From his father he could win no support for his wish to be a writer, although this wish reflected Patrick’s need to feel closer to him. For Bernard, when acting the novelist, published several historical novels of which he appeared to think rather well (‘As a puff preliminary,’ he advised his publisher, ‘you may say that this is the greatest novel ever written – which indeed it is’). His disinclination to help may have come from the suspicion that his son was naturally more gifted as a writer. Instead, he sent him to a commercial school near Holborn with a marvellous letter of instruction:

On Sabbath mornings you will sit, regularly, under the minister of the Scots Presbyterian Church near St Pancras. This is a parade. You will then proceed to Chiswick, reporting for Dinner at one-thirty, military time – i.e. five minutes early . . . You will bring with you a weekly report on conduct and progress from your tutors, endorsed by the Principal. If any difficulty should arise, you are to say that, I, your father, the author and barrister, require this.

You will make enquiries as to membership of the City Volunteer or Cadet companies; I believe such bodies still exist. Understand this is an order; excuses will have no more avail with me than the preachments of Mormon missionaries.

For exercise I recommend rowing. Ascertain the conditions of membership of the London or Thames Boat Clubs – you cannot hope for Leander.

Patrick did not remain long at this school, but while there he first fell in love. ‘His surrender was instant, absolute and agonizing,’ his brother Bruce Hamilton remembered. ‘I could see that her mere appearance made him almost faint with longing.’ More damaging was a love affair which began in 1927 with Lily, a West End prostitute. This must have seemed an escape from the respectable middle-class world of his parents into the world of London’s defeated classes – the insignificant, the needy, the homeless and the ostracized – that populate his novels. But it also followed the pattern of his father’s first marriage to a prostitute he had met in the promenade of the Empire Theatre, which ended when she threw herself under a train. The affair with Lily seemed both a copy of, and perhaps an exculpation for, that marriage – for here it is the prostitute who educates and takes revenge on the gentleman. By moving into a lower social sphere, Patrick Hamilton did not shed the insecurities implanted by his upbringing: his emotional vulnerability helped to make him one of the chronically dissolute and distressed who wander the dingy London streets and find refuge in its pubs and dosshouses.

The Midnight Bell (1930) is an account – in places almost a transcription – of Patrick Hamilton’s disastrous romance with Lily. When first published it had the subtitle ‘A Love Story’. But the word love, though desperately repeated in the many blurred conversations, loses all particular meaning and becomes a vague shorthand for what the characters imagine they want – the possession of beauty, money or security: in short, the possession of the unattainable.

The Midnight Bell is a study of infatuation. We are spared none of its detailed tortures or griefs, betrayals and deceits, in this anatomy of humiliation that brings us to the frontiers of Patrick Hamilton’s famous psychological thrillers for the stage, Rope and Gaslight, and his classic murder novel Hangover Square. ‘Her perfect cruelty and egotism appalled him . . . He would kill her.’ But there are to be no murders in this trilogy, for it is the endurance of ordinary life that we are being shown. What The Midnight Bell loses in detachment, it gains in intensity. The appalling monster-bores of this pub are excruciatingly observed and intimately known. As we follow the intricately plotted inanities of their tales, which divert us by driving the other characters to distraction, we do not overhear them from a distance, but are brought into their very presence.

The Siege of Pleasure (1932) is the story of Jenny Maple’s first step down from respectable servant girl towards prostitution. ‘Jever hear of Bernard Shaw? .