“The kiss of a wicked woman – the kiss of Sin… The sweet, brief, virginal kiss of Sin….It remained on his mouth like a touch of violets. There had never been such a kiss in the history of the world.”
His characters are heroically contradictory, in their thoughts and in their actions, and it is here where his novels become so heart wrenchingly honest. You realize, 
eventually, that the character is trying, at least mentally, to convince themselves of one thing but instinctually they'll do the exact opposite.
And they always lose.
The passage above, taken from The Midnight Bell (the first story in Twenty Thousand Streets), focuses on Bob, a pathetic barkeep with a peculiar world view. He falls in love with Jenny, a manipulative prostitute, who plays the dumb, forlorn fool for his entire savings.
““Well – I’m married.”
“Oh God,” said Bob.
There was a long silence. She put her hand out consolingly on to his. He was appalled by its white sweetness and beauty. He hoped people wouldn’t see. It didn’t look well – being tenderly consoled by a prostitute in a public place.””
A master of the paradoxical sentence, in this short passage, conflicting narratives come into play several times. Hamilton, whose father was bullying alcoholic, eventually succumbed to the disease as well (after a crippling car accident). Like Bob, he too fell in love with a prostitute, and like George, the dim-witted, split-personality protagonist from Hangover Square, he died at an early age, from cirrhosis of the liver. Hamilton’s prose is always touchingly sympathetic for his characters, the lowliest of the low. They are the perpetual drunks, the drug dealers, the street walkers and the homeless. They were his people, and he treated them as such. As Doris Lessing wrote for the Times in 1968, "Hamilton was a marvelous novelist who's grossly neglected." It’s hard to think of writer who treats the neglected with such welcoming, honest, and tender prose.
