Some critics said his dialogue was banal and his plots were unbelievable, but many grudgingly acknowledged the author’s unusual talent at producing what the Washington Post once called “good junk reading time after time”.

After Sheldon’s 1987 novel Windmills of the Gods debuted at No. 1 on bestseller lists, Charles Champlin, then The Times’ arts editor, wrote that Sheldon had found “a statistically wider audience each time, evidently satisfying everyone except most literary critics, who regard popularity and quality as incompatible”.

Fans admired plotlines that were amazingly complex yet easy to follow and the colourful characters who could never be counted on to do the expected.

“Sidney’s longevity secret is that he is a great storyteller, a master of the narrative tale,” his literary agent, Mort Janklow, told The Times in 2004. “Readers care about his characters, many of whom are women under threat. He has an instinctive ability to read women’s emotions”.

For his part, Sheldon said: “I don’t write for critics. I write for readers.”

His wry and witty script for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947) won him a 1948 Academy Award for original screenplay. The farce, which starred Cary Grant and Shirley Temple, was “uncloyed with cuteness”, the New York Times review said at the time.

He was born Sidney Schechtel on February 11, 1917, in Chicago, the son of Otto, a salesman, and Natalie, a homemaker. Unable to pay the rent, the family kept moving and Sheldon attended about a dozen schools. Sheldon later remarked that his career as a writer was rather improbable considering his background.

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