Now, when you walked into a pub Hamilton’s characters were not there. The young were everywhere, particularly in the new coffee bars – courtesy of the Italians. The pubs themselves were being done up, not always to everyone’s taste.

Hamilton’s characters came out of an unhappy history. It is forgotten now that before the First World War there was talk of imminent revolution – the condition of the working people was so poor – though now people talk as if the Empire benefited everyone. The fear of Revolution made King George refuse to give asylum to his relatives Nicky and Alex, the Czar and Czarina of Russia. They begged for help, did not get it, and were then murdered. Then came the First World War and its depredations, and the difficulties of post-war times. Then the Wall Street collapse and the Depression. It is forgotten often that again the condition of the working people was such that whole swathes of them lived on bread and dripping, bread and margarine, and sugar and tea. When the young men reached the call-up centres, the Other Ranks were a good foot shorter in height than the middle-class boys, and in bad physical condition. The Second World War and its aftermath impoverished Britain. The moneyed classes were amply chronicled by Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Antony Powell, but there were other witnesses, of whom Patrick Hamilton was the most reliable.

People ask now, ‘But how could so many people become communists? Why did they?’.

It is this history, particularly the desperations of slump-time, that made so many communists.

Decades of hard and turbulent times had created Hamilton’s world of crooks and spivs, blackmailers and bounders, murderers and thieves, and some of the nastiest women in literature. It is forgotten that then girls had to look for husbands to keep them from the fate of spinsterhood, and a miserable old age; they had to find men to exploit. Now girls get jobs. If they did have jobs then they certainly did not earn anything like what the men did. But Hamilton records penniless girls’ attempts to be decent and honest, just as George Gissing had done before him. But I think one has to remember Hamilton’s scheming greedy bitches with a horror reserved for no other writer.

He was a good hater. He loathed a certain stratum of British life, just as George Orwell did. Pretentiousness and snobbishness, ignorance about the outside world, coupled with a complacency that came from knowing they were members of the greatest empire in the world. And there were the real crooks, like Gorse: the trilogy about him made a TV series and put a word into the language. ‘He’s a real Gorse, that one,’ you would hear.

The Slaves of Solitude is set in wartime but not in London, where life was easier, if more dangerous than outside. There were restaurants for the well off, people danced in the big hotels. An old woman told me, ‘It was so glamorous, don’t you see? The wonderful uniforms, and so many men from everywhere. Any girls with any kind of good looks had the time of their lives.’ An American, who had flown many sorties over Germany, said that in between dropping bombs he and his fellow officers had danced in the London hotels every night. He had a wonderful time. A new slant, surely, on ‘The best time of my life’.

But these amenities were not known in the little towns outside London where people were living as they could through a war that seemed endless. ‘They once had a Thirty Years War, didn’t they? A Hundred Years War? Why shouldn’t we?’

Their war was dark, oppressive, cold – and endless. Some landladies found the wartime restrictions to their taste. In the Rosamund Tea Rooms – once real tea rooms (a name enough to revive memories of bad boarding houses and penny-pinching hotels) – the landlady took the light bulbs out of the sockets, so that the inhabitants had to use their torches inside as well as outside in the dim streets. Miss Roach, the patient long-suffering heroine, does not think much about the fortunes of war, the smashed empires, the ruined cities, the cold seas full of the dead. The war for her was all attrition and doing without. ‘The war . .