One of the most under-rated, and one of the best writers of Golden Age Detection, Josephine Tey, tells us a dark little tale about how Miss Pym's psychology can detect a murder in a gymnasium, in a hothouse single-sex environment, where desperation that the best job goes to the best person causes passions to spill out from the tightly buttoned blouses of perfect English gym teachers. A magnificent, Machiavellian murder in the cleanest surroundings. For those who prefer working on the mat to the high bars.

Another 1930s detective novel about drugs, but with more variety: not just cocaine, but cigarettes and the subjugation of the masses' free will by advertising. Dorothy L Sayers feeds her public's addiction for more Lord Peter Wimsey with Murder Must Advertise, a great novel about murder and treachery in the office lives of advertising executives and high diving in high society. For those who prefer a Daimler to a Ford.

Before he wrote The Sword in the Stone, T H White tried to gatecrash the 1930s party of detective novelists critiqueing their own society. He tackled drugs, murder, snobbery, loyalty, fast cars and literary allusion. He played with the conventions of the detective novel and produced a small but perfect classic of detective fiction. For readers who prefer to ride their horses astride.

It's not a novel, but it's great political reportage and polemic. In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell takes us into scenes of 20th-century degradation and poverty that were commonplace, and inescapable, for hundreds of thousands of the British before the Second World War. He gets angry about waste and mismanagement, petty meanness and middle-class squeamishness. He is resentful at the public-school system for giving him complexes about the smell of the poor, and he's furious at the misery children grow up in if their fathers can't get work. For readers who want something to get angry about.