to the less salubrious Edgware Road, in the early evening.
“He was aware all the time of the stringy tie beneath the mackintosh, and the frayed sleeves: he carried his body about with him like something he hated.”
As well as self-loathing, especially of his body, and jealousy of those better-endowed, he’s plagued by thoughts of mortality and - worse - of undecomposed bodies rising from the ground.
Image: Blood-spattered pages
Revulsion and fear of flesh drips between the sentences, ostensibly about blood and death, but at least as much about sex.
“Sometimes he secretly touched himself here and show more there with scent: it was one of his ugliest secrets.”
To escape the “thin summer rain”, he goes to a cheap, dilapidated cinema, showing a silent film. The encounter he has there is not what one expects, and the denouement after he leaves, twists it yet another way. Whether it’s a story of external supernatural horror, or interior madness, is for the reader to decide.
Editing offensiveness
This was published in 1939, when Oswald Moseley’s fascists were part of elite society. That probably explains, though doesn’t justify, the casual anti-Semitism of the second sentence, and which has nothing to do with the plot. Apparently some version have removed a single word ("Jewish") from the description, and although I'm wary of the thin end of wedges and of censorship, that's an edit I can support.
Quotes
• “You needed money for love. All that a poor man could get was lust.”
• “The memory of ugly deeds committed on park chairs.” [as voyeur or protagonist?]
• “A number of lonely men like himself wearing the same uniform of the cheap mackintosh. They lay about at intervals like corpses.”
Short story club
I read this in Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature, by Alberto Manguel, from which I’m reading one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 4 September 2023.
You can read this story from page 77 here.
You can join the group here. show less
The aptly-named protagonist, Craven, is walking up swanky Park Lane to the less salubrious Edgware Road, in the early evening.
“He was aware all the time of the stringy tie beneath the mackintosh, and the frayed sleeves: he carried his body about with him like something he hated.”
As well as self-loathing, especially of his body, and jealousy of those better-endowed, he’s plagued by thoughts of mortality and - worse - of undecomposed bodies rising from the ground.
Image: Blood-spattered pages
Revulsion and fear of flesh drips between the sentences, ostensibly about blood and death, but at least as much about sex.
“Sometimes he secretly touched himself here and show more there with scent: it was one of his ugliest secrets.”
To escape the “thin summer rain”, he goes to a cheap, dilapidated cinema, showing a silent film. The encounter he has there is not what one expects, and the denouement after he leaves, twists it yet another way. Whether it’s a story of external supernatural horror, or interior madness, is for the reader to decide.
Editing offensiveness
This was published in 1939, when Oswald Moseley’s fascists were part of elite society. That probably explains, though doesn’t justify, the casual anti-Semitism of the second sentence, and which has nothing to do with the plot. Apparently some version have removed a single word ("Jewish") from the description, and although I'm wary of the thin end of wedges and of censorship, that's an edit I can support.
Quotes
• “You needed money for love. All that a poor man could get was lust.”
• “The memory of ugly deeds committed on park chairs.” [as voyeur or protagonist?]
• “A number of lonely men like himself wearing the same uniform of the cheap mackintosh. They lay about at intervals like corpses.”
Short story club
I read this in Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature, by Alberto Manguel, from which I’m reading one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 4 September 2023.
You can read this story from page 77 here.
You can join the group here. show less
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Born in 1904, Graham Greene was the son of a headmaster and the fourth of six children. Preferring to stay home and read rather than endure the teasing at school that was a by-product of his father's occupation, Greene attempted suicide several times and eventually dropped out of school at the age of 15. His parents sent him to an analyst in show more London who recommended he try writing as therapy. He completed his first novel by the time he graduated from college in 1925. Greene wrote both entertainments and serious novels. Catholicism was a recurring theme in his work, notable examples being The Power and the Glory (1940) and The End of the Affair (1951). Popular suspense novels include: The Heart of the Matter, Our Man in Havana and The Quiet American. Greene was also a world traveler and he used his experiences as the basis for many books. One popular example, Journey Without Maps (1936), was based on a trip through the jungles of Liberia. Greene also wrote and adapted screenplays, including that of the 1949 film, The Third Man, which starred Orson Welles. He died in Vevey, Switzerland in 1991. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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