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He thought of his conversion as almost entirely an intellectual step ("Since I was going to marry a Catholic, I determined to learn about Catholicism"). He was later able to write about his baptism with sardonic detachment: "The cathedral was a dark place full of inferior statues. I was baptized one foggy afternoon about four o'clock. I couldn't think of any names I particularly wanted, so I kept my old name. I was alone with the fat priest; it was all very quickly and formally done, while someone at a children's service muttered in another chapel. Then we shook hands and I went off to a salmon tea." Even so, he couldn't help feeling that "I had taken up the thread of life from very far back, from so far back as innocence."
"Pity Is the Worst." The first novel about Graham Greene might end there. Then he turned into a writer. In 1926, full of his Nottingham knowledge of journalism, he got a job as subeditor in the letters department of the London Times. On the side, he wrote two bad novels, which publishers encouragingly rejected. In 1929, Heinemann accepted The Man Within. It was reviewed by St. John Ervine as a "remarkable first novel" by a writer who "obliges us to believe in his people, even when his people seem determined we shall not believe in them."
On the strength of The Man Within (it was a flop in the U.S., where it sold only 2,575 copies), Greene convinced the chairman of Heinemann's that a promising novelist should not be wasting his energies in the Times letters department, and got the publisher to subsidize him for three years. Greene's next two novels (The Name of Action, Rumour at Nightfall) must have made his publishers think twice about their investment. Both were murkily intense, heavily plotted melodramas that Greene has since tried hard to forget. Orient Express (1932) made the publishers feel better. A tightly written suspense story, it made Greene a popular writer. Hollywood turned it into a movie.
Greene went on writing novels (It's a Battlefield, England Made Me, This Gun for Hire), and getting more popular. But the critics didn't take him seriously. He was too readable; whether he called them "entertainments" or not, his stories were read for sheer pleasure by people who ignored his terrifying glimpses of sin and despair. Even the chilling study of pure evil in Brighton Rock (1938) was written off by one English reviewer as "so much guff." Nevertheless, Brighton Rock was a turning point for Greene. He had discovered that "a Catholic is more capable of evil than anyone."