15 Aug 2026
issue 15 August 2026
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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.
