Literay agent and writer Giles Gordon called Ann Quin’s Berg “a Graham Greene thriller as if reworked by a somewhat roman- tic Burroughs”. Yet her work barely caused a ripple in literary history.

For Tim Brown, a Quin aficionado and the man behind Brighton’s CineCity Festival, it’s time that changed.

“I first read Berg in the 1980s when I was about 18 and it’s one of the best- kept secrets of British literary his- tory, ” says Brown.

“It’s still one of my favourite books – though I would say that.”

Brown has commissioned artist and production designer Anna Deamer to put together an imaginary screen version of the novel, which was published in 1964, as part of the three- week long CineCity festival.

Deamer worked with a hundred students from City College for ten months to design a vision of how a film set for a movie version of Berg might look.

Now the boarding house in an out of season seaside resort at the centre of the novel has been con- structed in the univer- sity’s South Gallery. Together with two other rooms, dressed with props, the instal la t ion gives a vivid snapshot of the book and the 1960s.

Barry Adamson [CineCity Patron, bass player for Nick Cave’s bad seeds and soundtrack writer for David Lynch’s Lost Hig- way] has penned a 25-minute score for the installation.

“I introduced Anna to it and she loved the book and wanted to do it immediately.

“We’ve approached it like making a professional film. It has been made to industry standards. It’s a big project.”

Berg is a dark experimental novel of lust and revenge. Its protagonist Alastair Berg comes to a seaside town to track down his estranged father.

He changes his name to Greb and starts a relationship with his father’s girlfriend. As the three characters’ lives unravel, so does the absurd and brutal plot.

The Berg film installation follows on from the Brown and Deamer’s work on a similar project based on Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square for Brighton Fes- tival in 2012.

“The installation for Hang- over Square was a big success. That was a much better known novel – so we thought what can we do next?”

So when Brown spotted it was the 50th anniver- sary of the publication of Berg the bricks fell into place.

He had previously pub- lished one of her short stories, Ghost Worm, in a collection with other writ- ers’ work in 1993.

But CineCity offered him the opportunity to recreate her work on a large scale and, by creat- ing a film set, to remind people of the film festival. Ann Quin was an avid cinema goer who enjoyed
a golden age of European film.

She loved Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and the French Nouvelle Vague. Yet the Brighton-born writer was a tragic figure.

She only wrote three novels before drowning off the coast of Brighton aged 37. A fisherman reported seeing someone of her description walking into the sea off Black Rock.

A day later her body was discovered at Shoreham and identified after an appeal in The Argus. Perhaps now she will be remem- bered for Berg, what writer Lee Rourke says it is the “Best novel ever set in Brighton”.

University Of Brighton Gallery, Grand Parade until Friday, December 19 - Open Monday to Friday, 11am to 7pm, Saturday and Sunday, 10am to 4pm, free.