Ninety years ago, in October 1932, the English satirist Evelyn Waugh published his third novel Black Mischief. He’d had a hit two years prior with Vile Bodies, a novel that made famous (even as it mocked) the slang and habits of the aristocratic Bright Young Things and propelled Waugh to literary stardom. The success of that novel and his later classic Brideshead Revisited (1945) meant Waugh would forever be associated with the hedonism of 1920s aesthetes and party-goers.
Waugh thought Black Mischief would be even more successful, particularly across the Atlantic. The novel wasn’t a failure, although it did not sell in the way he wanted. It did, however, ignite a scandal in English letters that reveals the values of 1930s Britain in some troubling ways.
