Forgotten Book - The West Pier

Patrick Hamilton was a fascinating writer. I've read no fewer than three biographies of him, those by his brother Bruce, Nigel Jones, and Sean French (all are good, by the way), and I find his life story intriguing, though I have to say he was welcome to it; a classic case of money not being everything, really. He suffered disability and disfigurement as a result of a road accident that wasn't his fault, but even by then he was a heavy drinker, and his health deteriorated steadily until he died in his late fifties.

It's as a playwright that he's best remembered. Rope and Gaslight were both highly successful, and both were filmed. But he felt that his novels were more important, and even if  many would disagree, I find them highly readable. The West Pier, set in Brighton, is a case in point. It was also the first of a trilogy that he wrote about the same character, Ernest Ralph Gorse.

The first thing to say about Gorse is that he's a deeply unpleasant individual. Hamilton makes that clear right away - in fact, the author's voice intrudes constantly, an odd feature that some would find irritating and others old-fashioned. Personally, I didn't mind, although I was surprised that such an experienced novelist resorted to such a device.

Gorse bears some comparison to Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, because he possesses a certain charm, and he lacks a conscience. But this isn't a murder story. It is, instead, the story of a minor crime, the work of an embryonic confidence trickster, and his deceitful treatment of a decent girl and two schoolfriends. And despite the lack of "high stakes", it's compelling because Hamilton creates a frighteningly credible picture of someone who indulges in petty acts of cruelty and revenge - and has a knack of getting away with it.

Ripley and Gorse

The first book in the Patrick Hamilton’s Gorse trilogy, part of which sourced the excellent tv series The Charmer, was The West Pier. Graham Greene generously described it as ‘the best book written about Brighton’. It was published in 1951, and was followed by Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953) and Unknown Assailant (1955). The series was actually meant to be a quartet, but the fourth book never appeared.

These were the last books written by Hamilton, who is better known as the playwright who wrote Gaslight and the Hitchcock-filmed Rope. He remains a cult favourite as a novelist, with many prominent admirers, though his life ended in 1962 (when he was only 58) in misery and alcoholism. The sourness with which he viewed life when he wrote the books is reflected in the character of Gorse, a man wholly without consicence.

I wonder if Patricia Highsmith read Hamilton before she created Tom Ripley – whose first appearance was in 1955. Of course, there are many differences between the two men, but there are also similarities. They are superficially charming, and can behave in an attractive manner, but their only real concern is themselves.

The fact that both characters first appeared within four years of each other is fascinating, regardless of whether Highsmith knew of Hamilton’s work (he isn’t mentioned in her exhaustive biography). It’s quite common for two different writers to come up with ideas that seem similar, independently of each other. Something in the ethos of the times, perhaps. There are suggestions, for instance, that Hamilton was influenced by the crimes of Neville Heath in his creation of Gorse, and I think that is possible (gorse, heath, get it?) although some have suggested that the fact that the stories are set before Heath started his crime spree means that a likelier inspiration for Gorse was Smith, the Brides in the Bath murderer.

I’m not aware of any critic of the genre who has made any sort of a connection between Gorse and Ripley – perhaps it might be said that there isn’t much of a connection to be made. But I can’t think off-hand of any series protagonists before this odd couple who display so clearly the grim conscienceless of the sociopath, however apparently affable, that has proved such fertile ground for modern writers such as Ruth Rendell.