Tag: Ernest Ralph Gorse

Unknown Assailant by Patrick Hamilton (#Gorse 3)

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Unknown Assailant (1955) is much shorter than Patrick Hamilton’s other two Gorse books, only some hundred pages in all. It is now 1930 and Gorse is masquerading as “The Honourable Gerald Claridge”. His plan this time is to defraud barmaid Ivy Barton of her savings, as well as relieving her father of a considerable sum of money by persuading him to invest in a musical play. No one is more aware than Gorse of how posing as a theatrical “insider” can awe and dazzle the gullible.

It is a bit like the outline of a story that was not quite finished. It lacks detail. For example we are never told quite how Gorse met Ivy or why he considered her a suitable victim. There are few of the long dialogue scenes that we find in the previous novel and not as much humour (although the scene where Gorse, as Claridge, and Mr Barton call each other “sir” is amusing). We are told about the hostile letters Mr Barton writes but they are not reproduced.

Despite these flaws it is an essential read for admirers of the first two books and contains much of interest. It is the simple-minded Ivy who comes closest to seeing what Gorse is up to and thwarting his plans.

Towards the end of Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, Hamilton had compared Gorse to an artist. He suggested that the ease of his success with Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce led Gorse to make the mistake of thinking that there were many other and richer women waiting to be defrauded in the same way. “. . Gorse was one who had to pay for the precocity of his youth in the most distasteful coin of premature middle age”.

Do I detect a sense of Gorse as a self-portrait of Hamilton on some level here? After all, Hamilton hit the jackpot early on in his writing career, with the success of his stage plays Rope and Gaslight, but never quite reached those heights of public acclaim again. Gorse is, after all, the same age that Hamilton would have been at the time the novel is set.

There are references throughout that novel to Gorse’s future. Near the beginning, Hamilton compares Gorse to several notorious English murderers. Although it is not stated directly, the implication is to become a nationally famous killer, ending up being executed. The name “Gorse” suggests that Hamilton may have modelled him on Neville Heath. Gorse’s later military impersonation may also refer to Heath, who did something similar.

Here, that idea is taken further by introducing quotations from two future biographers of Gorse. One of them refers to “his life-long habit of writing filthy anonymous letters and abandoning women with entirely gratuitous cruelty”. The other cites the Gorse cases from the earlier novels, as well as “The Haywards Heath dentist” and “The Rugby watchmaker”, for which Hamilton did not provide any further details.

By the time Hamilton wrote Unknown Assailant, his powers as a writer were on the wane, as a lifetime of excessive drinking caught up with him. It was to be his last published novel and there’s a sense that Gorse’s decline mirrors his own.

It’s as if Hamilton had realised that writing about a serial criminal would involve telling the same story over again. Gorse uses his car in the fraud against Ivy, simply because that is what he always had done, and it goes badly wrong for him.

There was obviously at least one more book about Gorse to be written but sadly Hamilton did not live to take Gorse into this imagined future. He died in 1962.

If you like the Gorse novels you might be interested in Patrick Hamilton’s radio play, Money with Menaces.

 

 

Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse by Patrick Hamilton (Gorse #2)

The Good Reader

Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953) continues the career of Patrick Hamilton’s anti-hero, the coldly malevolent fraudster, Ralph Gorse.

It is 1928 now and Gorse is twenty five. He finds himself house-sitting for a friend in Reading and bumps into fortyish widow, Mrs Joan Plumleigh-Bruce, in the local pub. Having spotted that she is quite well off, Gorse decides to make her his next victim. There is first the small problem of detaching her from her suitor and would-be husband, fifty-something estate agent and widower Donald Stimpson.

Readers of The West Pier will see that Gorse is up to something similar here; the destruction of an existing relationship in order to insinuate himself into his victim’s affections so that he can steal from her. The youthfulness and innocence of the characters in that first book gave the story a sort of poignancy. Here, the people in the circle into which Gorse inserts himself are old enough to know better. They are led astray by Gorse’s air of being a worldly sophisticate from London.

Gorse plays on the vanity, snobbery, and greed of Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce. He uses to the full “his gift of causing and using the emotion of relief in women”.

The tone is darker, more satirical and humorous, than the first novel. In places it is laugh-out-loud funny, particularly the scene where Gorse manipulates Stimpson into getting drunk and visiting a prostitute. Gorse plays on Stimpson’s unease at finding himself in a grander sort of hotel bar than he is used to. Stimpson passes out and the next morning has a horrendous hangover and no memory of what happened. Gorse then plays on Stimpson’s fear of having caught a nasty disease. He has also acquired a nice story to tell Joan to lower her opinion of Donald and drive a wedge between them.

Hamilton goes into great detail about how Gorse carries out his fraud, as well as the snobberies and attitudes of his characters. Much of the novel is told in dialogue. Some of the satire is excruciating, for example the “mock historical” jargon that the men slip into.

A section near the end is presented as Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce’s diary. Hamilton is merciless about her banal thoughts expressed in pretentious language. It’s almost as if he wants to torment his characters in the sadistic manner of Gorse.

All this leads the reader to think that Hamilton’s intention was something more than the story of a crime. The novel is as much about the class structure and attitudes of the 1920s as Gorse’s fraud. Biographies of Hamilton say that he held Marxist views. He certainly had a startingly clear-eyed appreciation of the role of money in people’s lives.

That is a very useful quality for a novelist trying to create a realistic picture of the 1920s. For example, we are told that the collapse of the General Strike and increasing working-class unemployment has led to more women turning to prostitution on the streets of the West End of London.

We never really know why Gorse acts as he does. What we do know is that he is the biggest snob of all, enraged when he reads Joan’s diary and finds that she thinks his accent sometimes slips into the “common”.

Hamilton tells us that “social snobbery  indeed, may conceivably have been his one true passion in life. Probably it far exceeded his love of money, which, perhaps, derived only from his ambition to appease his social aspirations”.

The West Pier by Patrick Hamilton (Gorse #1)

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West Pier

The West Pier can’t have been the first novel by Patrick Hamilton I read because my Penguin is dated 1986, and my copy of Hangover Square is dated 1985. I know I read a review of The West Pier in Time Out, that finished “further Hamilton re-issues, please”, but was that before or after I saw Gorse glaring up at me from the bookshop table in David Parfitt’s cover illustration? It captures him rather well, that picture, that look of smelling something unpleasant under his nose that he could never quite shake off.

“The best novel written about Brighton” said Graham Greene according to the blurb, but that strikes me as a sort of back-handed compliment, carrying as it does the sly suggestion that everyone really knows that it is Brighton Rock.

I would agree with most Hamilton admirers that this is not his best work, but I think I would have to say that it is my favourite, close to my heart for reasons that will become clear.

Hamilton was writing in the early fifties but The West Pier is set in 1921, with a prologue in 1913. The main characters are seen first as schoolboys, then as young men. What fascinated me was the way so little seemed to have changed. His detailed description of the way teenage boys behave seemed closer to my own experience than anything else I had read. Much as I love The Catcher in the Rye, this is adolescence, English style.

And later, the rituals of “getting off” with the opposite sex rang painfully true, as did the pairing of the tall, willowy beautiful girl with her short, dumpy and less attractive friend. Stocky, determined Gertrude, condemned to be one of the “other ones”, who must always accept being paired off together in the courting rituals that take place on the west pier itself.

The west pier was more or less intact when I first knew it, but already closed to the public. The ancient pre-decimal slot machines had been removed to an arcade on the seafront. You could buy a bag of old pennies to work them with. There was a figure of a sailor in a glass case, who laughed maniacally for about three minutes when a coin was deposited in the slot.

I had a friend, now sadly no longer with us, who lived in Brighton, and was a fellow-admirer of this book. We used to imagine what a good film the story would make, and my friend suggested that the laughing sailor would be an appropriate recurring image for Gorse’s trickery. The film would end, he suggested, on a freeze-frame of the final image in the book, Gorse’s face set grimly as he hunches over the steering wheel, speeding towards London and a dubious future.

I was fascinated that Hamilton described Over Street as a slum. When I first knew it, it was home to students at Sussex University.  In the novel, Esther Downes, daughter of a worker at the nearby railway station lives there. In one of the most striking passages of the book, we are told that despite being a porter and therefore despised, Mr Downes considered that he had risen in life, because his father had tried to make a living by running behind horse carriages and offering to carry the bags when they reached their destination.

It’s quite clear that Gorse is what we would today call a psychopath, but the book is all the stronger for not using any psychological jargon. Hamilton doesn’t need it. The descriptions of Gorse’s behaviour, and the disquiet he arouses in people are quite enough to tell us what is going on. All the tell-tale indicators are there. The general malevolence towards the world, expressed by puncturing strangers’ bicycle tyres, the races in the bath that he subjects his pet mice to and the hints of something strange sexually. Hamilton anticipated Patricia Highsmith and Tom Ripley by several years.

The film we imagined never did get made, but Gorse came to television, in the shape of Nigel Havers, in the series The Charmer. This was an adaptation of the second book of the trilogy, Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, with an ending invented by the screen writer, Allan Prior. The screenplay was published as a novel and this is a good read for admirers of Hamilton and his compelling creation Ernest Ralph Gorse.