Anthony Quinn’s deliciously dark, theatrical-set murder mystery Curtain Call announced the former film critic as a popular novelist of the first rank after his earlier books failed to receive the appreciation they deserved. Since then he has published seven books, wildly varying in style and settings, but featuring a core cast of characters. Memorable among them is the James Agate-inspired figure of the portly, bibulous, louche theatre critic Jimmy Erskine – surely one of the great literary creations of modern times.

Erskine reappears in The Millionaire Waltz and is given many bon mots, but he is not the protagonist here. The action now revolves around Edie Greenlaw, a 1920s middle-class not-quite-flapper, who, when not modelling for Dickins & Jones or playing Cleopatra on stage, is entangled in two storylines: a case of homosexual blackmail and entrapment, involving one of her friends; and, more compellingly, a love triangle, involving herself, her decent-but-dull war hero fiancé, David, and his more simpatico cousin, Chris.

The thriller aspect is limited, even perfunctory, and the resolution to the blackmail story rather too neat. But the real pleasure of The Millionaire Waltz, as with all Quinn’s novels, is not so much the plotting as the evocation of period. Edie is an especially compelling protagonist – undeniably decent but also capricious, flighty and not without vanity.

As she sashays from drunken country house parties to West End first nights (playing opposite repellent co-stars) to the relative slums of Islington, she drives the story in a consistently engaging fashion. Quinn gives her and her friends (including Curtain Call’s leading lady Nina Land, here appearing as a charming ingenue) plenty of witty dialogue; but we are never allowed to forget that the martini-laden hijinks are taking place in a society devastated by war, with further conflict on the horizon. By the time the genuinely surprising conclusion delivers a bittersweet rug-pull for Edie, you’ll be keen for a follow-up to her adventures.