There has been a broad welcome from critics - myself included - for the return to London's professional stage of Patrick Hamilton's thriller Gaslight. I stress London stage because a rather good touring production was out on the road at the end of 2005. It starred Peter Amory and Leah Bracknell, who came to fame in television's Emmerdale. The previous professional production I'd seen - at Oxford's New Theatre in 1974 - had an even more impressive soap pedigree. In the role of the frail (!) Mrs Manningham was Pat Phoenix - the redoubtable Elsie Tanner of Coronation Street - while the part of her criminal husband was played by Alan Browning, her partner on the screen and in real life.

The only national critic I saw to dissent from the generally laudatory reception was the Sunday Telegraph's Tim Walker. He seems to specialise, incidentally, in being at the opposite extreme in his opinion from his daily counterpart Charles Spencer. This was seen recently over Antony Sher's Kean, which he gave a five-star rating, while Spencer thought it almost unwatchable. Gaslight, which Spencer enjoyed, Walker found "slow and mannered". He must, of course, report as he found. I wish, though, that he hadn't resorted to imaginative inventions of his own while running down the play.

He wrote: "There are lots of unintentional double-entendres - often involving the word 'gay' - that had the youthful, sassy, metrosexual audience laughing in all the wrong places." (Where, I wonder, were the right ones?) It is an amusing point to make, perhaps, but I would be prepared to swear there was but one mention of the word 'gay' - perhaps someone with a copy of the script could confirm that I am right. This was met with the sort of laughter that might be expected from an audience which understands the word's meaning has changed since 1938 - indeed, that the world has changed - and admires this production's impeccable picture of the way things were. And as for sassy metrosexuals, I think Mr Walker must have been in another part of the theatre from me on Press night.

But my purpose today is not to dwell further on Gaslight but to direct attention to another aspect of Patrick Hamilton's fine body of work - his novels. Yesterday saw the publication, for the first time in more than a decade, of The Gorse Trilogy (Black Spring Press, £9.95). Published between 1951 and 1955, the three novels provide an account of the career of Ernest Ralph Gorse, from his days as a schoolboy swindler to his criminal maturity as a seducer of a series of women whom he cleverly deceives and ruthlessly robs.

The story was told, in somewhat softened form, 20 years ago in London Weekend TV's drama series The Charmer, which starred Nigel Havers as the remorseless villain. The character is said to have been based on the career of the real-life conman Neville George Heath, who went on to become a killer, too. From evidence in the books it is apparent that Hamilton had intended that Gorse would also murder. Sadly for his readers, he was to take his own life, drinking himself to death at the rate of three bottles of whisky a day. He died in 1962, aged 58.

Since then, his reputation as a novelist has never really recovered, though he has always had a distinguished circle of admirers. Graham Greene called The West Pier - the first of the Gorse trilogy "the best book written about Brighton", generous praise in view of his own Brighton Rock. Doris Lessing called him "a marvellous novelist who is grossly neglected" and Keith Waterhouse said he was "a riveting dissector of life up to and including the war". But it is J.B.Priestley, I think, who most eloquently sums up his appeal: "I cannot help seeing him from first to last as a gifted youth, living in some boarding house and breaking out of his solitude every night to sit in a pub, keeping his very sharp eyes and ears hard to his work."

There is certainly plenty about pubs in Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, the second of the trilogy - some 20 scenes are set therein. The fact that these are just down the road in Reading provides a 'local' feel to the story that I much enjoyed. It concerns the conning of the snooty widow Joan Plumleigh-Bruce, a stuck-up bitch it is a pleasure to witness being ripped off. Hamilton's excellent novel The Slaves of Solitude, recently published by Constable at £7.99, is set in wartime Henley, where the writer briefly lived, and is likewise interesting for its picture of a familar town.