Patrick Hamilton is best remembered for his plays Rope (1929) and Gas Light (1939), which were made into well-known films and have been performed in countless amateur and professional stage productions. But Hamilton referred to his plays deprecatingly as "thrillers" and wanted to be remembered primarily for the novels he had published. Beginning in the 1930s he had a popular reputation based both on his novels and his plays; in 1956 John Betjeman described him in an article in the Spectator as "one of the best English novelists." His work suffered a period of near invisibility after his death, although, as Doris Lessing noted in September 1987 in the Listener, "his books were on the shelves of people who make sure their special authors don't get thrown out." The resurgence of interest in his work that began in the late 1980s focused on the original appeal of Hamilton's novels: they are, according...