Patrick Hamilton’s most enduringly successful novel,
Hangover Square(1941), is a timeless story of erotic obsession and addiction. The protagonist, George Harvey Bone, murders a young actress, Netta, and her secret bedfellow, Peter, before killing himself. The main plot is familiar in the twenty-first century from the many media accounts of lonely, half-crazed men who murder a wife or girlfriend and her lover before committing suicide themselves. But the novel’s original title also emphasises that the events take place in a specific time period (at the end of Auden’s “low dishonest decade”):
Hangover Square; or the Man with Two Minds, a Story of Darkest Earl’s Court in the Year 1939. Moreover, the novel was written at an equally significant historical moment, during a crisis…
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Citation: Thomas, Susie. "Hangover Square". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 31 August 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4838, accessed 27 November 2024.]
