Patrick Hamilton

Anthony Walter Patrick Hamilton (17 March 1904 – 23 September 1962) was an English playwright and novelist. He was well regarded by Graham Greene and J. B. Priestley, and study of his novels has been revived because of their distinctive style, deploying a Dickensian narrative voice to convey aspects of inter-war London street culture. They display a strong sympathy for the poor, as well as an acerbic black humour. Doris Lessing wrote in The Times in 1968: "Hamilton was a marvellous novelist who's grossly neglected". His two most successful plays, Rope and Gas Light, were made into famous films: Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) and the British-made Gaslight (1940), followed by the 1944 American version. Life and works Hamilton was born on 17 March 1904, at Dale House, in the Sussex village of Hassocks, near Brighton, to (Walter) Bernard Hamilton (1863-1930), a writer and non-practising barrister, and his second wife, Ellen Adèle (née Hockley; 1861-1934), who wrote as "Olivia Roy". His parents were pretentious and snobbish; Bernard Hamilton thought himself to be "a great writer although the few books he penned — soppy romances and some hotchpotch of religion and spirituality — were mediocre at best", "frequently boasted about his genealogical table", and "pretended to be the rightful heir to the throne of Scotland", and Ellen "treated her domestics with haughtiness" and "attempted to breed her children as members of the high society". Due to his father's alcoholism and financial ineptitude, the family spent much of Hamilton's childhood living in boarding houses in Chiswick and Hove. His education was patchy, and ended just after his fifteenth birthday when his mother withdrew him from Westminster School. His first published work was a poem, "Heaven", in the Poetry Review in 1919. His sister Lalla, acted under the name of Diana Hamilton and starred in Sutton Vane's Outward Bound. After a brief career as an actor, he became a novelist in his early twenties with the publication of Monday Morning (1925), written when he was nineteen. Craven House (1926) and Twopence Coloured (1928) followed, but his first real success was the play Rope (1929, known as Rope's End in America).