This apparently destitute trailer park resident, Broderick swiftly realises, used to be Blue Tyler: used to be the biggest child star in all the Hollywood firmament. With an eye to a book and possible screenplay, he begins to tape interviews with the erstwhile, foul-mouthed star and her former associates - one-legged, homosexual Communist director Chuckie O’Hara, studio heir Arthur French - about Blue and about her dapper, celebrity-gangster lover, Jacob King. And, although he doesn’t know it yet, about secrets of murder and paternity long hidden from a camera’s gaze.

Dunne’s colossal novel is a minor master-piece. It more than belongs on the shelf alongside the cream of recent movie-novels Tim Lucas’ Throat Sprockets and Theodore Rozak’s astonishing Flicker, being as different in its way as they were from each other. Playland is a book with an epic sweep and real grasp of canvass. It plays history and invention with a sure-hand, touching on both fact and alternative history with scarcely a hint of falseness. Thus we have WWII, the McCarthy trials, the plane crash that did for Carole Lombard, but also the behind the scenes sexual shenanigans, links to organised crime, and the all-too-convincing legend of Blue herself - "Genius. Whore. Individualist. Iconoclast. Liar."

Playland makes explicit the links between crime and the movies in the late 40s. King is obviously modelled on Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, sent to the West Coast to take care of Mob business. He becomes besotted by Blue Tyler, chasing, bedding, and then taking her on his journey into the Nevada desert to buy into the burgeoning Las Vegas dream-factory. But, like Siegel, King becomes bigger than the men he beards for: wearing the suits, attending the parties, and eventually seeing the ostentatious Playland casino-hotel built in his own flamboyant image. His demise is suitably operatic, the novel’s treatment of this material far more satisfying than Barry Levinson’s recent movie. Despite Playland’s being set up as a thriller, Dunne is careful to ensure that his novel is as much history as mystery. He borrows when he needs to borrow, invents when it suits him to. Structurally it runs in three acts, but with-in each the author has the confidence to play fast and loose with time and narrative, tossing in interview, newspaper report, and, most daringly, snippets of Broderick’s nascent screenplay.

Fetid and pleasingly dark, Playland scratches the surface of Hollywood glitz and finds it wanting. It finds sleaze under the stars, a curious dignity to its gangsters, and in its doomed lovers, an affecting melancholy. In Playland Dunne has created a book whose formidable size and ambition are matched only by its success. Superb.