Tag: Patrick Hamilton

The Pursued by C S Forester

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The Pursued is the third of C S Forester’s inter-war crime novels. It was written in 1935 but not published at the time. The manuscript somehow went missing, to be rediscovered and finally published in 2011. Like the two earlier novels it’s a tale of dark deeds in suburban London, but it’s slightly different in that here the female characters are given more prominence. I suspect that the real reason it was not published at the time was a frankness about sexual matters unusual for an English novel then. It’s also perhaps the closest of the three to the writing of Patrick Hamilton, with the same sensitivity to the position of women in that era. Like many crime novels of this vintage, there is an echo here of the events of the real-life Thompson and Bywaters case.   

Housewife Marjorie Grainger, ten years married with two small children, returns from a night out visiting an old school friend. She finds a strong smell of gas in the kitchen and her sister Dot, who has been babysitting, lying dead on the floor with her head in the oven. At the inquest it is revealed that Dot was pregnant and a verdict of suicide is returned. It is a mystery as to who the man responsible could have been. Dot was twenty-eight, had always lived with her widowed mother and her job did not bring her into contact with men very often.

Marjorie is puzzled by her discovery of two broken wine bottles in the dustbin. She has already noticed her husband Ted’s unusual excitement on the night of Dot’s death. Then she finds that he has lied about his movements on that night. And he works at the local gas showroom and is knowledgeable about gas appliances.

When her chatterbox four-year-old son blurts out what he saw on the night of his aunt’s death, Marjorie realises in a flash that it was Ted who had an affair with Dot, got her pregnant and then killed her by getting her hopelessly drunk and leaving her with the gas tap turned on. It appears that Marjorie’s mother, Mrs Clair, has reached the same conclusion, because she says that the boy will not repeat what he has just said. It’s crucial to what happens later that the two women never really have a direct and open conversation about what they both suspect.

Marjorie suggests that Mrs Clair could now come and live with Ted and her. Ted is not keen on this and proposes instead that Mrs Clair, who lives nearby, takes on his junior employee George Ely as her lodger.

The auditors are due at Ted’s firm, so rather than cancel the usual family holiday in Sussex, they agree that George should take Marjorie, her mother and the children in his new motor car. For Marjorie, this is a longed-for break from her sexually demanding husband who she no longer loves and now believes to be a murderer.

For Mrs Clair, it is something rather different. She has realised that if Ted were convicted of murder, it would ruin Marjorie’s life and taint the children forever by association. She is coldly planning a different sort of revenge on Ted. During the long sunny days, she takes every opportunity to bring Marjorie and George together. She suggests that they go out for evening trips in the car. As she has intended, the inevitable happens and Marjorie and George become lovers.

When Marjorie tells her mother that she does not want to return to her husband and hints at her belief that he is a murderer,Mrs Clair pretends to misunderstand. She plays the innocent leaving Marjorie to think that she alone knows the truth and that her mother has no idea that she and George are lovers. George and Marjorie spend the last few days of the holiday in a panic about what they are going to do. Ted is George’s boss. Ted’s manager Mr Hill is very strait-laced, and will sack anyone at the merest hint of impropriety. Marjorie realises that it may be fear for his job that led Ted to kill the pregnant Dot.

Marjorie returns to the family house but George is unhappy about this. He doesn’t want her to submit to George’s sexual demands. There is a path running along the back of the houses next to the railway line. George uses this to visit Marjorie for snatched moments of passion in the garden. He is a tender and gentle lover, younger than Marjorie and a complete contrast to her husband. What neither Marjorie or George realise is the extent to which they are being manipulated by her mother.

Meanwhile, Mrs Clair is planning her next move, buying a hatchet from the hardware store and hinting to the local police constable that Ted is in a peculiar state of mind.   

Marjorie has put Ted off with excuses about her monthly cycle but she knows that he will work that out soon enough. When she finally tells him that she will not submit to his demands anymore, he threatens to hurt her daughter if she does not give him what he wants. A distraught Marjorie runs to her mother’s house. This is the crisis that Mrs Clair has been working to bring about. The now furious George, Marjorie and Mrs Clair return to Marjorie’s house. Mrs Clair is carrying the hatchet in her bag, and utters the fateful words “we’re going to kill him”. This dramatic moment is not the end of the story by any means.        

This is a short novel, only just over two hundred pages, but it’s very intense with a lot packed into it. Forester is a master of succinct prose and there is not a word too many. The final most tragic part makes the reader think about the difference between moral guilt and physical guilt, and the plot shows how chance events can disrupt the best-laid plans. This is not a novel that the reader will forget and it leaves one at the end thinking about just who is a villain and who is a victim. A final twist in the very last sentence reveals that for one character at least there has been a sort of natural justice.

Does Mrs Clair take her motherly devotion too far? Or is the course of action she chooses the only one she can take, given her circumstances and those of her surviving daughter?

For this is the world of shabby suburban London, where the furniture and carpets are threadbare, people have just enough money to get by on and the neighbours take a keen interest in each other’s doings. This was the time when it was a woman’s role to run the house, with even a fit young man like George not expected to lift a finger to help. Ted expects domestic and sexual slavery from Marjorie as no less than he deserves in return for earning the money. For women the only alternative is to live in a cramped bedsit in a boarding house for professional women as Marjorie’s schoolfriend does.

I was surprised at the end to find out that Mrs Clair is only fifty-nine. She is constantly referred to as elderly and I thought she must be over seventy at least. That’s another way in which the world has changed.

Writers react to the rise of the motor car

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At the end of Patrick Hamilton’s novel Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, there is an extraordinary passage in which he depicts the rise of the motorcar as a plague of black beetles spreading out all over England. The beetles have taken over and made human beings their slaves and attendants. The novel was published in 1953 but set in 1928.

Hamilton had his own reasons for disliking cars. He had been badly injured in a hit-and-run incident in the 1930s. To ram the point home, he gave his villainous anti-hero, Gorse, an association with cars and the motor trade. There is something of this idea that cars may not altogether be a good thing in Nicholas Blake’s 1938 novel The Beast Must Die. The hit-and-run driver who kills a young boy and tries to cover it up is a garage owner. This novel was inspired by a “near miss” incident involving the author’s own young son.

In 1927, H V Morton had published an account of his travels round the country, In Search of England. In his foreword, he was much more enthusiastic about the rise of the petrol engine than Hamilton or Blake. He sees the provision of coach services and “the popularity of the cheap motor car” as reviving road travel and making remote areas of the countryside more accessible than they were in the railway age. He laments the “vulgar” behaviour of some visitors, but thinks that in general, the age of the car will lead to a greater understanding and love of the countryside, which will therefore help preserve it. The seaside holiday will go out of fashion, he suggests, to be replaced by the country holiday.

Compare this to a report in the “I” newspaper of 16 November 2019. It is headed “Pay As You Go”, and continues “As UK resorts clog up with traffic, Dean Kirby reports on a plan to charge tourists a congestion fee in the Lake District.” There is now a conflict in many areas between tourist traffic and local road use.

Things have been heading this way for a long time. Some years ago, I went to Lyme Regis in Dorset. From the top of a double-decker bus, I could see the “park and ride” car park, necessary to prevent the town’s high street seizing up completely in the summer. A little further off, was the disused viaduct of the now closed railway line to the town.

We tend to think now of the inter-war years as a “golden age of motoring”, bringing to mind the image of a uniformed AA patrolman saluting a passing sportscar, the only vehicle on an otherwise empty road. We can’t really blame H V Morton for not having a crystal ball, but it’s interesting that he did not seem to have thought out the implications of increased car use.

We see the 1930s as the Shell Guide era of motoring. Paul Nash took the photographs for the Dorset volume. But these detailed descriptions of rural England were sponsored by a petrol company. The original editions were spiral bound so they could be opened flat on a car seat. Admittedly Hamilton was writing with the benefit of hindsight, but he seems to be one of the only writers who saw that Britain would have to change to accommodate the motor revolution.

Of course, it was a fictional character who appeared as early as 1908, who caught the deep appeal of this new form of personal transport. I am thinking of Mr Toad, staring after the speeding car with a gleam in his eye. Despite his string of accidents and fines, Toad could not resist getting into a car again. “Toot Toot!”

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)

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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”.

Money With Menaces by Patrick Hamilton

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For me, the broadcasting highlight of the holiday season was on the radio rather than the television. It was the play Money With Menaces by Patrick Hamilton. Actually, it wasn’t on the radio; it is a BBC recording from a few years ago that someone had kindly loaded on to YouTube.

A little research revealed that this was written for radio in 1937, shortly before Hamilton’s great stage success Gaslight. It is a gripping suspenseful piece, quite short and essentially a two-hander, a series of increasingly disturbing telephone calls. As the title suggests, it becomes clear that what we are dealing with here is blackmail. Part of the fascination for Hamilton admirers is the slow, insinuating way that “Mr Poland” tortures his victim. He talks round the subject in his dry voice and refuses to come to the point, stringing out the agony. It is almost Pinteresque.

This sort of thing features strongly in Hamilton’s novels. I am thinking of Mr Thwaites in The Slaves of Solitude, whose victims are stuck with him at the breakfast table. It might almost be a grown-up Ralph Gorse on the other end of the line. Those unfamiliar with this nasty piece of work, can make his acquaintance in my post about The West Pier.

The mechanics of suspense are worked out very cleverly. We are in the world where telephones were situated at a specific place, not carried in one’s pocket. The blackmailer leads his victim in a merry dance around the west end of London, from one phone booth to another. The telephone call provides many possibilities for radio drama. How do we know that the person on the other end of the line is who they claim to be? Francis Durbridge used this sort of thing to great effect in his Paul Temple series.

Thinking further along these lines reminded me of Ford Madox Ford’s 1912 novel, A Call. As far as I know, that was the first novel where the plot depended on the use of the telephone.

Without giving too much away about Money With Menaces, what seems to be increasingly absurd turns out to have a logical explanation. There have been later works on a similar theme by Roald Dahl and William Boyd.

I thoroughly recommend this as a gripping forty minutes or so on the radio – or should I say wireless?

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.