Patrick Hamilton began as a very young novelist, barely in his twenties. And there is a sense in which he stayed very young, even though he reached maturity as an artist. The essential self behind the novelist, expressed by him, never came out of that youth, never really matured at all. Patrick Hamilton became one of the most widely admired novelists of his generation; he earned and spent a great deal of money; and in ordinary terms he left his youth behind for many years of middle-age. But while knowing all this – and indeed a lot more than this – I cannot help seeing him from first to last as a gifted youth, living in some boarding-house and breaking out of his solitude every night to sit in a pub, keeping very sharp eyes and ears hard to work. Even the absurd little snobberies of his later life, noted without malice by his brother Bruce, seem to me those of a rather ingenuous youth. Again, though he tried living in many different places (always in England), he never appears to have really settled down anywhere, never became a member of a community, but was always, so to speak, the restless and sceptical outsider, still the gifted but lonely youth.

It is this that gives his fiction its unusual setting, its peculiar characters, its unique style, tone, flavour. He is above all the novelist of the homeless. Instead of a specific society, which most novelists require, he takes us into a kind of No-Man’s-Land of shabby hotels, dingy boarding-houses and all those saloon bars where the homeless can meet. (And no English novelist of my time has had a better ear for the complacent platitudes, the banalities, the sheer idiocy of pub talk, than Hamilton.) But his characteristic humour, always at its height retaining a certain zest that is itself youthful, still leaves us aware of what is lurking in the shadowy background. This is a suspicion of the society from which his chief characters are exiled. It is a deep feeling that there are no real homes for his homeless people to discover. It is a growing despair that dreads the way our world is going. (To ease this, during the Second War and for some time afterwards, he turned to Marxism and Soviet Russia, but not with any great conviction and passion – ingenuously youthful again – as any of us who heard him on these subjects can testify.) What was intensely felt here was not the result of political-economic opinion. It was an instinctive abhorrence of our modem urban life that may have disturbed him quite early, perhaps from boyhood. Though he used a wartime background for his Slaves of Solitude, it is significant that in the three Gorse novels that followed he had to return to the nineteen-twenties and thirties: he could no longer cope with the post-war world. It is also significant that the most forceful piece of writing in Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse is the last thing in it, a sardonic vision of an England covered with cars, as if it had been successfully invaded by a host of giant beetles, receiving every attention.

While he matured as a novelist – and both Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude reveal formidable skill – that inner Patrick Hamilton, the lonely youth of the boarding-houses and pubs, remained to brood over the scene. So he is the novelist of innocence, appallingly vulnerable, and of malevolence, coming out of some mysterious darkness of evil. His George Harvey Bone, condemned to live in Hangover Square, is a triumph of compassionate creation. His is an idle and stupid existence, always threatened by schizophrenia, and he is a double murderer before finally committing suicide. Yet it seems to me impossible to deny him our sympathy. His adored Netta, on whom he wastes so much time, attention, deeply-felt longing, is not only a selfish and callous little bitch, but, along with her closer friend, Peter, seems to represent some principle of evil. And all this group, forever aimlessly drifting and pub-crawling, somehow suggest the London of 1939, and far better than most novels of the period, though they may be more broadly-based. We live so closely with the hopelessly infatuated Bone that we can never forget him.

Much the same can be said of a very different character, Miss Roach, with whom we live so closely in The Slaves of Solitude. She is another of Hamilton’s memorable innocents, and the kind of rather vague spinster who would never attract our attention. But by the time she leaves the boarding-house at Thames Lockdon and returns to London, then we have shared with her so many little adventures, as strange to her as episodes in the Arabian Nights, we are among her closest friends. (It is the lack of this growing point of sympathy in so many recent clever novels that makes us shrug them away.) And we have also become acquainted, in typical Hamilton fashion, with Mr Thwaites, at once a comic character and a menacing monster, the sinister Vicki Kugelmann, and the American who is as generous but as unpredictable as an Oriental despot. It is all happening in wartime, with the war itself never forced into the scene but kept growling in the distance; the whole thing being presented with wonderful skill.

It is possible that this new generation of readers, who do not know their Patrick Hamilton, may at first be bewildered or rather bored by his very individual humour, depending as much of it does on emphasizing – by a free use of quotation marks and capital letters – the catch-phrases and banalities of an older and vanishing generation. But I feel sure that a great many younger readers will be caught and held by Patrick Hamilton’s intensely personal vision of life, his enduring sense of homelessness, of the loneliness and solitude so many young men have known, his feeling for the innocence always menaced by stupidity and wickedness, the compassion behind his apparently sardonic detachment The world that he secretly regarded with horror, in the dark outside the lighted saloon bars, is not better than it was when he was writing these novels, it is if anything – worse. So I feel there must be thousands of youngish readers who will not only appreciate his unique talent but will also welcome him as a friend and a brother.