Presenters

A Gun For Sale by Graham Greene will be a little known Nottingham-based thriller to many people.

For a start it's set in the fictional city of Nottwich, but as Greene admits it is actually Nottingham - an industrial city, a few hours north of London.

Graham Greene knew Nottingham, he lived in the city for three months in 1925-1926 and worked at the Nottingham Journal.

The city didn't create a massive impression on him, he complained in a letter: "This town makes one want a mental and physical bath every quarter of an hour."

However, it was memorable enough to base his book here.

Nottwich as Nottingham

A Gun For Sale was published in 1936 and it's overall theme was how wars can be started by the few and for profit.

In the first few pages we're introduced to an assassin called Raven who murders a minister and his secretary.

This act gives momentum to a possible European conflict, just as the first world war began with an assassination.

Raven is hired by a dying industrialist named Sir Marcus who manufactures, among other war-related items, gas masks.

Raven is conned out of his payment and pursues those who have wronged him from London to Nottwich by train.

Nottingham oozes off the pages and Greene even name checks the road he lived on - All Saints Terrace (Located near to The Arboretum and Hyson Green).

In the book he describes the road as "two rows of small neo-Gothic houses lined up as carefully as a company on parade."

Strange city

Greene said Nottingham was "the first strange city in which I had made a home, alone, without friends."

This feeling of alienation comes through in the pages of A Gun For Sale. Nottingham is murky and grim, a bit other worldly in a sense.

So why do I like it? Well, it's a great story but it's set in a Nottingham I never knew... a Nottingham before the war, before mass-consumerism, chain pubs and franchises.

Maybe it was a bit austere and over industrialised but I'd still like to have a walk around the streets during that time.

Greene's novel takes me as close to that as possible.

A Gun For Sale is published by Penguin.