Hell
is too Crowded is the fifth novel published by Harry
Patterson. It was released as a
hardcover by John Long in 1962, and it is the most mature—both stylistically
and thematically—of Mr Patterson’s earliest novels.
Matthew Brady is an American structural engineer who
is in London after completing a job in Kuwait.
In the early morning hours Brady is on the tail end of a two day jag
when a frightened young woman named Marie Duclos stumbles out of the fog. Marie is returning home from a party, and she
tells Brady a man is following her.
Brady accompanies the young woman to her Chelsea
flat where everything changes. He passed
out on the couch, and his next conscious moment is the police questioning him
for the murder of Marie. The rest of the
novel is Brady’s attempt to discover who framed him for the murder, and why.
Hell
is too Crowded is a brilliantly plotted novel with a
depth of setting and atmosphere not previously accomplished by Harry
Patterson. The storyline—at least the
hook—is similar to David Goodis’ Dark
Passage, but the execution is purely Jack Higgins’ adventure. Matthew Brady is a man apart—he is completely
isolated from the world around him, and the setting and atmosphere denote this isolation
from the first moment. The fog, the near
emptiness of the river, and the sound of a ship’s foghorn combine to create an
uneasy tension of separation, which is the underlying theme of the novel—
“A
ship moved down the Pool of London sounding its foghorn like the last of the
dinosaurs lumbering aimlessly through a primeval swamp, alone in a world that
was already alien.”
The plotline is straightforward, but it is developed
seamlessly; one scene effortlessly leads to the next, and Mr Patterson doles
out clues timely, but with an unhurried pace.
The first clue is in the first paragraph, but it isn’t realized until
the last pages of the novel.
Hell
is too Crowded is very nearly a perfect thriller. It is a mixture of noir and adventure, and is
written in Mr Patterson’s unique, almost lyrical, prose—
“There
was a taste of fog in the air, that typical London fog that drifts up from the
Thames, yellow and menacing, wrapping the city in its shroud.”
There are also a few interesting slang terms in the
novel, including “grass,” which basically means snitch, and “doss,” which means
easy. There is also a solid joke in the
narrative—if you know Harry Patterson was a school teacher—when an homely assistant
to one of the villains, a Hindu Priest named Das, is described as “a school
mistress.”
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