The Patrick Hamilton Appreciation Society discussion
Hamilton-esque books, authors..
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Welcome to Hamilton-esque books and authors
American Tabloid is amazing. I haven't read the rest of the trilogy yet.Red Harvest and The Glass Key strike me as Hammett's best novels, both unforgettable.
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I've started a separate thread on Max's Top 10 slangy crime novels here....
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Thanks again Patrick
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Thanks Patrick - this looks interesting. I know of Dean Street Press and have seen the Furrowed Middlebrow blog before but have yet to actually read anything - so that list should inspire a foray into these books in 2017.
If you look at Scott's Overwhelming List of thousands of women novelists and memoirists from the period he covers (1920-1960, if memory serves), and then think that there might be three or four times as many male writers, many of whose work could fall within the remit of TPHAS...it is staggering. The work of rediscovery may have barely begun.
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/review/show...
Patrick wrote: "If you look at Scott's Overwhelming List of thousands of women novelists and memoirists from the period he covers (1920-1960, if memory serves), and then think that there might be three or four times as many male writers, many of whose work could fall within the remit of TPHAS...it is staggering. The work of rediscovery may have barely begun."
Absolutely. Who needs new books?
That sounds like a fantastic book!Here is another in a similar vein, Lost Writers of the Plains, which can be downloaded as a free ebook.
Any of you read A Bit Off the Map by Angus Wilson? On the evidence here, it seems worthy.
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But sadly, no I haven't read 'A Bit Off the Map' by Angus Wilson. Yet. Any book with a character who is a mentally subnormal teddy boy who drifts around cafes, infatuated with an untalented, artistic crowd sounds unmissable.
I'm on it. Thanks, as always.
Yessir, that lone descriptive sentence is precisely what sold me on the book... so full of promise!I've just now purchased one of many copies to be had cheaply via AbeBooks.com -- though I opted for a more affordable latter-day edition. There's also a Penguin paperback edition out there, whose cover sports a very 1970s-esque illustration of a pair of blue suede shoes. It rivals a Showaddywaddy album cover in the coveted Cheese Factor Stakes.
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More cheese please waiter.
That sounds about right! Really looking forward to this one turning up in the post for me to settle down with!
Not sure that he qualifies as Hamilton-esque, but nor am I convinced that he doesn’t, because I’ve only read one poem by Siegfried Sassoon, more about whom can be read here:But the one poem that I read, pasted beneath, left me feeling a lot like his work is worth a look-in. This was written in 1917, as he was serving in the English armed forces during the war. If anyone has it in their heart to let me know whether or not his efforts are worth exploring, I’d be grateful.
SUICIDE IN THE TRENCHES
By Siegfried Sassoon, 1917
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
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The always-brilliant London Books are set to roll out their third republication of London-centric writer Simon Blumenfeld. Titled Phineas Kahn: Portrait of an Immigrant, originally published in 1937, the London Books edition appears slated for a 1 October return to print. Martin Knight and John King, through their London Books catalogue, have never let me down, so I’ve got this one marked for purchase.From London Books:
Phineas Kahn: Portrait Of An Immigrant by Simon Blumenfeld
Simon Blumenfeld’s acclaimed second novel follows the struggles of a Jewish merchant’s son, Phineas Kahn, as he makes his escape from the confines of Tsarist Russia to Vienna and then London in 1900, where he settles to raise a large family in the liberating atmosphere but desperate poverty of the East End. Hard-working and wedded to tradition, Phineas never surrenders in his fight to achieve a better life for his wife and children, who along with his great love of music offer solace in the most difficult times. Phineas Kahn: Portrait Of An Immigrant follows Blumenfeld’s ground-breaking debut Jew Boy, and shows the experience of earlier, first-generation migrants.
Based on tales from Blumenfeld’s own family history, and the lives of people he knew while growing up in Whitechapel, Phineas Kahn opens up a window on the sweatshops, slums and synagogues of the area’s Jewish community in the early decades of the 20th century. Not only a fascinating insight into what was a largely hidden world, Phineas Kahn is also a priceless portrayal � wrapped up in a gripping, warm narrative � of a London now vanished. With Jew Boy and Doctor Of The Lost it forms a loose trilogy that captures the shifting culture, politics and expectations of those who made the East End their home.
Looks like Hodder & Stoughton are about to bring a slew of novels by Pamela Hansford-Johnson back into print this autumn. I’ve been wanting to read her debut novel, This Bed Thy Centre [originally published in 1935] ever since Five Leaves brought it back in a limited print run in 2011, alongside The Furnished Room by Laura Del-Rivo, Baron’s Court, All Change by Terry Taylor, and Adrift In Soho by Colin Wilson as part of their Beats, Bums & Bohemians editions.From Hodder & Stoughton:
"Rediscover a classic gem with Pamela Hansford Johnson's THIS BED THY CENTRE, the explosive, defining novel about sex in 1930s London.
'Striking first novel . . . qualities of vitality and humour which set it apart.' New York Times
Delve into the world of Pamela Hansford Johnson through her explosive, banned debut, This Bed Thy Centre. . .
Sixteen year old Elsie Cotton, who lives with her widowed mother in south London, wants someone to explain to her what sexual intercourse is. Her mother won't tell her, and nor will her teacher; her boyfriend Roly is only too willing to show her, but fear of the unknown and her understanding of the potential consequences stop her.
As she and Roly continue their courtship, it becomes clear that the only way Elsie will take the leap into bed is if they're married...
This era-defining novel - which was banned from Battersea library on publication - explores down-at-heel south London in the 30's and attitudes towards sex. The Daily Express said at the time:
'Miss Johnson will be able to write when she has persuaded herself that there are other things in the world besides sex.'
Luckily for Miss Johnson, this was the debut novel that was followed by 27 other novels in a career that ended in her being called 'one of Britain's best-known novelists' by the New York Times."
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Cool, hopefully her novels will live up to my expectations, and be worthy of their own thread!
Here's a name for you chaps, Donald Henderson. I'm about halfway through Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper and it's definitely in our wheelhouse, Hamilton-wise. I'm on my phone so find it difficult to do links and what have you but you're smart cookies and will find it easy enough. I had no idea it was going to be Hamilton-esque, I just thought it sounded like an interesting inverted mystery set during the blackout and listed as one of Raymond Chandler's favourite books. Actually though its reminding me very much of Hamilton and i feel sure it will go down a treat in these parts.
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I'll set up a dedicated thread too
Muchas gracias, Papi, as they say round my part of town. This one’s readily available through stateside Amazon, so I’ve added it to the tip top of my list of things to buy. Maybe pair the purchase with the new Walter Lure autobiography? I can justify doing anything I want.
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Do it, do it.....
To Hell and Back: My Life in Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers, in the Words of the Last Man Standing seems to be only available on Kindle here in Blighty. And over £11. Hoping for a more reasonably priced edition at some point
This sounds like something you guys would like:It Never Gets Dark All Night by William Hayward
My friend Alex's review: /review/show...
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It Never Gets Dark All Night by William Hayward
My friend Alex's review: /review/show..."
Thanks for highlighting that Antonomasia
This interesting review on Amazon UK from JBWCH....
At the beginning of the story Bran Lynch, an Irish ex-poet, is living in a remote Gloucestershire farmhouse, playing unwilling host to an assortment of refugees from employment. They are preparing for a party which interrupts the quiet of the beautiful woodland with a raucous combustion of jazz, sex and cider. By the time it is over most of the characters have found themselves launched on voyages, both inner and outer, which are far stranger than they could have imagined when they set out.
It Never Gets Dark All Night was first published by Heinemann in 1964 on a list that included Anthony's Burgess's Nothing Like the Sun and Chinua Achebe's Arrow of Gold. Worple are proud to put it back on the literary map, here prefaced and edited by Peter Carpenter, literary editor to the Hayward's estate, and fronted with `All The Devils Are Here', a brilliant introductory essay from celebrated polymath and cultural guru, Kevin Jackson.
In this essay Jackson traces the journey of the writer, William Curtis Hayward (1931-1968) as well as illuminating future readings. He highlights, for example, Hayward's debts to Ulysses, an informing fascination with the occult, and a prophetic counter-cultural awareness in areas such as meditation, Tantra, communes and New Age environmentalism.
"Hayward's comedy is stoic, melancholy; the world squeezes his heart... He associates himself with the landscape in which he lives, with traditional forms of knowledge. He fears: love and its loss."
Iain Sinclair (London Orbital, 2002)
"A curious, ambitious and, in many ways, highly original novel... partly a study of bohemians, partly a novel of ideas... a modest British cousin of Kerouac's On the Road. There are few other novels which offer such richly detailed reportage of British bohemia in those years which divide the Beat Generation from the Hippies. The more you re-read it, the more it yields up haunting treasures of thought and phrase."
Kevin Jackson
Darren Coffield: Tales From The Colony Room. Soho’s Lost Bohemia /book/show/5...One to order from the library once we’re given access, I think, this is given a pride-of place review in the current Strong Words. Perhaps a little more rumbustious than The Midnight Bell, but I am certain that our man might have fitted right in:
“The Most Disgusting Carpet In All Of London: After a health inspector’s report included that the Colony Room ‘possessed the most disgusting carpet he had ever had the misfortune to come across in his entire career, (to which Ian Board protested, ‘But we don’t drink off the carpet�)� an upgrade was contemplated.
“The carpet was so tacky after years of booze being spilt on it that if you stayed too long, your feet stuck to it. In fact, you wiped your feet when you left the club, not vice-versa. Reluctantly Ian ripped up the old carpet and replaced it with the cheapest he could find, so when you walked into the club, you were startled by a flash of bright green from wall to wall. Francis (Bacon) came in that afternoon and was horrified.�
“Ian said, ‘I told you, dear, we’ve been ordered to put in a new carpet�.�
“Francis ordered a dozen bottles of champagne, shook them up, sprayed them all over the carpet and said, ‘Well, that’s better�.�
Since there’s not a chance that any of my local libraries will be lending this one, I’ll absolutely be making a purchase. Thanks for the tip, it seems like a good’un!
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Tales from the Colony Room: Soho's Lost Bohemia by Darren Coffield sounds like another essential read
To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the closure of London's most infamous arts establishment, the Colony Room Club in Soho, former member Darren Coffield has written the authorised history of this notorious drinking den. It's a hair-raising romp through the underbelly of the post-war scene: during its sixty-year history, more romances, more deaths, more horrors and more sex scandals took place in the Colony than anywhere else. In the regimented and repressed atmosphere of post-war London, the Colony was heroically bohemian, largely thanks to the dominant personality of its owner, Muriel Belcher. Muriel was a combination of muse, mentor, critic and guru to those who gathered around her, just as the Colony provided a home for the confluence of talents that will be forever associated with the artistic circle of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Tales from the Colony is an oral biography, consisting of previously unpublished and long-lost interviews with the characters who were central to the scene, giving the reader a flavour of what it was like to frequent the Club. With a glass in hand you'll move through the decades listening to personal reminiscences, opinions and vitriol, from the authentic voices of those who were actually there. On your voyage through Soho's lost bohemia, you'll be served a drink by James Bond, sip champagne with Francis Bacon, queue for the loo with Christine Keeler, go racing with Jeffrey Bernard, get laid with Lucian Freud, kill time with Doctor Who, pick a fight with Frank Norman and pass out with Peter Langan. All with a stellar supporting cast including Peter O'Toole, George Melly, Suggs, Lisa Stansfield, Dylan Thomas, Jay Landesman, Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst and many, many more.
Patrick wrote: "Blood Brothers"This one’s been on my radar without me taking the plunge... thanks for recommending it, I’ll take action!
I believe Roy Fuller has been mentioned here before (obviously I'm too lazy to find where) and having read The Second Curtain I'm here to tell you it's a winner. It's a thriller in the Graham Greene, Nigel Balchin vein and, though usually wary about making recommendations, I'm quite happy to recommend this because I enjoyed it so much.
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Yes indeed it was a top Lobstergirl tip over on the London writers thread...
Lobstergirl wrote: "I haven't read enough Hamilton (only Hangover Square) to know if Roy Fuller is Hamiltonesque, but Fuller writes novels set in London.
Roy Fuller's novel The Second Curtain is subtitled "a mystery," and while it is something of a psychological thriller, you shouldn't mistake it for genre fiction. It's quite literary and had me thinking of Waugh, Orwell, and Anthony Powell."
Thanks for the thumbs up CQM
I need to read it
CQM's glowing five star review is here...
/review/show...
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Thanks again CQM
I’m not sure where this should go, but..From today’s Sunday Telegraph (Pressreader, library-sponsored version, lest it be thought that I have taken a sharp right turn).
The tortured genius who drank himself to death
A new show shines a light on the dark, comic novels of Patrick Hamilton. Dominic Cavendish reveals the demons that inspired them
The Sunday Telegraph
Patrick Hamilton stands as one of 20th-century literature’s more intriguing and elusive figures. It’s almost 60 years since his death, and 80 years since the publication of his best-known work, Hangover Square, the title a pun on London’s Hanover Square and a signpost to the book’s pub-land milieu. He was the author of 11 more novels, and penned two substantial hit plays, Rope and Gas Light, which enjoyed successful lives on screen too.
You can’t say that he’s forgotten. And in some ways, he’s more ubiquitous than ever � the much-used phrase “gaslighting� derives from the subtly destructive mindgames conducted by husband against wife in his 1938 thriller (played by Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in the subsequent film).
Now the first book in his great trilogy about 1930s Soho and its environs � Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky � has been adapted by the award-winning choreographer Matthew Bourne for a show � The Midnight Bell � that is touring the UK until late November. ber. Billed as a series of “intoxicating oxicating tales [about the] darker reaches of the human man heart�, the production, like the book, centres on the patrons of the fictitious Midnight Bell pub in Fitzrovia, who gather nightly to pour out their passions, hopes and dreams.
It’s a world which Hamilton � who died of cirrhosis of the liver aged 58 in 1962 � knew at first hand. He started drinking heavily and regularly circa 1927, while in his twenties � haunting pubs in Earl’s Court, Chelsea, Soho and around Euston Road.
By the end of his life, his drinking was the stuff of legend � glasses of Guinness in the morning, gin before lunch, whisky after tea, a post-war intake that apparently rarely fell below about three bottles a day.
The roots of Hamilton’s dependency on booze are many: in his formative years, a volatile father and a mentally frayed mother (who committed suicide in 1934), and a lack of financial security; later, physical frustration � his first marriage was a sexless one. And there was a disfiguring accident in 1932 when a car rammed into him in Earl’s Court.
The Midnight Bell catches some of the highs of unbridled bibulation. With women absent come 10pm, the bar turns into a lexicon of male inebriation: “They were talking drunk, and confidential drunk, and laughing drunk, and beautiful drunk, and leering drunk, and secretive drunk …�
The repetition might seem heavyhanded, but it attests to Hamilton’s rare ability to conjure atmosphere. You’re You re there with him, surveying a scene no less hectic than tha Hogarth’s Gin Lane. An And, as with that picture, despair lurks too. In Hamilton-land, there’s always always a need for one more round, the better to anaesthetise the anxiety besetting what the author Michael Holroyd calls “London’s defeated classes � the insignificant, the needy, the homeless and the ostracised�.
Jenny, a prostitute with whom the barman Bob becomes obsessed, had a real-life model. In an inhibited, idealising way, young Hamilton mixed with the “courtesans� of Soho, and had a one-sided, essentially platonic involvement with a lady of the night called Lily Connolly. She exploited his infatuation to extract money from him. The end of The Midnight Bell finds Bob, penniless and hungover, lying in misery in a doss-house. He heads for the docks, hoping for new horizons.
Nothing so benign occurs at the climax of Hangover Square. Published in 1941 and later hailed in the press as “one of the great books of the 20th century�, Hangover Square, like Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, is written in a drolly detached style and explores the shabby crevices of London life and the dark, despairing alleys of the human heart. It also features an unrequited obsession, in this case between near-skint bohemian George Harvey Bone and actress Netta, from whom George tries to elicit something more than cool indifference. But, instead of sinking into self-pity like Bob in The Midnight Bell, George � who suffers from an identity disorder that renders him quasi blotto � resolves to murder the object of his desires, the showdown symbolically occurring just as Chamberlain declares war with Germany.
That wider, grim context means that, as well as being an invaluable social documenter, Hamilton � a theoretically committed Marxist � might be held as a political writer too. It’s tempting to draw comparisons in that regard with his contemporary, George Orwell. But his distinction lies in what makes him seem messier than his peer: his interest in tangled psychology.
Whereas Orwell extrapolates from world events and envisages future torture chambers in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Hamilton achieves a queasy comedy of distress by showing that our capacity to torture each other needs no state intervention.
His characters are lonely, lost souls, whether they attempt to connect or not, whether they drink themselves silly or no. Still they hold out hope, still they’re disappointed; they’re preyed upon, and, adding to the agony, know as much, but can’t help themselves. They’re from a bygone age, yet actually seem very close to our own atomised times.
In The Slaves of Solitude, his 1947 evocation of wartime suburban England � modelled on Henley � a meek secretary, Miss Roach, is bullied on a daily basis at her lodging house by a typical Hamiltonian monster � the Nazi-sympathising Mr Thwaites who has “the steady look with which as a child he would have torn off a butterfly’s wing�. In Rope (1929), much admired by Harold Pinter, two young murderers conduct a dinner party with the friends and family of their victim, whose corpse lies in the chest they’re eating from.
We’re cruel beasts, and it’s awful, and sometimes it’s awfully funny, Hamilton tells us. His work repays attention.
Perhaps that thought has struck Stephen Sondheim for one; as a youth, the creator of Follies and Sweeney Todd was enraptured by the 1945 film of Hangover Square, which turned George into a mentally disturbed classical composer-pianist, and its score by Bernard Herrmann.
Perhaps American musical theatre’s genius will retrace his steps. Even if that proves a false trail of supposition, in Hamilton’s fascination with scrabbling lives, tormented souls, the desperation beneath the woozy veneer, lies an invitation to us all.
The Midnight Bell is at Sadler’s Wells Oct 4-9, and touring until Nov 27. Tickets: new-adventures.net/ the-midnight-bell
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They've already been and gone here in Brighton
Shame
Sounds good though
Review of Sadlers Wells but just as interesting, a series of other Hamilton reviews and features under the main article. For exploration�
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Matthew Bourne’s The Midnight Bell review � to the dark heart of desire
Sadler’s Wells, London
The choreographer draws rich inspiration from the lonely, thwarted characters of the novelist Patrick Hamilton in this beautifully danced new work
Nice. The discussion between two of the actor/dancers on the link is quite enlightening, as is the trailer. I want one of those beermats!
Here's a London author as yet unmentioned: J.M. O'Neill - laureate of the London Irish and a former publican, so knew a thing or two about drink. I've read Duffy is Dead and am happy to recommend it to all who grace these columns. Review at /review/show...
Sounds like a tip to take, so I am. Thanks!
For some reason, probably an unearthly cerebral stew of incompetence and senility, I can never find links to discussions of each of the individual Hamilton works. A quick idiots� guide might aid future orientation. Anyway, this is just to inform the Hamiltonian Collective that Talking Pictures TV will be screening a 1945 film adaptation of Hangover Square on Wednesday 3 May AD 2023 from 2340-0110 next morning.
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Click on "discussion" - top right, below The Patrick Hamilton Appreciation Society heading
Click on "Patrick Hamilton: book by book" where you will find all the discussions including Hangover Square
Thanks. It seems to work differently on the app, but I have found it.
I see that I was here a few years back, then I took some time off from all groups. Recharging the batteries.🙂 Anyway, here is a pocket bio:Retired humanities teacher, residing in Tlaxcala, Mexico, with two dogs and six indoor cats. Passionate about literature, history, philosophy, classical music and opera, cinema, and similar subjects. Nostalgic guy. Politically centrist. BA in American Studies from Yale; MAs in English and Education from Boston University. Born in northern New Jersey. Have lived and worked in San Francisco, Chicago, northern Nevada, northeast Wisconsin, South Korea. More detail at Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ profile.
Current recommendation for this group: Josephine Bell’s The Port of London Murders (1938), gritty and atmospheric.
The Patrick Hamilton Appreciation Society
Books mentioned in this topic
The Cooler (other topics)The Cooler (other topics)
A Taste of Honey: A Play (other topics)
Cwmardy / We Live (other topics)
Room At The Top (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
George Markstein (other topics)John Wain (other topics)
J.M. O'Neill (other topics)
Roy Fuller (other topics)
Darren Coffield (other topics)
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Thanks Patrick, that's a cracking article and is the kind of thing that here at TPHAS we love L.U.V.
You've also reminded me get my mitts on Vulgar Tongues: An Alternative History of English Slang
Of the books listed in that article these are the ones I've read...
The Gilt Kid by James Curtis
Trick Baby by Iceberg Slim
Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler
American Tabloid by James Ellroy (def one of my fave books of all time)
Weirdo by Cathi Unsworth
...and all are flipping great which makes me think that I must love slangy books and should read the others...
Sir, You Bastard by GF Newman (1970)
The Crust on Its Uppers by Robin Cook (1962) - actually got this one on my shelf
If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes (1945)
Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L Sayers (1933)
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (1929) - I may well have read this one as I've read a few by DH but cannot remember which ones so a read or reread is most def in order