Forgotten authors No. 15: Thomas Tryon

He had it all: charm, style, popularity, intelligence, success, and he was ridiculously handsome. Did I mention he was also dating a porn star? Tryon played the lead in the 1958 cult hit film I Married a Monster from Outer Space and would have starred alongside Marilyn Monroe in the uncompleted Something's Got To Give. Bored with acting (and humiliated by Otto Preminger) he thought he'd write, and was damned good at that too. His novels were popular successes and three were filmed, one of them by Billy Wilder. Then he faded away.

Tryon's style was American expansive: grand themes and resonant plots, set in Connecticut or New England. Anyone planning to hold a seminar on writing popular fiction could use him as an example of how to get it right. His first novel, The Other, about a Russian grandmother teaching a dangerous game to two brothers, one gifted, one harmful, has been reissued in a new edition with a contextualising foreword by Ramsey Campbell. The narrative contains a mid-tale twist so blind-siding that you almost drop the book. It was subsequently filmed.

Tryon's two volumes of interlinked tales concerning Hollywood players and their efforts to survive public taste and changing times, display insider's knowledge. One account, "Fedora", became the basis for the Wilder film. He also wrote two American Civil War epics.

Tryon specialised in strong female characters, never more so than in Lady, a sweeping novel about the grande dame who lightly rules her town between the wars, and who hides a lifelong secret that pinpoints America's damaging attitude toward miscegenation. Harvest Home occupies Wicker Man territory. A family relocates to a perfect American town, but the idyllic setting proves deceptive. They have come here to enjoy the nation's old ways and get what they wish for – at a price. Their dilemma is presented so appealingly that the reader, too, is baited and lured into the same nightmarish trap. A faithful but flat television version was subsequently filmed with Bette Davis.

Tryon died too young, but had more books published posthumously. He remains virtually unknown in the UK.