Adrift in Soho was Colin Wilson’s second published novel. It appeared on September 4th, 1961 in the trademark yellow Victor Gollancz dust-jacket and was published six weeks later by Houghton Mifflin in the US. Released one year after Ritual in the Dark, it is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story, set in the 1950s, about a young man from the provinces searching for freedom in London. In his autobiography Dreaming to Some Purpose (2004) Wilson explained that the novel had, in fact, started out as a collaboration between himself and an old Soho friend called Charles Belchier, otherwise known as Charles Russell, a Bohemian actor who appeared uncredited as the bandleader on the Titanic in the film ‘A Night to Remember’ (1958).

Essentially a philosopher, he was best known for his first book The Outsider, a philosophical study of alienation in modern … More

Adrift in Soho: Beatniks, Bums and Bohemians.

The story opens in the late summer of 1955. Nineteen-year-old Harry Preston, having been granted an early discharge from national … More