Category: patrick hamilton

MR STIMPSON AND MR GORSE and UNKNOWN ASSAILANT by Patrick Hamilton


These two novels complete THE GORSE TRILOGY. They follow our anti-hero, Ralph Ernest Gorse, as he continues to con women out of their money.

MR STIMPSON AND MR GORSE is oddly named, as Mr Stimpson comes into the story only tangentially. Mr Gorse’s real prey is one Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce, a colonel’s widow with inflated ideas as to her own status. She is, as is common with every other character in this novel, completely unpleasant: vain, grasping, and calculating. Gorse convinces her of his probity by encouraging her to entrust him with small amounts of money initially (to bet on the horses for example). He eventually convinces her to become secretly engaged to him, and they spend a wild week in London, during which he encourages her to drink far too much. She entrusts him with £500, and he sends her back home to Reading, saying he will follow shortly. Needless to say he does not.

One very striking aspect of this novel is how much of it takes place in drinking establishments. Everyone is constantly either drinking or drunk. Patrick Hamilton clearly spent an ungodly amount of time in bars, as I don’t think I’ve ever read such detail or accuracy about pub culture, pub conversation, drunken dalliances, the taste of brandy, the effect of ‘Gin and It,’ Monday morning hangovers, etc etc etc. It kind of made me want to have a drink.

UNKNOWN ASSAILANT

The title made me very worried that here Ralph Ernest Gorse would finally mature from conman to serial killer. The atmosphere of these books is strangely suspenseful – or stressful might be a better term – and I was kind of worried this might be where it was going. However, bizarrely, this was the most cheerful of the books, and included, incredibly, a character who was not irredeemably bad! Amazing. Of course, we are immediately told that he is to die senselessly in the early days of the WWII, so fear not, this is still vintage Hamilton.

Gorse meets a rather dim barmaid, Ivy, and convinces her that he would like to marry her. He bamboozles her (through her stupidity and timidity); and then bamboozles her father too (but in this case through his cupidity and brutality), into investing in a fictitious theatrical enterprise. Once he has their money safely in hand, he takes Ivy to a lonely part of the countryside. You can see where I thought this was going to go horribly wrong. However, all he does is tie her up, tell her she has been swindled, and leave her to make her own way home.

At this she point, she meets the one not thoroughly objectionable character in the book, Stan, a lone telegraph boy, who takes her home, comforts her, and gives her the courage not to return to her horrible and vindictive father.

The last two books in THE GORSE TRILOGY continue to be bleakly funny, as:

Chelsea proper is, as is well known, despite its countless normal inhabitants, the favourite London resort of those who are obvious failures or of those who are obviously going to be failures before long. The failure is nearly always of an ‘artistic’ kind.

But I found that more than funny, they were bleak. I enjoyed them, but I am glad they are finished. For some reason I am not surprised that they were Patrick Hamilton’s last novels before he drank himself to death. The man who wrote the Introduction called these end-of-the-tether novels, and while I don’t know exactly what he means, I know exactly what he means.

THE WEST PIER by Patrick Hamilton


This came to me in the way I best like books to come: randomly. Someone else picked it out for me at the library.

The author’s voice was naggingly familiar, and eventually I placed it: it’s Patrick Hamilton! He wrote the fairly fabulous HANGOVER SQUARE, which I blogged earlier this year. (Here it is).

THE WEST PIER is the first in a trilogy of novels based on a real life confidence man, Neville Heath. It begins by telling of his time at school, and his love of ‘mischief’ – for example, he always carries a long pin about with him, so he can make punctures in the wheels of any bicycles he finds unattended. He attends a rather posh public (or private, depending on the country you’re reading this in) school, and is generally sheilded from the consequences of his actions. The story then catches up with him as a young man just after the First World War, and tells how he manages to defraud a working class girl of her life savings (£68; a great deal to her, and not very much to him) simply for the thrill of it.

Much that appealed about HANGOVER SQUARE also appeals about THE WEST PIER. There a sort of coldly comic edge to it which is often hilarious. Like this bit of schoolboy conversation in a changing room:

“You’d better not accuse me, you know” said Kerr, now anxious to be accused, and endeavouring to create the allusion that this had already happened. “Because I’ll jolly well punch your nose.”
“And you’d better not accuse me either,” said another boy named Roberts, perceving and rushing with all his belongings towards the glorious Yukon of quarreling with Kerr had discovered. “Or I’ll jolly well punch your nose too.”

For some reason, I just love that about the Yukon. Or this, about these same boys as young men in their early twenties:

All these boys were, of course, in what is deceptively called the ‘morning’ of life – deceptive because the vigorous word ‘morning’ does not at all suggest the clouded, oppressive, mysterious, disquieted, inhibited condition through which the vast majority have to pass at this age.

I don’t know if that’s so much funny as it is sadly true. And this is I think the reason I can’t really say I enjoyed this book. It’s written with great clarity, truly remarkable insight into human behaviour, and with painfully accurate analysis of how people act in social situations; but it’s all rather sad. The con man is a clever, cunning, and unpleasant man. His victims are greedy, vain, and rather credulous. These people are drawn clearly and intelligently, but I wasn’t sure to what effect. The bad man tricked the stupid people. That was basically it.

Perhaps I’m being rather Victorian about it all, but I didn’t really get the point. It was all rather sad and defeated, and no one emerged well or was any the wiser from their experiences.

I believe poor Mr Hamilton ended his life an alcoholic, and I think I would drink too if I found the world so very full of evil and idiocy. In fact, I might just go have a drink right now. I’m not sure how else I’ll get through the rest of the trilogy.

HANGOVER SQUARE by Patrick Hamilton


This is a fantastic little book. It’s subtitled ‘A story of darkest Earl’s Court,’ and is very much about the misery and anonymity of the big city. It’s certainly not a book to read when you are feeling sick of London, as I am.

Sample: At one point, our protagonist is trying to warm up on a cold day in front of a miserable gas fire. Comments the author, in probably my favourite line of the entire book: “To those whom God has forsaken, is given a gas-fire in Earl’s Court” You said it, baby.

HANGOVER SQUARE tells the story of one Harvey Bone, who is a sweet and slightly simple young man living in Earl’s Court. The year is very specifically 1939, and the war hangs over the entire book. Bone is very lonely, and conceives an obsessive love for one Netta Langdon. She is thoroughly nasty to him, but he hangs onto the edge of her hard drinking social group. Occasionally, Bone hears what is described as a click in his head, and suddenly the world becomes a bit silent and vacant, and he moves as if in a dream. During these periods, he plans to kill Netta. When his head clicks back, he cannot remember these ‘dead’ periods at all. Bone is a thoroughly symmpathetic character, and the book reels you in by continually keeping you in hope that he will come right. He keeps trying to give up drinking, and planning to move out of the city to the countryside, both of which, it is suggested, might yet save him. Eventually, in a particularly bad period, he does kill Netta, and on her friends, and then covers the apartment in lengths of thread, so the crime scene will not be touched by the police. Shortly afterwards, he kills himself. He had been looking after a stray cat, and his suicide note is mostly about making sure the cat is looked after. It is sad.

Hamilton is a bit naughty, as he really makes you hate Netta. I have to admit its a tiny bit mysoginist. Apparently ‘her thoughts resembled those of a fish – something seen floating in a tank, brooding, self-absorbed, frigid . . . she had been born, apparently, without any natural predilection towards thought or action . . .’ You get the picture. You seriously totally don’t care when she gets drowned in her bath.

JB Priestly in the introduction makes the excellent point that Hamilton is one of the first writers to really deal with the way one can be homeless in a big city – homeless in the sense of anonymous, and without any kind of community – just floating. Let me just quote you one other little bit! Speaking of a young man: “For he was alone in London for the fist time, and at an age when the external world generally bears a totally differnet aspect from the one it bears to its more battered and jaundiced inhabitants – at an age, indeed, where even the scenery of SW7 might be associated with the beginning of life rather than the end of all hope, and its streets and people charged with a remarkable mystery and romance of their own.”

Fantastic.