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Major minor

Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square  
By CHARLES TAYLOR  |  February 19, 2006

LOW LIVES Hamilton raises his hard-boiled, pulp-fiction world to the level of tragedy.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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Related: Noncombatants, The awful truth, Major and minor Billy, More more >
  Topics: Books , Alfred Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman, Patrick Hamilton,  More more >
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ARTICLES BY CHARLES TAYLOR
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  •   PLEASURE PRINCIPLES  |  December 02, 2009
    Willard Spiegelman seems like a nice guy. He has had the good luck to live a happy life without major disaster or suffering. But as a long-time professor of English at Southern Methodist University and editor of the Southwest Review , he has ended up living his life among just those people — writers and academics.
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    Joe Lansdale's Hap and Leonard act out
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 See all articles by: CHARLES TAYLOR

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