Craven House, by Patrick Hamilton
Patrick Hamilton (d. 1962) was a supremely odd fish, a kind of case-study in psychological extremism who drank himself to death at the early age of 58. His later novels, written when the drink was cracking him up, offer the curious spectacle of a mind that has travelled too far into itself, and a writer feeding entirely off his own imagination rather than the world beyond it. Hamilton revivals, which come round every five years or so, usually concentrate on his London trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky (1929-34), or Hangover Square (1941), but it is nearly two decades since anyone has taken a punt on his second novel, Craven House (1926).
First published in his very early twenties, and here introduced by one of Hamilton’s two modern biographers, Nigel Jones, this belongs to an extinct sub-species of English fiction: the boarding house novel.
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