Beckett, the central character in The Furnished Room, is walking to the Tube when he sees broken glass lying 'like a crystal fortune' in the gutter: 'The wonder of it took him aback. He wanted to shout aloud the miracle of a broken milk bottle.'

    The incident makes him happy, as if 'touched by grace', says the narrator. 'The experience of seeing glass, and others like it, were a compensation. They were the occasional visions into super-reality given to the victims of unreality.'

    In one way or another, the protagonists of all three of these novels could be described as 'victims of unreality', although Harry Preston in Adrift in Soho often seems more of an opponent of unreality than a victim of it. In each case, it is a kind of existential angst that draws them into their adventures in the shabby demi-monde of London's 1950s counter-culture where they seek an escape from the mundanity of everyday living.

    All three novels were first published in 1961 and reflect the Beat Generation culture which had arrived in England in the previous decade. Adrift in Soho is currently being filmed by Burning Films under director Pablo Behrens. Baron's Court is a cult classic unavailable since a paperback edition in 1965. Bringing out the three titles again, 50 years later, as a matching set under the 'Beatniks, Bums and Bohemians' series title is an inspired move on the part of Five Leaves.

    Beckett says he wants freedom: 'It's only when a man is alone that he can experience the moments of assent. When he understands such experiences, he will know them to be timeless moments of union with God, immanent and transcendent.' The Joycean epiphany, no less, the 'moment of vision' of Thomas Hardy, the 'moment of being' of Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson – and the 'super-consciousness' sought by Colin Wilson.

    Thus Del-Rivo, despite the largely monochrome world she depicts, wants to deal with crucial questions of consciousness, as do Wilson and Taylor, in their different ways. The uniting theme of the three works is the limiting consciousness of the quotidian, and how these limits might be transcended. 'It is not enough for the human consciousness to expand beyond it's own narrow existence,' ponders Harry Preston. 'It wants to penetrate simultaneously into every other existence in the universe.' A truly remarkable statement to be found in a novel written more than half a century ago, and amazingly resonant with consciousness theory today, but indicative of Wilson's lifelong preoccupation.

    Preston meets an out-of-work actor who launches into a tirade after watching people hurrying to work in the rain: 'They'd got caught in the big machine. They didn't know what it was like to be alive, to be free ... And what's the good of telling 'em they've all been twisted out of shape?' It's a speech that could equally well come from Baron's Court or The Furnished Room.

    Being an avid Wilson fan, I'd read Adrift in Soho before, and it was a pleasure to read his second novel again and this time compare it to the Taylor and Del-Rivo works. It's probably no accident that Del-Rivo's nihilist anti-hero is named Beckett, nor that his nemesis is named Dyce. The Furnished Room is generally pessimistic in tone, while Adrift in Soho is indubitably optimistic; Baron's Court, essentially a comic novel with a smattering of the picaresque, kept me chuckling.

    Turning from Taylor to Wilson, you find yourself in the presence of a much more powerful intellect and a writer deeply interested in the inner life. In contrast to Baron's Court, there's little humour in Adrift in Soho with Wilson's characters reflecting different aspects of his philosophical concerns; this is a novel of ideas, typical, in that respect, of Wilson's oeuvre, and replete with literary allusions. What humour there is, is sardonic, and this is also true of The Furnished Room.

    Harry Preston ('pressed on', perhaps) arrives in London from the provinces in the mid-1950s looking for excitement and begins to make sense of his life and the world within a ragtag milieu of struggling artists and hopeless romantics. Of course, the first book from the internationally best-selling Wilson, now 80, was the The Outsider, a philosophical study of alienation, published in 1956 when he was still only 24.

    Like Adrift in Soho, The Furnished Room is set in the bedsitland of Notting Hill and Earls Court. It tells the story of an aimless young drifter who gets involved in a murder plot to make himself feel alive. The book was made into the 1963 Michael Winner film West 11, set in a gloomy Notting Hill and starring Alfred Lynch, Eric Portman and Diana Dors. Laura Del-Rivo, now 77, can still be found running her market stall in London's Portobello Road.

    In his introduction to Baron's Court, London writer Stewart Home tells how he came to champion the reissue of the novel and eventually tracked down Terry Taylor, now 76, who was a friend of Home's mother in the 1960s. Home describes Baron's Court as a 'far-out drugs novel' – it's the first British novel to mention LSD – and ahead of its time: an unnamed teenager opts for drug-dealing, thinking it will bring meaning to his life.

    A sub-genre of the 'working-class novel' of the 1950s and early 1960s, the three novels in their new editions seem to call for a re-evaluation of the literary scene of the time.