So, I just finished Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, for those who don’t know it, a psychological study of alcoholism and obsession in late 1930s Earls Court. Cheering stuff.

I think I first heard Hamilton’s name from Iain Sinclair - surprise, surprise - who flagged him up as a great forgotten London author. Ah, “forgotten” and “London” - two words to make my snobbish metropolitan heart beat faster. This alone would never be enough by itself to make me read anything - trying to keep up with Sinclair is not an advisable activity. But his name kept popping up and seems to be on a bit of a roll at the moment: back in March the NFT programmed a season of his film adaptations (David Thomson article here) and the BBC just adapted his Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky for telly (but broadcast it on BBC4, in the assumption that the proles and the tight couldn’t take it. Public service my arse). Nevertheless, he rarely appears on lists of great c.20th authors, despite J.B.Priestley’s opinion that he was “Among the uniquely individual minor novelists of our age - a master.”

A pity, because the London he evokes is at once bizarrely foreign (in a history’s-another-place kind of way) and immediately recognisable. How many of Hamilton’s own landmarks were destroyed - almost immediately after publication by bombing or by later development - is unknowable, but the texture of piss-poor, crusty fag-end London life hasn’t changed. Descriptions of pubs, their atmospheres, of drinking sessions that begin in the suburbs and soon necessitate a taxi to Soho to continue: the rhythms of the London binge are unchanged. Psychologically too it’s spot on: unrequited love for cruel, beautiful girls was a running theme of Hamilton’s life as well as his work. It also has the greatest last three lines of any book I’ve every read; a final-para punchline that you have to read the whole book to get, self-deprecating yet absolutely, ruthlessly direct.

At some point, I’ll take my copy down to Earl’s Court and find some of his pubs. Mm, lovely pubs.