By placing a wooden chest containing the murdered boy centre stage and inviting his father to eat supper off it, Hamilton ‘found an authentic addition to the repertoire of horror’. But by denying all knowledge of the Leopold-Loeb trial, he conceals the fascination he shared with them for Nietzsche, whose superior thought, he believed, was strong enough to free him from the force field of his father’s megalomania. There is a mention of Carlyle, but none of Nietzsche in the play, and Patrick Hamilton represents its savage homo-erotic theme as being merely a piece of the stage business. ‘I have gone all-out to write a horror play and make your flesh creep,’ he wrote. ‘. . . If I have succeeded you will leave the theatre braced and re-created, which is what you go to the theatre for.’ But it was ‘not intended to be a highbrow play’, and so he added ‘delving into morbid psychologies and so forth’ was quite beside the point.

There is a similar exploitation of villainy, a piling on of agony, in his equally successful and much-filmed melodrama, Gaslight. Here the psychopathic husband brings his wife to the house where he has murdered her predecessor and tries by a variety of devilish stage tricks to push her into madness. Almost all his plays, from the ingenious revenge thriller for radio, Money with Menaces, to the gothic stage tragedy of imprisonment and murder, The Duke in Darkness, show a sadistic relish for applied cruelty which seems at odds with the embracing sympathy and humour of the novels – though terror and the prospect of revenge are never far below the surface of his multi-layered fiction.

These two faces of Patrick Hamilton are subtly brought together in his celebrated novel Hangover Square (1941), a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story originally subtitled The Man with Two Minds, in which the ungainly, weak-willed George Harvey Bone, lovelorn and innocuous, is intermittently transformed by a snapping sensation in his head, a schizophrenic click!, into a predestined killer. The parallel world that this heavy-drinking man enters is colourless, submerged, semi-silent, the world of an automaton, remote from other people except his intended victim, the tantalizing Netta Longdon, whom he loves.

As he grew older, Patrick Hamilton’s novels became darker. The Slaves of Solitude is the most sombre of all. Though there is no sound of gunfire in the book, no sight of blood or spectacle of killing, it is, he tells us, a war novel. The only bombshells are verbal bombshells, but the grey deprivation of life is seen as much a part of the war as soldiering. ‘The earth was muffled from the stars; the river and the pretty eighteenth-century bridge were muffled from the people; the people were muffled from each other. This was war late in 1943.’ The dim black-out, ‘like moonlight gone bad’, in which these people live mirrors the blackness of the author’s spirit.

This blackness seems to have been largely caused by his inability to escape from the acute anxieties of childhood. They had been extraordinarily stimulated by the extravagant unpredictability of his father: his sudden violent tempers, alternating with moods of embarrassing affection, his bouts of drunkenness, his extreme social snobbery and ancestral mythmaking, all contributing to the dread of his presence in their comfortable home. Whatever Patrick did in later life seemed like a distorted echo of Bernard. When he idiosyncratically took up Marxism to purge his parents’ social pretensions and obtain a secure, predictable scientific faith, was he not parodying Bernard’s eccentric fascism? When he found a father-figure in Stalin was he not reproducing his father’s discovery of Mussolini?

His sexual life too seems to have faltered under the imposing, impotent shadow of his parents. He believed himself to be unattractive to women and may have suspected that he was a repressed homosexual. In any event, he had difficulty in achieving sexual fulfilment with women (scholars have diagnosed premature ejaculation). He idealized glamorous actresses and played sado-masochistic games of bondage with a series of prostitutes (his early infatuation for a London prostitute was almost a carbon copy of his father’s first marriage). Nevertheless, he married twice, tried to keep both wives content by drifting back and forth between them, and made all three of them unhappy.

Patrick Hamilton’s triumph was to turn these disasters of his life into marvellous opportunities for his novels. Even here fate malignantly intervened. Early in 1932, when on the verge of a literary breakthrough, a near-fatal road accident in the wasteland of Earls Court (where he was to set Hangover Square) prevented him from writing for two years. It also left him with a damaged arm and scarred face. But though this exacerbated his morbid self-consciousness, he turned it to advantage on the page, adding to Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky a dramatic road accident which he later adapted as a play for radio called To the Public Danger.

He was already a heavy drinker before his accident. By the time he began writing The Slaves of Solitude he had become an alcoholic, drinking three bottles of whisky a day.