Subtitled 'A Story of Darkest Earl's Court', Hangover Square is the finest novel by one of the most under-rated and interesting English novelists of the 20th century. George Harvey Bone is a self-hating habitue of the cheap pubs and restaurants of Earl's Court, held there by his obsessive love for the tart and would-be actress Netta Longdon. He is also a schizophrenic who has periods in which he enters an almost trance-like state. During these 'dumb moods', as another character calls them, love for Netta turns to murderous hatred and he can think only of killing both her and one of the pub hangers-on who is her occasional lover. Bone emerges from a 'dumb mood' with little or no recollection of what he has done and said in it but with only a desperate yearning to escape the life he is leading. Each time Netta, who has learned that one of George's friends works for a theatrical agent and is thus prepared to encourage his dog-like devotion, lures him back into the same old round of boozy nights and hangover mornings. The inevitable tragedy beckons. Patrick Hamilton published his first novel in his early twenties and, in the 1930s, he became a highly successful playwright whose greatest box-office triumph, Rope, was filmed by Hitchcock in the 1940s and is still revived today. In 1937, he was involved in a serious car accident in a street off Earl's Court Road, from which he never fully recovered. Always a heavy drinker, he was for the rest of his life, as his friend and admirer J.B. Priestley noted, 'an unhappy man who needs whisky as a car needs petrol'. Out of his own unhappiness and addiction he fashioned a dark and compelling tale of shallow lives lived at the margins of society.

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