A Gun For Sale: Mormons and Mohammedans

 I am LDS, so it is rather fun to come across unexpected references to Mormons in unrelated books.

One of the pivotal scenes in A Gun For Sale, Graham Greene's 1936 novel of political assassination and revenge, is the gas practice in the streets of Nottwich.

Raven, the hare-lipped hired killer, tracks down those who double-crossed him to the town of Nottwich. Since Europe has been brought to the brink of war by his assassination of the minister of an unnamed country, military drills are taking place throughout England. This particular one allows him to evade police pursuit and take his revenge.

In the 1942 film noir classic, This Gun For Hire, the story is transposed to wartime San Francisco. The gas-mask sequence begins at 1:12:42.
 
In the book, several medical students decide to rag conchies- conscientious objectors- and everyone not wearing a gas-mask. "What they wanted were people who cared so little about their country that they wouldn't even take the trouble to put on a gas-mask."[1] After a particularly violent episode where they trash the room of a bookish colleague, the students come across a senile old woman.

Almost immediately they picked up an old woman. She didn't in the least know what it was all about. She thought it was a street collection and offered them a penny. They told her she had to come along to the hospital; they were very courteous and one offered to carry her basket; they reacted from violence to a more than usual gentility. She laughed at them. She said, 'Well I never, what you boys will think up next!' and when one took her arm and began to lead her gently up the street, she said, 'Which of you's Father Christmas?' Buddy didn't like that: it hurt his dignity: he had suddenly been feeling rather noble: 'women and children first': 'although bombs were falling all round he brought the woman safely...' He stood still and let the others go on up the street with the old woman; she was having the time of her life; she cackled and dug them in the ribs: her voice carried a long distance in the cold air. She kept on telling them to ' take off them things and play fair', and just before they turned a corner out of sight she was calling them Mormons. She meant Mohammedans, because she had an idea that Mohammedans went about with their faces covered up and had a lot of wives. An aeroplane zoomed overhead and Buddy was alone in the street with the dead and dying until Mike appeared. Mike said he had a good idea. Why not pinch the mummy in the Castle and take it to the hospital for not wearing a gas-mask?[2]

 Buddy, the medical students' ringleader, then chases after another man without a gas-mask, but this time it is Raven...




[1]Graham Greene, A Gun For Sale: An Entertainment, 1936, p. 142.

 [2]Greene, Gun For Sale, p. 146.