“He was not a major writer,” says Doris Lessing a few lines into her otherwise appreciative introduction to my copy of Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude. This makes me wonder what one has to do to qualify as a ‘major’ writer? I think him quite wonderful, and, having recently reread The Golden Notebook, which I loved back in the seventies, I have a feeling his work may turn out to age better than Lessing’s own.

I only knowingly came across Hamilton for the first time a few years ago (though in fact I have always been a particular fan of the Hitchcock film, Rope, which is based on a Patrick Hamilton play.) He was recommended to me by my friend the late Eric Brown, who had a real feeling for British authors of the mid-twentieth century. I promptly devoured Slaves of Solitude, Hangover Square and the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, and was really blown away by them. What’s more, when I recommended these books to other people, they either turned out to already be big fans, or read the books and were as enthusiastic as I was (except in the case of my wife, to be fair, who is not prone to reckless enthusiasm, and thought Slaves only ‘quite good’). I have recently reread those first two again (or to be more accurate, listened to them this time as audiobooks), and remain very impressed. Slaves is my favourite, but with Hangover Square a fairly close second, and I particularly liked the third book of the Twenty Thousand Streets trilogy, The Plains of Cement, in which the barmaid Ella has to choose between marrying a horribly unattractive older man who treats her like a child and barely notices her as a human being, and depriving her frail mother of a chance to come out of poverty.

I don’t know much more about Hamilton’s background than can be found in his Wikipedia entry here. He had communist sympathies (like the early Lessing), a strong identification with the downtrodden (something that does not come over so strongly in the work of the self-assertive, self-consciously visionary Doris Lessing), and he was an alcoholic – in fact you may find you get a hangover reading any of the above five novels, just from the sheer number of drinks you have to imaginatively knock back. He was a successful playwright. Rope, as I mentioned, became a film, Gas Light was filmed twice, and is the origin of the concept of ‘gaslighting’ – something, of course, which is done to the downtrodden to keep them down. (Hangover Square was also made into a film, though from what I gather its central character is a very different proposition from the slow, heavy George Bone of the novel.) He was also severely disfigured when he was run over by a car.

The five novels I’m discussing here are all set in or near London before or during the second world war. This seems to lead some commentators on Hamilton to speak of his work as though it was some kind of historical artifact, a record of a certain kind of life in a certain part of London, at a certain time in history. As I’ve remarked before, this idea of fiction as ‘documenting’ some particular period of history, or place, or area of life, strikes me as very reductive. What makes these novels great is that they speak to things that we all experience, seen through different eyes.

However Hamilton certainly is very good at evoking place – see for example the account of a commuter train arriving in a suburban terminus that begins Slaves – and the way that a place is transformed by our mood. (In Slaves for instance, he mentions in passing the way that the aspect of nature itself seems different on a Sunday from how it looks on weekdays). He is equally good at writing about interior states, and especially about obsession and addiction, to which of course he was not a stranger. He writes beautiful, functional, unfussy descriptive prose. There is absolutely no showing off (a quality, incidentally, that reminds me of the personality of my friend Eric).

In all these books, there are hard, narcissistic, self-obsessed people, who are cruel to others, or use others without ever really seeing them, and who may nurture fascistic fantasies: examples are Vicki and the truly ghastly Mr Thwaite in Slaves (though the two are very different to each other), and Netta and her friends in Hangover Square. There are quiet, mild characters who don’t know how to assert themselves in the world. Miss Roach, the main character in Slaves, is one such, a 39- year-old single woman, appallingly lonely, living during the blitz in a genteel lodging house with a bunch of older people in a town outside London. George Bone (or at any rate George Bone when in his right mind) is another: lumpish, clueless, hopelessly pursuing a beautiful but heartless woman. Ella, the barmaid in the trilogy is another. (But again, these three are not mere types and are all very different from one another.) Finally, there are a number of characters who manage to be both competent at life and non-egotistical. George’s friend John Littlejohn is one of these. Mr Lindsell, and to some extent Mr Prest (though the latter is a bit of a lost soul himself) are other examples in Slaves.

All of these books are beautifully structured and paced, and what makes the latter particularly impressive is the fact that comparatively little actually happens. Miss Roach is simultaneously bullied and bored silly by Mr Thwaites over the dinner table in her boarding house, she is taken out for drinks by an apparently benign but ‘inconsequent’ American officer who never makes his intentions clear, she is let down by her friend Vicki, she has a row with Thwaites, and finally she experiences a very small but very touching moment of redemption at the end, though certainly not happy ever after, or even an end to loneliness. George, again and again, tries to interest Netta in him as a person, and again and again discovers that she cares absolutely nothing for him. (The first book of the Streets trilogy deals with a similar hopeless obsession, which I gather relates to Hamilton’s own biography.)

I’m not conveying much, I fear, but these are wonderful books.

(I should add that the later ‘Gorse’ trilogy is, accordingly to a friend who was already be a fan of Hamilton, a very different proposition, with one of his cruel, ruthless figures in the driving seat throughout, and none of the mercy that pervades the books I’ve read. I’m going to give it a go, but it’s not the one to start with.)