Michael Arlen's name will always be associated most strongly with his most popular work, The Green Hat (1924), a romantic novel about a passionate, promiscuous woman whose true nobility of soul is only revealed at the novel's sensational ending. His play version, produced in 1925, provided popular vehicles for Tallulah Bankhead (in London) and Katherine Cornell (in New York); a film version, A Woman of Affairs (1928), with a scenario by Bess Meredyth, starred Greta Garbo. This great success brought Arlen fame on both sides of the Atlantic: as he put it years later, "I was a flash in the pan in my twenties. I had a hell of a good time being flashy and there was, by the grace of God, a good deal of gold dust in the pan." When the vogue for his work more or less collapsed shortly after, he continued to write for a smaller but...