SEX AND SHOPPING: SIX OF THE BEST

The Joan Collins case marks the end of a literal); era. Critic Anthony Looch looks back on its greatest works THE SIGHT of the incomparable Joan Collins — 'our Joanie' — being humiliated in a New York courtroom over the quality of her two draft bonkbuster novels for Random House was almost too much to bear.

It was as if the British monarch had been dragged into a Pimlico magistrate's court by social workers, to be held to account over the behaviour of her off- spring. But I must declare an interest: I am a fan of Joan's published literary endeav- ours, although I accept the possibility that she may have run slightly out of steam now, as many authors do.

My introduction to this type of novel was in the late 1980s when, in my days as a parliamentary reporter for the Daily Tele- graph, I also became a reviewer of 'bodice-rippers'. Strictly speaking, this genre is either a Regency or Restoration romp. Its cinematic manifestation would have been a black-and-white 1940s British film starring someone like Margaret Lock- wood. The heyday of such books dates back earlier than this.

Between their palpitating pages, dashing highwaymen, lecherous squires, randy regents, dissipated princes, wicked land- lords, and merry monarchs did indeed rip bodices from luscious breasts, though what came next was left to the imagination or described in very broad terms.

The classic 20th-century bodice-ripper is Forever Amber, written by the American Kathleen Winsor. It was published in 1944, and describes the adventures of a promis- cuous Restoration beauty.

My reviewing brief was a broader one, encompassing popular, sexy fiction, largely for and by women, but concentrating on the massive blockbuster novels which were such a feature of the affluent 1980s. Those were the glittering years when advances ran into six figures and novels bristled with designer-label clothes ripped off in aban- don by muscular heroes. The sheer excess of sex, money and lust provided the page- turning momentum.

There is a common misconception among people who have never read them that books of this kind are rubbish. This is untrue. Admittedly, they are often mediocre, if one judges them by the stan- dards of high-brow fiction. But the vintage years of the 1980s are worth recalling in their confident, sensual splendour.

Asked to name six of the best, I would start with the legendary success, Shirley Conran's Lace. This saga of five women sharing a single devastating secret was set in a jet-setting world of beautiful people. Of more lasting interest to many readers was the introduction of live goldfish into human love-making. Do not try this at home.

Destiny by Sally Beauman was modelled on the classical sagas of patemities kept secret and old wrongs unavenged. A hand- some French aristocrat encounters a love- ly young woman while cruising along the street in his Aston Martin. Little does he realise that she was begotten by his elder brother, a libertine baron. But he soon will.

Riders by Jilly Cooper was responsible for the single biggest increase in jodhpur sales ever recorded among the unhorsy classes. Unlike Lace and Destiny, the tale of amatory dalliance was set in the middle- class milieu of show-jumping. Cooper's success in turning the world of Thelwell 'I love House music.' and Betjeman into a realm of adulterous lusts was achieved with the help of a jaunty prose style honed by years as a journalist. The rest of us can only live in hope.

Penny Vincenzi's first novel, Old Sins, spotted the potential appeal of the bodice- ripper to socially aspiring British readers and charted the rise to enormous wealth of a middle-class family throughout the post- war years. I have not cared for any of her subsequent work, but I greatly admired Bella Mafia by Lynda La Plante, the story of a Mafia feud which leads to the murder of Don Roberto Luciano, his sons and two small, perfectly formed grandsons — all on the eve of the family wedding. Later, the widows quite properly plot their revenge.

Male authors are understandably shy of entering a field dominated by evocations of female sexuality. Only one belongs in the company of the Eighties greats — Marius Gabriel, who for years wrote novels for Mills & Boon under the pseudonym 'Madeleine Ker', a sort of Currer Bell in reverse. His debut under his own name was Original Sin, a feast of incest, kidnapping, drug-addiction amid the horrors of the Spanish Civil War Today's bonkbuster is, alas, but a pale shadow of the conspicuous consumerism and brand-name-dropping hedonism of the 1980s. Publishers have decided that endless descriptions of shopping orgies and gorging in fancy restaurants are in bad taste in a world where so many people have been made redundant or bankrupt.

Shopping fever was briefly succeeded by carnal excess. But there are only a limited number of ways in which fingers, tongues, penises and orifices can be utilised for sex- ual pleasure, and language is restricted in the variety it offers for describing such activities. Readers were titillated by such accounts but the thrill was transient. Nowa- days, they are jaundiced, and publishers have started to rate plot complexity and bouncy narrative as highly as once they rated copulatory inventiveness.

The bodice-ripper has shown its capacity to adapt and survive and I have no doubt that it will still be around, in some form or other, in a hundred years' time. However, the Collins case may mark a turn of the tide in the publishing world against its own questionable cult of the 'celebrity novel'.

Many of these books, even if competently ghost-written, flopped. Having got over the novelty of reading fiction by their favourite newsreaders, actors or models, the public started to assess such offerings critically and decided they weren't worth buying.

If the 'celebrity novel' dies a death, many unpublished authors will rejoice at a greater chance of breaking into print: I have to confess that I am one of them.

When Joan described all the hurtful things that the publisher said about her work, I knew exactly how she felt. I've experienced it many times — but without an £800,000 advance in my bank account to ease the pain.