It’s a Battlefield
Graham Greene
 Drover, a bus driver, stabs a man who is about to attack his wife. Unfortunately for him, the man is a policeman and Drover is a Communist, so he is sentenced to hang. The novel explores the intersecting lives of those close to Drover in the days before the hanging. His Communist colleagues want him to die because this will gain support for the party; his wife and brother begin an affair. There is no hero. With few exceptions, the characters are deliberately limned as, in one critic's view, "mediocre, bleak, uninspiring and at times perverted and stupid". Some of the characters seem only half complete. The resulting interplay of selfish, driven characters creates what Greene called "a panoramic novel of London". In this panorama, the traditional detective story is (sometimes using postmodern techniques) turned on its head.; the hidden villains, according to one critic, are class and capitalism.