Patrick Hamilton, playwright and novelist, was born in Sussex, the son of Bernard and Ellen Adela Hockley Hamilton. He passed his formative years on the south coast in Brighton and Hove. Hamilton was educated at Westminster School and, as a teenager, was most attracted to writing poetry, though he made his acting debut in 1921 at the age of seventeen. He decided that to support himself as a poet he should write fiction as well. Hamilton's father insisted that he earn a weekly wage, so in 1923, with help from his sister, Lalla (who had already made a modest theatrical debut in 1918), he became assistant stage manager and the player of a bit part in two separate tours of a play by Sutton Vane, who later married Lalla.

Hamilton worked in the theater, fulfilling various roles onstage and behind the scenes, and became familiar with theater techniques and, of course...