Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square
By CHARLES TAYLOR | February 19, 2006
Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square makes almost all other hard-boiled writing seem phony. If Hamilton, who died in 1962, is remembered at all, it’s probably for the movie versions of his plays Gaslight (with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer) and Rope (filmed by Alfred Hitchcock). The difference between those chestnuts and Hangover Square (1941, just reissued by Europa Editions) is the difference between entertaining, well-constructed melodrama and the kind of work that, once you’ve read it, becomes forever after a part of your experience.
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