In an interview on Whodunnits

The next one on your list is by Patrick Hamilton and is called Hangover Square. It’s set in 1939, and it’s about an unemployed alcoholic?

Yes. It’s a study of schizophrenia, in a way. The main character, George Harvey Bone, goes into these strange trance states. Like a lot of Patrick Hamilton’s characters, he is devoted to a woman who is not worthy of him, who is one step up from a prostitute. He’s obsessed with her, and eventually ends up murdering her. It’s just an incredibly written, claustrophobic book that would be in my top five almost any day you rang me. Patrick Hamilton goes in and out of fashion – and I’m not sure he’s ever been as popular in the States as he is in the UK – but a lot of crime writers like him because he has this strange claustrophobia. And he can be funny too, about fairly nasty things.

Yes, from the title I thought it might be quite funny.

There is a kind of black humour that comes through it – this central character who is so hopeless and is being exploited by his friends, and particularly by this woman. And you just know it’s going to end badly.

Tell me more about the claustrophobia.

A lot of it goes on inside his head. There’s one particular bit where he’s walking along in Brighton. Brighton figures a lot in the book. It’s actually set in Earl’s Court in London, but he goes down to Brighton, and Brighton carries a meaning for him. But there’s a very good description as he’s just walking along and his mood is changing, and there are things clicking in his mind and you can feel the threat of the mental illness about to take him over…

In an interview on London

Your fourth choice is Hangover Square, by Patrick Hamilton.

I chose Patrick Hamilton because he hits, in particular, on the derangement of the city. He was a big drinker. His writing is like the hallucination or the delirium of an alcoholic dream, and sees London as a kind of nightmare. I wanted to have one book, at least, that views the city in that way.

Hamilton is quite parallel, in his period of writing and in some of his subjects, to Graham Greene – but it’s a very different tone and texture. With Hamilton, it’s as if he disappears himself into it. Various of his books I could have chosen, but this one, I think, is the most demented and committed. We seem to keep coming back to periods of war – with this story, you’re coming into World War Two, and there’s an element of fascism and sexual sadomasochism. It’s somewhere between a crime novel and a political novel, created out of the madness of drink and derangement.

I haven’t read this one, but it sounds pretty bleak – in fact, it sounds like it could be the bleakest on a list of books that are all relatively bleak. Is London an innately bleak city to you?

In part. It has a brutal quality to it, absolutely. It’s always been a city of business, a city of collision and conflict, and you need to survive that. But equally there have always been visionary characters who have gone hard against this spirit of the place and survived in their own corners. London is so huge that it can encapsulate a lot of eccentrics hidden away in their caves doing interesting, curious things. And at the moment, it’s also a place where every possible language and culture is put together into a sort of seething mix – which gives it qualities that other places don’t have.