The Criminal Type in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain: Hamilton, Gorse and Heath

This article uses Patrick Hamilton’s fictionalisation of aspects of the case of Neville Heath, who was sentenced to death for murder and hanged in 1946, as the focal point for a discussion of how notions of criminality were shifting in Britain in the wake of the Second World War. Hamilton’s novel The West Pier (1951) and its sequels Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953) and Unknown Assailant (1955) show the author engaging with contemporary media portrayals of criminality, and in reviews critics vacillate between considering Hamilton’s protagonist as either exemplary or exceptional. In Hamilton’s novels and reactions to them, and in the depiction of the Heath case, anxieties about criminality, masculinity and shifts in the social order, are seen to be to the fore.