Book description
The Midnight Bell, a pub on the Euston Road, is the pulse of this
brilliant and compassionate trilogy. It is here where the barman, Bob,
falls in love with Jenny, a West End prostitute who comes in off the
streets for a gin and pep. Around his obsessions, and Ella the barmaid's
secret love for him, swirls the sleazy life of London in the 1930s. This
is a world where people emerge from cheap lodgings in Pimlico to pour
out their passions, hopes and despair in pubs and bars - a world of
twenty thousand streets full of cruelty and kindness, comedy and pathos,
wasted dreams and lost desires. Born in Hassocks, Sussex in 1904,
Patrick Hamilton was the youngest of three children. His parents, Ellen
and Bernard Hamilton were published authors. At the age of seventeen he
began to work as an actor and assistant stage manager for Andrew
Melville. He then changed his career and worked as a stenographer. He
published his first novel
Craven House
in 1926 and within a few years established a wide readership for
himself. His first theatrical success was Rope
(1929) on which Alfred Hitchcock's film of the same name was based. Many
novels followed, including Hangover Square
, his trilogy of novels Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
and Slaves of Solitude
, as well as radio dramas and plays, several of which were filmed,
including Gaslight
, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. A celebrated 'bright young'
novelist of the Twenties and Thirties, Hamilton was in tune with the
times. He died on 23 September, 1962
