At the same time he reflects in his "humorous" (but only at first sight) novels the deep tragedy of the petty bourgeois, small-town and suburban world in which hypocrisy, mental smallness, narrow-mindness and spiritual poverty wins.

At the beginning of his work stand humorous sketches mostly from small-town environments, with caricatured human types, especially from middle-class, often Jewish society.

His first novel was Dům na předměstí (1928, A House in the Suburbs) in which he portrayed the transformation of a "small man" into a dehumanised creature as soon as he is seized with the proprietary instinct to possess.

During the Nazi occupation, in 1941, Poláček's humorous novel Hostinec U kamenného stolu (Tavern with a Stone Table) was published under the name of the painter Vlastimil Rada.

After the Second World War, a novel about his childhood in Rychnov nad Kněžnou, Bylo nás pět (There Were Five Of Us, however translated in English under the title We Were a Handful) was published.