1. The Midnight Bell

Here is a description of number one in my 11 April, quiz:

The magnificent fourth novel, by Patrick Hamilton, The Midnight Bell (1929), opens with the worst literary device in the world - a dream sequence. Bob, barman of the eponymous pub, is asleep in the afternoon and dreaming that he's leaving the coast of Spain aboard a ship embarking on a momentous voyage.

Fortunately it's only a couple of paragraphs before he jolts awake to find that the swishing of the water is no more than his own breath, and the thundering wind is nothing but the rumble of traffic from the nearby Euston Road. He is fully clothed and feeling wretched, and it's here that the novel really begins: "Then he cursed himself, softly and vindictively. He faced facts. He had got drunk at lunch again." Poor Bob is to spend much of the next 200 pages charging around London in various states of alcohol-fuelled degradation, and from this point on Hamilton's fiction would rarely venture more than a few pages away from the pub.

This is a good article which can be read here.