Which is about as far as anyone can go in placing Wilson’s book into any kind of recognisable context.
At the point of his death, Melmont “converted financial black holes into physical ones, transforming himself into a dark, omnivorous sucking Force, a living gravitational field” and in this form proceeded to swallow the universe. Yet it seems to me equally possible that he lived the life he had created through his writing. In an artistic sense he knew perfectly well what he was doing when, for example, he sought out humiliation at the hands of Lily Connolly; in that sense he was master of his fate, and no doubt merrily so.There is only one great novelistic theme, he once wrote to his brother: “that this is a bloody awful life, that we are none of us responsible for our own lives and actions … sustained mockery and relentless scarification, dealt out by a novelist to characters whom he has purposely presented as grotesque marionettes, bring weariness to a reader …”There is irony in the fact that Sadleir, while proclaiming the sixth-former orthodoxy that writers should strive not to hate the human race, should have perpetrated such an intense cruelty upon Patrick Hamilton (but that’s publishers for you) He never really recovered from the blow of this letter.

Everybody knows, in his heart of hearts, that it’s a first-rate existence if only one or two things would go right.”. It is all, of course, profoundly true, and bears no actual relation to life whatever It is merely the portentous dirge of the poet’s mind … and that whether you’re making love, being hanged, or getting drunk, it’s all a futile way of passing the time in the brief period allotted to us preceding death. A good deal of his life had been spent in the shadows that permeate his books – in 1932, for example, he had a disfiguring car accident from which he recovered only tentatively – and in the Fifties he became suicidally depressed, underwent electro-convulsive therapy which finished him as a writer, then declined into a semi-willed illness and death.From this, one might think that the sadness of his life affected Hamilton’s work with the spirit of dark determinism.

Had the widowed Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce, who is swindled of her savings in Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, been less vain a woman, she would not have been so easy to flatter and deceive.This is stern logic; and such relentless misanthropy did not go down well. But not his publisher, Michael Sadleir, a close friend for nearly 30 years, who in 1952 wrote to Hamilton that Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse was “disagreeable and unsympathetic … Hamilton was no longer dealing exclusively with “low-life” – women like Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce were recognisably middle-class – so his contempt for his characters could no longer be dismissed as vaguely justifiable Now, it was clear, Hamilton hardly liked anyone Some of us might agree that he had a point. He has no interest in extending compassion or understanding to his creation because it would, as Ella might put it to herself, Be Wasted on him Nor does he necessarily extend it to his victims.