From George Orwell to Daphne du Maurier, the books that made a decade span village detectives, Edwardian butlers and Bright Young Things
Being asked to curate a list of the best 10 novels of the 1930s is rather like being invited to tap-dance on a crocodile’s back: impossible to achieve and even harder to fake. But here goes. Below is my list, but there are several omissions that I think I have to be up front about. There’s no Steinbeck, no Hemingway, no Woolf – even though the 1930s saw her publish two works, The Waves (1931) and The Years (1937). Nor is there a barnstormer of the day, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936), or Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New Word or, indeed, JRR Tolkien’s fantastic The Hobbit (1937). Eric Ambler is missing, too, despite the visceral power of The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) and although Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh are on the list, neither Brighton Rock (1938) nor Scoop (1938) make it. Similarly, 1934’s Murder on the Orient Express is a defining work but missing – ultimately, because I feel that Marple is more telling than Poirot.
Ten is tough, so the corpus I’ve chosen I hope reflects the era: the 1930s is a big decade in world history. In Britain, arguably, it can almost be viewed as the very last decade of the long 19th century. There were the imperial conferences, the empire endured and Britannia ruled the waves. It was almost like the 1890s still. Yet, as the old order clung on, apparently immutable as ever, changes were everywhere – internationally, politically, but also in literature and society.
