Hoff served in the Signals Branch of the Royal Air Force in World War II, and later became a civil servant, associating closely with C. P. Snow, who appears in light disguise as Robert in Scenes from Provincial Life and its sequels.
It was hailed at once by writers such as Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess and John Braine[1] who wrote: "This book was for me – and I suspect many others –- a seminal influence"[4] Deceptively simple in style and both comic and lyrical in tone, the novel tells of events in the lives of its narrator, Joe Lunn, a grammar school physics teacher; his girlfriend Myrtle, who wants him to marry her; his friend Tom, with whom he plans to emigrate to the USA; and various other characters in an English provincial town in the spring and summer of 1939.
Scenes from Metropolitan Life, although written in the mid-50s, remained unpublished until 1982, for legal reasons: the real-life prototype for the character of Myrtle, central to the novel, had threatened to sue if it were published.
In 1971 he published an account of the trial of the two Hosein brothers, found guilty in 1970 of the kidnapping and murder of Muriel McKay, whom they had abducted in the belief that she was the wife of Rupert Murdoch.
He had a straightforward and uncensorious attitude to the sex lives of his characters and a respect for the young, which gave even his later novels a freshness and a contemporary resonance.