These stories were in some ways practical: Fitzgerald needed to think up a schtick, to draw readers into a series, to discover a sort of Runyon/Wodehouse sitcom formula that would pay. In each story, Hobby hatches a scheme - which usually involves stealing an idea, a script credit or a hat. In each story Hobby is undone and further humiliated.

But Hobby is no Bertie Wooster. His schemes are nasty, his humiliations nastier. He tries to gull a co-writer away so he can steal his credit by faking a letter informing him that his two brothers have been killed in the war. He cheats a young office runner; a couple of tourists; an old friend; an ex-wife. He vomits in the stolen hat and “shambled towards the lavatory like a hunted man”. If Hobby is Fitzgerald’s Falstaff, he is decidedly the Falstaff of Henry IV Part II rather than Part I.

The Hobby stories may have been a handy comic schtick, but they are also a rueful serial self-portrait in a distorting mirror: a satire on everything hateful about Hollywood, but one in which Fitzgerald is himself implicated. For in Hobby’s pocket always is a half-pint of liquor. Gin beads his forehead. He has “red-rimmed eyes and a soft purr of whiskey on his breath”. At the denouement of a particularly painful story, he is publicly confronted with a clanking sack full of the “dead soldiers” evacuated from his desk drawers.

Pat’s eyes - “red-rimmed” or “red-streaked” - are described in almost every story; a sort of leitmotif, or Homeric epithet. The reader cannot help but be reminded, in parody, of the all-supervising eyes of T J Eckleburg - “blue and gigantic” - that loomed down from the oculist’s billboard in Gatsby.

Were those eyes threatening judgement? How will Pat, how will Scott, be judged? There’s an awful apprehension underpinning these stories. The narrator of “The Long Way Out” describes his horror of oubliettes: “dry wells thirty or forty feet deep wherein a man was thrown to wait for nothing.” For the protagonist of “The Guest in Room Nineteen”, recovering from a stroke, “now life was like waiting for an unwelcome train. He was very lonely.”

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