I've always felt that Hangover Square is a companion piece to Graham Greene's Brighton Rock in its exploration of the sadness and hope of the lost and the lonely who inhabited Brighton's underbelly in the 1930s. Where it differs, paradoxically, is that Greene, long a visitor to Brighton, really got a sense of living in Brighton, whereas Hamilton, born over the Downs in Hassocks, sounds like a visitor.

In fairness to Hamilton, Hangover Square is really a London novel - an Earls Court bedsit-land novel - but Brighton looms large. Not as some longed for idyll (but when has Brighton ever been that?) rather as a place where passions - dark, fierce and, in this case, deadly - find expression.

Bathetically the main character, the love-lorn, lost and, eventually, murderous schizophrenic George Harvey Bone, sees his redemption not in Brighton but in, erm, Maidenhead. How times change.

I first came upon this novel thanks to the little known, much altered film adaptation. It starred Laird Gregor, in the twilight of his career, playing Bone as a strangler, stalking women in a gaslit London to the tune of the then neophyte movie composer Bernard Hermann's "Concerto Macabre".

I love movies but I prefer to stay with the novel. I still imagine the unhappy figure of Bone in some of the little-changed pubs around the Laines and on that slow walk from the railway station to the seafront.

His epitaph in the novel is a melancholy masterpiece of a complex life compressed into a newspaper headline:

Slays two
Found gassed
Thinks of cat

Sussex based crime writer Peter Guttridge is the Observer's crime fiction critic.

Scandalous that so little Hamilton is in print. See http://tomroper.typepad.com/tr/2004/03/patrick_hamilto_2.html

That was then, this is now....Slaves of Solitude has been reissued in not one but two editions, and Black Spring will bring out the Gorse Trilogy in June. So the situation is less bleak.