Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky - Softcover

`Written in the early 1930s TWENTY THOUSAND STREETS UNDER THE SKY displays Hamilton's particular genius at understanding the milieu who stand at the side of the bar. . . mainly seedy types but none the less rich in dreams, hopes and despairs. Those were the days when pubs were filled with characters. . . 'The Midnight Bell', lying in the Euston Road, is the pulse of this trilogy. It is here where Bob, the barman, falls in love with Jenny, a West End prostitute who leads him carelessly up the garden path and breaks his heart. . . In 'The Siege of Pleasure', we hear how Jenny was easily dissuaded from being a polite serving girl to selling herself on the streets. . . In 'The Plains of Cement', it is Ella, the barmaid of 'The Midnight Bell' who is pursued by the appalling Mr Eccles. . . Hamilton is a master at reproducing the inflated talk of betrayed lives' INDEPENDENT

Patrick Anthony Hamilton was born in 1904 in West Sussex, his father a comic actor, mediocre writer and intermittent soldier, his mother a singer and expert copier of oil paintings. He was sent to commercial school in London, and for a time trained as an actor, before realising that his talents lay in literature instead. His first novel, Monday Morning, was published when he was only nineteen, and two more followed in quick succession, as he began to be admired and widely read. In 1927 he fell disastrously in love with a prostitute, and started to drink heavily - experiences brilliantly transmuted into his trilogy of novels, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. In 1929 he turned to the theatre, writing Rope, a tense thriller staged at the Ambassadors Theatre to huge success and later filmed by Hitchcock. The resulting adulation and financial ease was followed by his marriage in 1930, to Lois Martin, Then in January 1932, Hamilton was knocked down by a car and lay seriously ill for many months. It took two years before he was able to start another book, yet he went on to write novels, including Hangover Square and Slaves of Solitude, radio dramas and plays, several of which were filmed, including Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. His first marriage failed, and in 1954 he married again, this time Lady Ursula Winifred Stewart. When he died in 1962, after a long illness, The Times obituary paid tribute to hum as 'a genuine minor poet (to use the term in its broad, modern sense) of the loneliness, purposelessness, and frustration of contemporary urban life.