Drink slowed his work and he made most progress on this book during periods of relative abstemiousness, writing in bed all day before going out to drink in the evenings. He was living partly in London, where he had an apartment at the Albany near Piccadilly Circus, and in Henley, where he set his novel, ‘a mere village right off the map’ which he named Thames Lockdon.

He offers us an ironic self-portrait in The Slaves of Solitude as the mysterious Mr. Prest, ‘the black sheep of the boarding-house’, who with his beery voice and face of an ex-pugilist, floats through each day with ‘an air of having been battered silly by life, of submissiveness to events, of gentleness, of willingness to please, of dog-like gloom and absent-mindedness’. Though looked down on by the other members of the boarding-house as being almost an alien (‘funny’, ‘strange’, ‘odd’, ‘queer’), he regards all of them with ‘the supreme, leisured, and assured contempt of a cultivated man for Philistines . . . indeed, as a sort of zoo, containing easily recognized types of freak animals, into which an ironical fate had brought him.’

The exception is Miss Roach, the shy, modest, decent, over-sensitive, thirty-nine-year-old spinster and daughter of a dentist from whose viewpoint the story is mostly told. She, who had been nicknamed ‘Old Cockroach’, has an affinity with the man whose name is so nearly ‘pest’. But, within the stupefying atmosphere of the boarding-house, she does not recognize this and ‘often wondered what exact motive Mr. Prest had in being alive – if, and by what means, this seemingly empty, utterly idle and silent man justified his existence.’

But Mr. Prest, like Patrick Hamilton himself, divides his life between Thames Lockdon and London, where he can be found at various bars, ‘sipping at his beer and hoping for the best’. On unfortunate days he stands alone, embarrassed, self-conscious, obsessed by the fear of being ‘out of it’ and ‘not wanted’. But then come lucky days when he joins the crowd and, ‘in his old element, now completely elated rather than dejected by his own yesterdays’, talks on an equal footing with famous men of the theatre. For Mr. Prest has a secret. As ‘Archie Prest’, he has once topped the bills in pantomimes. Near the end of the novel, when, due to the wartime shortage of actors, he is starring in a production at Wimbledon of Babes in the Wood, he is miraculously transformed from ‘a forlorn, silent man in the corner . . . that idler and hanger-about in bars’ into ‘a wicked but absurd uncle . . . preposterously dressed in green’. In this wonderfully comic and surreal scene, partly a fantastical rewriting of a sad late performance he had witnessed by the great old musical comedian George Robey, Patrick Hamilton gives us the opposite of that deadly transformation experienced by George Harvey Bone in Hangover Square. This is the ecstatic transformation his characters search for in pubs; which Patrick Hamilton, changing his name to Henderson, had looked for when he briefly went on the stage himself in what he called his ‘nerve-wracking, ill-adjusted, wretched early youth’; and which, in muted form, he finally achieved in his best novels. Seeing Mr. Prest’s elderly pugilistic face, so madly painted, as he stands bombarded by the frantic yells of delight from the children, Miss Roach observes ‘an extraordinary look of purification about the man – a suggestion of reciprocal purification – as if he had just at that moment with his humour purified the excited children, and they, all as one, had purified him.’

Somehow his triumph seemed to be Miss Roach’s triumph as well, and her heart was lifted up with pleasure . . . Looking at him, she had a strong desire to cry .