Amazon.co.uk Review
Patrick Hamilton was just twenty-four years old when
The Midnight Bell was first published in 1929, but his writing told a different story. The narrative he told was, give or take, his own and was of a young man (Euston Road barman Bob) impossibly in love with one of London's "lovely ladies" (Jenny), an infatuation which tore him apart emotionally, and led him steadily from pub to pub to dosshouse. While Hamilton the man managed to extricate himself from his affair and get married, over the next few years Hamilton the writer returned compulsively to the same materials, manipulating unresolved subplots and highlighting minor characters to produce
The Siege of Pleasure in 1932 and
The Plains of Cement in 1934. Together the three novels form a many-layered and remarkable trilogy, now happily available again in paperback. They conjure brilliantly twenties Britain, emotionally paralysed by class fears and genteel snobbery, but by now completely unable to regain the social certainties of the past. Hamilton captured the psychological complexity of his career losers with a theatricality which would later find full expression in his stage plays (later filmed),
Rope and
Gaslight. Many writers since have probed into the capital's lowlife, but probably nobody will ever capture so well the twilight tyranny of the London pub, and its denizens' unspeakable desperation. --
Alan Stewart
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Hamilton was a marvellous novelist who's grossly neglected The Times Patrick Hamilton wrote about pubs better than any other novelist... The wonderful 1935 trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, is set in a pub off the Euston Road. Every detail is spot on Independent on Sunday A complex study of failed hopes and disappointed love Independent on Sunday Patrick Hamilton was a writer's writer... Seen as touchstones by authors from J.B. Priestley to Iain Sinclair The Times Hamilton writes about street life with an honesty and lyricism, an absence of sentimentality or fetish for squalor, that should make nearly every hard-boiled writer hang his or her head in shame Salon My big discovery of the year has been Patrick Hamilton. His trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky is a beauty - one of the finest books I've ever read No other English writer has written so acutely about sexual infatuation, embarrassment and self-delusion Time Out Bleak and brilliant...an authentic lost classic Guardian
by Patrick Hamilton
by Patrick Hamilton
by Patrick Hamilton
by Nigel Jones
