I read "Hangover Square" last weekend while on a trip to
London.
A wonderful book indeed. According to the Hamilton
biography
"Through a Glass Darkly" by Nigel Jones, quite a few details
of the
story are authobiographic.
Hamilton wrote HS after he had just gone through a most
unhappy
love affair (or rather non-affair) with an actress and had at
this time
-like many of his heroes- already an alcohol problem (he
drank
himself to death in 1961).
Earls Court / London which features prominently in the book
was
his home address for many years. Even the two pubs opposite
the
tube station where most of the drinking in the novel takes
place
can still be found today as Hamilton changed the names just
a
little bit.
The fact that the heroes main rival in H.S. is characterized
as a
man who had been to jail after knockig over and killing a
pedestrian
while driving a car under the influence has its parallel in
Hamilton's
life as well: He was hit by a car while walking just off
Earls Court
Road in 1932. The event left him hospitalized for months and
he
never completely recovered from the physical and
psychological
scars.
All this might be the reason that the novel has such a
feeling of
depressing authenticity.
Even though "Hangover Square" was once published in the
green
covered crime and mystery line of Penguin books in the UK, I
think
it is in fact more a psychological portrait of a doomed man
than a
mystery novel in the true sense of the word. It reminded me
more
of Dostoyewsky's "Crime and Punishment" than of the work of
a
noir writer.
The only other book I read by Hamilton was the London
trilogy
"Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky" from 1935 which
was
recently re-published. It has no connection to a crime or
mystery at
all (it deals with two desasterous love affairs and the
decline of a
girl into prostitution) but carries the same dark mood like
"Hangover
Square" and I would heartily recommend it to anyone who
enjoyed
this book.
Frank
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Frank Glenewinkel
frank.glenewinkel@uni-koeln.de
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