Love and death in London's publand

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Britain's best-known literary chronicler of London's underclass between the wars - the best-selling Marxist novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton.

He was the creator of British fiction's most sinister confidence trickster and his works attract a cult following of distinguished fans.
Long-time admirers include Doris Lessing, Antonia Fraser, Michael Holroyd, Keith Waterhouse, Sean French, Corin Redgrave, DJ Taylor and Lynn Truss.

Hamilton's dark, alcohol-fuelled vision finds an eerie pictorial counterpart in the London nightlife imagery of social realist photographer Bill Brandt, whose centennial is also celebrated this year.

Curiously, Brandt's eerie night-time photographs could almost spring from the pages of Hamilton's magnificent London trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (Vintage) and they similarly capture the bleak anonymity of the modern city which hides, in Holroyd's acute phrase, "those dim places where life seems to have leaked away."

Hamilton's fictional world, according to Holroyd, describes "life on the margins" at a time when the British social system was breaking apart to abandon a generation of class-dislocated casualties in the wreckage.

Brandt's images of an oppressed underclass share Hamilton's own literary vision and both men were ideologically responsive to contemporary movements in continental European socialism, bearing witness to the deprivations of workers' lives endured across the class divide.

Hamilton, the Marxist maverick, crossed that class divide often, as his lowlife novels reveal.

The humiliations of Hamilton's disastrous affair with a pretty, flighty Soho prostitute provided the raw data for his Siege of Pleasure, the most poignant segment of his London trilogy.

Her intimate experiences on London's streets in the book's confessional passages are unmatched as a social document depicting without sentiment the realities of interwar London prostitution.

Recently, Corin Redgrave acted on radio in an episode from Hamilton's Gorse Trilogy, which concerns the sinister adventures of a ruthless young small-time conman.

Redgrave thinks that Hamilton has a great grasp on villainy. "It's motiveless malignancy. The villain has no other motive than the sheer enjoyment of doing harm."

Graham Greene described The West Pier - part one of the Gorse Trilogy —as "the best book written about Brighton" and the character of Gorse, in his sociopathic cold-blooded amorality, prefigures The Talented Mr Ripley.

So it's a must read for fans of both Greene and Highsmith.

In fact, another devoted fan, Keith Waterhouse, in his novel Palace Pier (Sceptre), has conceived a novel within a novel in that his plot revolves around a supposedly undiscovered novel of Hamilton's from which Waterhouse quotes a number of pastiches.

The career of Hamilton's dashing hero Gorse is derived in part from the life of multiple deception led by the notorious double murderer Neville Heath, who was hanged in 1946.

The prophetic quality of Hamilton's psychological insights can be seen in his portrayal of Gorse as a potential killer whose childhood behaviour foretells the cruelty of his adult sadomasochism.

The adult Gorse, the conniving chancer, shares Neville Heath's bravado by masquerading as an officer of elevated rank and exhibits a fascistic obsession with military uniforms.

Hamilton's professed Marxism was a heartfelt belief. It was not idly faddish. His political prescience and early abhorrence of fascism is expressed also in his masterpiece Hangover Square (Penguin).

As novelist and critic DJ Taylor makes clear: "Hamilton saw the psychological roots of fascism."

The fury of Hamilton's indictment of fascism drives the pace of this classic noirish thriller.

Set in the grimy publands of Earls Court, the novel charts alcoholic George Harvey Bone's helpless infatuation with wannabe starlet Netta Longdon, who is cool, contemptuous and desirable beyond his reach.

Hamilton describes not only the brooding, frigid, self-absorption of his fictional love-hate object, the "unholy beauty" Netta, but also beckons us inside the troubled schizophrenic mind of her killer, Bone.

For, tragically, whether murderer or victim, both suffer in a vacuum - a moral hole symbolic of Hamilton's own dark, booze-suffused private hell.

Perhaps, above all, Netta, the treacherous "unsuccessful and impecunious film actress," whom Hamilton's alter ego Bone kills during one of his "black-outs" best expresses the social decay which so fascinated him.

He morbidly analyses it as the canker undiagnosed beneath the deceptive surface glare of the glittering beer-engines inside the taproom of Bone's regular pub the Black Hart.

The "parallel world of fantasy and illusion" encountered in London pubs, writes Holroyd, is a dimension where Hamilton's characters lose their private inhibitions and where their creator's divided self - that of a repressed libertine - equally sought release from his own demons.

Hangover Square is a tragicomic study of boozed-up sexual obsession - a thinly disguised, cathartic reworking of Hamilton's painful, unrequited passion for the film actress Geraldine Fitzgerald.

Yet, for all that, Hamilton's own hellish London of urban alienation is analysed with unrivalled mordant wit and relish, providing us with arguably the most penetrating study of drinking mania ever.

As Sean French wryly observes, Hamilton was "a connoisseur of alcoholic behaviour" and he could describe his own pathography with the precision of a clinician. He eventually, unsuccessfully, underwent electroconvulsive treatment for depressive alcoholism.

"I like his dark humour," says Holroyd. "You need characters to cast a shadow as they walk."

Hamilton, the self-confessed "heavy-drinking man," to escape his own darkness of the soul, in emulation of his creations, sought also the "mock good cheer" of the public house "where the fantasy life of his characters could come alight only in some brightly-lit bar" among "the coming together of so many lonelinesses."

This interpretation is echoed by Hamilton's Times obituarist, celebrating the laureate of London's rootless masses as "a genuine minor poet ... of the loneliness, purposelessness and frustrations of urban contemporary life."

Hamilton's London was "a kind of No-Man's-Land," wrote JB Priestley, a milieu "of cheap lodgings in Pimlico and the less expensive picture theatres, a world of barmaids and waiters and prostitutes ... of shabby hotels, dingy boarding-houses and all those saloon bars where the homeless can meet."

Tragically, Hamilton's meteoric trajectory as a popular writer ended in decline into alcoholism and death from cirrhosis of the liver and kidney failure.

Yet, although that astonishingly precocious talent was to ultimately burn out, Hamilton was to leave four literary masterpieces, Hangover Square, the London Trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, The Ralph Gorse Trilogy and the powerful redemptive novel, The Slaves of Solitude.

As Doris Lessing observes, Hamilton is a social historian virtually without equal in his punctilious reckoning up of the minutiae of desperate lives in the interwar years.

"Now people have forgotten the kind of smell that came out of England in the 1930s," she says, "the cheese-paring and the obsession with money.

"Then, people were always calculating ... could they afford to have this drink here, or a cheaper meal there."

It is in this kind of raffish world of rent arrears and post-dated cheques that Hamilton's feckless good-time Netta meets her end.

"Never has anyone written about crooks as well as Hamilton. And it's the details that are so absorbing," laments Lessing.

Agreed. It's the details that are most telling in Hamilton's work.

And the dark humour of the drunken double-killer who, hell-bent on revenge in Hangover Square, is "not too drunk to be too clever" for the man and woman he plans to annihilate - Netta and her lover, a polo-necked bullyboy fascist snob.

During the writing of Hangover Square, Hamilton boasts of his gift of not only documenting the transience of London's humdrum daily grind during the phoney war but also his facility to trace faithfully in his fiction the arc of history on the wing.

To Hamilton were attributed uncanny powers of rapport - of being "in touch, if unconsciously, with the prevailing social currents."

Lynn Truss, another dedicated fan, affirms that Hamilton "does write very well from a woman's point of view. He does understand what it's like to be them."

However, Truss recognises a misogynistic vengeful streak running through a number of Hamilton's fictions, stemming from an unfulfilled love life.

This misogynistic "revenge motif" is evident, too, in Hamilton's phenomenally successful play Gaslight, the story of an opportunist who marries a woman for her inheritance and schemes to drive her mad.

George Cukor's film based on the play was a study of psychological dominance and abuse of a woman through manipulation.
Charles Boyer played the role of the evil husband. Ingrid Bergman won Best Actress Award for her performance as the victimised wife.

"Bergman wasn't normally a timid woman," Cukor said later. "To reduce someone like that to a scared, jittery creature was interesting and dramatic."

Gaslight followed Hamilton's first runaway theatrical success, Rope, which centres on two university undergraduates who attempt the "perfect murder."

They kill a third boy, to prove that they are above "ordinary" people.

The story had similarities with the notorious Leopold and Loeb "killing for kicks" murder case - they killed 14-year-old Bobbie Franks in 1924 solely for academic interest, in perverted discipleship of Nietzschean nihilism.

Hamilton denied that Rope had any connections with the case.

Hitchcock adapted it for the screen, but the result failed to satisfy Hamilton.

"I have gone all out to write a horror play and make your flesh creep," Hamilton wrote of Rope, but Sean French thinks differently.

French believes that Hamilton had an affinity with Hitchcock.

For Hamilton, like Hitchcock, he asserts, "sex and violence are absolutely entwined" and twisted into a guilty secret.

Whatever Hamilton may have claimed, says French unequivocally, Rope is "one of the gayest plays written in the 20th century."

New readers coming fresh to Hamilton's novels will swiftly recognise the humanistic views reflected in his works insofar as he championed, like Dickens, the working millions by recognising and celebrating individual voices from the oppressed majority.

But, again like Dickens, no political propagandising is ever so overtly evident as to impede the suspense and narrative drive of a thoroughly good read from the pen of a master storyteller.

And there is a spiritual connection with Dickens of some significance concerning Hamilton's death in 1962.

Hamilton, the Dickens devotee, died aged 58 and geranium petals from a wreath were scattered on his coffin.

Charles Dickens also died in his 58th year, entombed in Westminster Abbey, with his coffin covered with his favourite flower - scarlet geraniums.

Now that Patrick Hamilton's home town Brighton has achieved millennial recognition of status as a city, in the year of his centennial, there can be no more proper time to celebrate the embracing breadth of this great novelist and playwright's compassion and humanity.

• Brighton-educated screenwriter John Branston has been championing the Patrick Hamilton centenary and setting the agenda for a number of literary events this year. He is currently working on a dramatisation of The Victim, the celebrated novel by playwright George Tabori.