Not long ago Patrick Hamilton was practically forgotten.  In his introduction to the 1974 edition of Hangover Square, J B Priestley remarked, ‘there must be a whole generation of readers who know nothing about him and his fiction’. By the start of the current century Hamilton, who enjoyed international success from the mid-1920s until his death in 1962, was finally sharing the indignity borne by other former luminaries such as Henry Green and Elizabeth Taylor. Alongside his out-of-print colleagues he huddled, cold and yellowing, on the shelves of second-hand bookshops.  

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