Showing results by author "Patrick Hamilton" in Literature & Fiction

Patrick Hamilton is renowned for his gritty, slice-of-life tales chronicling the hopes, dreams and obsessions of London's working class in the inter-war years. This collection brings together his key pieces, together with some lesser-known classics and a bonus 2004 documentary exploring his achievements and legacy.

This classic Victorian thriller was first produced in 1935. Jack Manningham is slowly, deliberately driving his wife, Bella, insane. He has almost succeeded when help arrives in the form of a former detective, Rough, who believes Manningham to be a thief and murderer. Aided by Bella, Rough proves Manningham's true identity, and finally Bella achieves a few moments of sweet revenge for the suffering inflicted on her.

Measuring out the wartime days in a small town on the Thames, Miss Roach is not unattractive but no longer quite young. The Rosamund Tea Rooms boardinghouse, where she lives with half a dozen others, is as grey and lonely as its residents. For Miss Roach, 'slave of her task-master, solitude', a shaft of not altogether welcome light is suddenly beamed upon her with the appearance of a charismatic and emotional American lieutenant.

London, 1939, and in the grimy publands of Earl's Court, George Harvey Bone is pursuing a helpless infatuation. Netta is cool, contemptuous and hopelessly desirable to George. George is adrift in a drunken hell except in his dead moments, when something goes click in his head and he realises, without a doubt, that he must kill her.

In Craven House, among the shifting, uncertain world of the English boardinghouse, with its sad population of the shabby genteel on the way down and the eternal optimists who would never get up or on, the young Patrick Hamilton, with loving, horrified fascination, first mapped out the territory that he would make uniquely his own. Although many of Hamilton's lifelong interests are here, they are handled with a youthful brio and optimism conspicuously absent from his later work.