As an escape from their imprisonment in these sullen institutions, he ushers his characters into the lighted world of the public house, where they can lose their private inhibitions, and lose themselves, by entering for some time a parallel world of fantasy and illusion. Pubs feature in almost all Patrick Hamilton’s novels, most particularly his marvellous London trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935), which makes brilliant and poignant use of his own disastrous infatuation with a young prostitute during the late 1920s. The reading public loved the compulsive story-telling of this ambitious novel; while critics and other writers increasingly valued his powers of sociological observation. ‘He wrote more sense about England and what was going on in England in the 1930s than anybody else,’ commented Doris Lessing. ‘. . . You can go into any pub and see it going on.’ Here were the defeated classes of the Depression: the homeless, the ostracized, the needy, re-created with loving detail. His characters are ordinary and uneducated people, tormented by their fantasies and tormenting others: ‘real people made plain for us,’ as J. B. Priestley called them. It is not a faultless novel: sometimes the narrative is too wordy, sometimes too mannered. But these are living faults that shadow living characters and are produced by Patrick Hamilton’s desire to convey simple people in situations that are beyond them. In the malignant atmosphere of London, these companions in toil came together in the local pub. There is the sailor-turned-waiter with ambitions to be a writer, the fly-by-night young girl trapped into prostitution, the plain barmaid courted by one of Patrick Hamilton’s specialities, the monster bore – a relationship developed in The Slaves of Solitude between the thirty-nine-year-old Miss Roach and the malevolent Mr. Thwaites. They are all observed with humour and tenderness, below which runs a disturbing subtext of fear and revenge. ‘There was not even any hope for Miss Roach that Mr. Thwaites would ever die.’ It is this menacing subtext that rises to the surface and drives the plots of Patrick Hamilton’s stage plays.

His first play, Rope, was staged in London in 1929, when he was twenty-five. ‘I have done exactly what Nöel Coward did with The Vortex. I am known, established, pursued,’ he wrote. ‘The world is truly at my feet.’ His gratuitous murder story scandalized and delighted audiences even more than Coward’s family drama of adultery and drug-addiction. It was to be played in theatres round the world for the rest of his life, was adapted for radio and television, and made into a famous experimental film by Alfred Hitchcock. The title had been taken from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (‘Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman – a rope over an abyss’), and the event-plot was derived from a cause célèbre in the United States involving two brilliant young students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who become obsessed with Nietzsche’s theory of the Superman and attempt an immaculate, motiveless murder. Patrick Hamilton himself rather unconvincingly denied that he had founded his play on this case. ‘I am not interested in crime,’ he said. Though he was pleased by the play’s success, he wanted somehow to distance himself from it. ‘It bears no relation to the rest of my writing,’ he wrote. He called it ‘a sheer thriller’, and technically this is true. As Sean French writes in his biography of Patrick Hamilton, Rope is a ‘supremely effective dramatic machine’.