The flood of novelists writing about F Scott Fitzgerald shows now signs of abating. Jackie McGlone speaks to the two most recent, Stewart O'Nan and Liza Klaussmann.

So we read on, borne back ceaselessly into the past by novelists whose fascination with the life of F Scott Fitzgerald has them beating on not against the current, but flowing with it – to spin Nick Carraway’s poignant signing off at the end of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby.

It seems that there is no stemming the tidal wave of fiction about Fitzgerald, his beautiful, tragically unstable wife Zelda and their gilded circle, from Therese Anne Fowler’s New York Times bestseller Z: A Novel Of Zelda Fitzgerald, to Beautiful Fools: The Last Affair Of Scott And Zelda Fitzgerald by R Clifton Spargo, to Paula McLain’s memorable The Paris Wife, about Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage to Hadley and the couple’s friendship with the Fitzgeralds.

Now we have another two novels about that “lost” generation. Award-winning writer Stewart O’Nan’s atmospheric West Of Sunset re-imagines the last three troubled years of Fitzgerald’s life, hacking away at Hollywood screenplays, suffering from poor health, mired in indigence and alcoholism, but still writing, working on his great unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, and falling in love with the mysterious, English-born gossip columnist, Sheilah Graham. Needless to say, the film rights are being fought over even as O’Nan and I speak.

A younger, often insufferably drunken Fitzgerald features in Liza Klaussmann’s moving book, Villa America, which tells the story of Sara and Gerald Murphy, wealthy Americans who “discovered” the French Riviera and befriended the Fitzgeralds, the Hemingways, Picasso and many other writers and artists between the war years. It is not the first time that this golden couple, who believed that living well is the best revenge, have been fictionalised – they were the inspiration behind Nicole and Dick Diver in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night. (There’ s also a shelf-full of biographies and a memoir by their daughter.)

“Fitzgerald dedicated Tender Is The Night to the Murphys but they felt insulted by it,” says Klaussmann, who will be in conversation with O’Nan about their visions of Fitzgerald and cohorts at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

As if these acts of literary ventriloquism were not enough, there are countless films, Broadway musicals and various TV series, including an American TV adaptation of The Last Tycoon, in the making. In the upcoming movie, Genius, based on Scott Berg’s superb biography of the brilliant editor Maxwell Perkins, Guy Pearce stars as Fitzgerald and Dominic West plays Hemingway. Then there are the biographies and works of non-fiction, such as Sarah Churchwell’s dazzling Careless People: Murder, Mayhem And The Invention Of The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald’s bitter observation “There are no second acts in American lives” is one of two epigraphs in O’Nan’s stunning novel. Well, Fitzgerald got that wrong, I suggest to the novelist, who is speaking from his home in Pittsburgh, where he was born and grew up. After all, isn’t Fitzgerald’s literary afterlife enjoying a remarkable third act?

“It is indeed,” acknowledges O’Nan. “Do I think he believed that there are no second acts? I think he wanted to check that; I think he wanted to find out if that was true. He uses it first in his essay, The Lost City (1931), where he writes, ‘I once thought there were no second acts in American lives.’ Later we find it in his notebooks for The Last Tycoon, where he says there are no second acts. He’s writing about Monroe Stahr [the tycoon], but obviously he’s writing about himself, too.

“I think Fitzgerald did believe in second acts, when you look at all the work that he did at the end of his life. There’s a ton of it and it is very good, because he’d regained his love of writing.”

O’Nan chose Fitzgerald’s “Nothing was impossible – everything was just beginning” from the short story Crazy Sunday (1932) as his second epigraph. Is that why? “Exactly,” he responds, pointing out that Fitzgerald was in love. He’d fallen hard for Graham – “a tough cookie, but also a new, independent woman”. Indeed, she turned their affair into an industry, writing 10 books about it. “She was an unreliable narrator, however.”

That second act for Fitzgerald in Hollywood is one that novelists have largely ignored, continues O’Nan, an aerospace engineer-turned-writer, with 14 previous, highly successful novels to his name, as well as several works of non-fiction, including Faithful, a collaboration with Stephen King.

“West Of Sunset began after I re-read Fitzgerald’s essay, The Crack-Up, which I’ve always loved,” says the 54-year-old. “Everything he cared about had been lost. His life was wrecked, so he goes out to Hollywood in its golden era. Everyone around him is incredibly successful, rich and famous, and he can’t even afford his car payments. Zelda is in a mental asylum so he has to pay her hospital bills, which aren’t cheap. He also has their daughter Scottie’s tuition at boarding school, then at Vassar, which was incredibly expensive.

“People say that he was a drunk, that he was a mess, that the final three years from 1937 were a dark time in his life. But I discovered that he worked incredibly hard, despite his outsiderness in Hollywood. Essentially he worked himself to death. He had no other way to make things right, to pay off all his debts and fulfil his family obligations, than to work. And how he worked! He got up early to write [the comic Pat Hobby short stories about a down-on-his-luck film writer], before putting in a full day at the studio, smoking all the time, drinking Cokes all day, battling alcoholism – it was a recipe for disaster. He never gave up the effort to be a first-rate writer. And, of course, it killed him. He died of a massive heart attack, at the age of 44, in Hollywood in 1940. Way too young. His story has such tragic dignity.

“I knew I couldn’t even attempt to do his actual voice or try to use his exact words, but I hope I’ve captured his romantic sensibility, his charm, and what it was like to live at the fabled Garden of Allah villa hotel,” says O’Nan. Instead, there’s an omniscient third-person narrator, an elegiac authorial voice. But he also had to write letters for Fitzgerald, because he couldn’t afford the fees the estate wanted if he were to use originals. “I felt there were many holes in all the biographies about those Hollywood years, opportunities for me as a novelist to fill in what’s missing. For instance, no biographer ever has him talking with Dorothy Parker, although we know they were there at the same time.”

There is therefore lots of witty badinage and a glorious, starry cast: Parker, Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart, Joan Crawford, among many others. O’Nan also captures the period glamour, as does New York-born Klaussmann in Villa America, albeit her gorgeous novel is set on the Cote d’Azur, mainly between 1923 and 1937. The cocktails! The caviar and champagne parties! The avant-garde bathing suits! The pearls! The lovely Sara slung hers down her golden-brown back when she wore them to the beach – like Nicole in Tender Is The Night.

Villa America – named for the Murphys’ sumptuous Cap d’Antibes home – exists in what former New York Times business journalist Klaussmann calls that “shadowland” where historical fiction lives.

At the age of 31, Klaussman, who was born in 1976, moved to London to do an MA, studying creative writing with Andrew Motion at Royal Holloway. She stayed because she finds the city “magic”. When we meet over coffee near her home in Primrose Hill, she says that she believes the novelist’s task is to explore the unexplained. “I love real life stories, true crime – not that Villa America is a crime novel!”

Both novelists did enormous amounts of research. O’Nan met and talked with Frances Kroll, who was Fitzgerald’s 18-year-old secretary, in Hollywood. “I was so lucky to meet her. She was the last living link with Fitzgerald,” he says. (Kroll died in June, at the age of 99.) “Sometimes I think I only write so that I can do the research,” he jokes, adding that he believes his engineering background gives his work precision: “I’ve an obsession with the real world.”

Once “a Hemingway girl”, Klaussmann’s obsession is Fitzgerald, although she’s been told her fictional version of him is annoying, which surprises her, because she sympathises with him, with his neediness, how there was never enough in the world for him. “I know how that feels; it’s about a hole you can’t ever fill; it’s sad. I re-read Fitzgerald when I was working on my thesis, comparing his two versions of Tender Is The Night, which is where I first encountered the Murphys. Immediately, I knew I wanted to write about them.”

The great-great-great-great granddaughter of Herman Melville, a fact she wishes she had never divulged when publicising her ambitious debut novel, the psychological thriller Tigers In Red Weather, Klaussmann researched the many biographies of the Murphys and visited the Beinecke Library at Yale University, which holds their clothing, diaries and letters. “I loved it,” she says, but admits to finding difficulties dealing with reality versus fiction.

She became convinced, however, that at the heart of the Murphys’ tragic story there was a secret. “I felt there was something going on you couldn’t see.” Gerald, a fine painter in the Cubist style, often referred to his “defect”. Klaussmann felt, like several biographers, that this referred to his sexual ambiguity. In Villa America, he has an affair with a dashing, gay pilot, Owen Chambers, the only fictional character in the novel, although there is no evidence he was ever unfaithful.

“I came across the fact that the Murphys had once hired a pilot to fly in caviar from the Caspian Sea. As you do! He was the character I needed,” says Klaussmann, who already knew she would write about the Murphys when she signed a six-figure, two-book deal. “It took a while to get going after the success of Tigers," she admits. Meanwhile a raft of novels about many of “her” characters appeared. “Something in the zeitgeist, I guess,” she says, echoing O’Nan’s view that it’s because they are all “great” subjects.

“I was always aware of Fitzgerald’s legacy,” concludes O’Nan. “I feared this might be a haunted book, that I’d die before I finished a novel about a guy who left an unfinished novel. I finished the first draft and thought, ‘OK, now I can die.’”

Villa America by Liza Klaussmann is published by Picador, £12.99; West Of Sunset by Stewart O’Nan is published by Allen & Unwin, £12.99. Both authors will be at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 22