Writing a Bestseller: In Theory and Practice
Another dip into the archives of my very sporadic career in journalism. This time we have a joint review I wrote for The Times back in 2007. It just so happened that a serious, if short, study of bestselling books was published at the same time as a biography of Harold Robbins — and I was asked to give them a read.
There is a curious irony to the fact that these two books about bestsellers are probably destined to sell very little themselves. Let’s face it, any study of popular fiction that includes the word ‘wegwerfliteratur’ in its opening paragraph is clearly not aimed at the average reader. Professor Sutherland’s introduction to the bestseller is an attempt to explain the phenomenon to academics who, in all likelihood, don’t actually read them. And it does that job reasonably well, although it is not without some basic errors — his assessment of the American pricing system is inaccurate and misleading but I won’t bore you with the detail. He also displays unashamed bias in places, suggesting that critical opinion is ‘vital’ to the success of a hardback — a comment that is perhaps only to be expected from a professional reviewer.
Unsurprisingly for an academic primer, Bestsellers is not a rip-roaring page-turner, but it does have its moments. The more interesting portions of the book compare bestsellers of yesteryear with recent sales trends. The WH Smith round up of 1960 includes Laurence Durrell and The Leopard at the very top of the charts; their 2000 list features Tom Clancy and Dick Francis, a statistic that speaks volumes. His amiable trawl through the history of popular books is frequently entertaining, with the plots of many long-forgotten potboilers unearthed, much to the author’s obvious incredulity at times.
The book, to its detriment and without explanation, almost exclusively focuses on fiction which conveniently allows the author to avoid discussing the recent spate of ‘misery memoirs’ or celebrity biographies. It also ignores popular genres such as the ‘clogs and shawl’ sagas or million-selling authors like Josephine Cox. Such omissions could be put down to this being A Very Short Introduction but the suspicion will remain that Sutherland simply couldn’t face immersing himself any further into the ‘lowbrow’ mire.
He does, however, manage to spend some time discussing the big daddy of the blockbuster, Harold Robbins, and his thoughts on that author also crop up a few times in Andrew Wilson’s biography, The Man Who Invented Sex.
Robbins had a modest upbringing and an unremarkable start in life, but he was ambitious and good with numbers. His father-in-law, a treasurer for Universal Pictures, secured him a job as a shipping clerk at the studio and Harold worked his way up to become a bookkeeper for many of their movies. It was when he refused to submit a budget for a screenplay he considered to be ‘a piece of old rubbish’ that he decided to turn his hand to writing. He was convinced he could do better himself.
As it turned out, Robbins was not that great a writer, as Wilson repeatedly points out in this book, but he was a wonderful storyteller, and not just on the page, either. In interviews and conversations he frequently made up wildly fantastic tales about his background: he was an orphan; he worked as a rent boy; he was the only survivor of a submarine attack. He also loved to shock and would litter his conversation with sexual innuendo.
This combination of raconteur and sensationalist, when transferred to the printed page, proved irresistible to the reading public. His books sold in their millions. And although he may not quite have been the man who invented sex, he was almost certainly the man who invented the sex and shopping novel. Books such as The Carpetbaggers and The Betsy pushed the boundaries of acceptability and got people reading, many of whom would never have picked up a book otherwise.
Robbins revelled in his success, surrounding himself with good looking women, fast cars, drugs and yachts. He got through three wives and fathered two illegitimate children. He also managed to spend all his money, leaving little or nothing after he died. His legacy is, instead, to be found in the thousands of mass-market novels lining the supermarket aisles and piled on bookshop tables.
Wilson has done a good job of cutting through all the bullshit that Robbins circulated about himself and has pieced together a fascinating portrait of a remarkable man. At times it reads like the plot of one of its subject’s novels, and that is no bad thing, but it does so with a slight air of embarrassment.
Reading both these books you do get the impression that the authors find their subjects a little beneath them, Sutherland more blatantly than Wilson, which makes you wonder why they bothered writing about them in the first place. They needn’t be apologetic, both have a worthy place on the bookshelves, although I am willing to bet you won’t be finding either of these in your local Tesco.
