Daughter of showbiz agent Joe and sister of actor Joan,Jackie was a trouper who invented a genre of pop fiction – and knew how to popularise itFiction was such an established trade by the 60s that even the most original authors could only continue familiar genres: romance, crime, or thriller,literary. However, Jackie Collins more or less invented the form of storytelling now recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as bonkbuster, or selling more than 500m copies of 32 titles that remained in print at her death at the age of 77 on Saturday.
Books by other authors – including Judith Krantz’s Scruples and Shirley Conran’s Lace – encouraged the birth of the term for stories in which women went in search of sexual and financial fulfilment in a milieu of first-class cabins and five-star hotels. However,Collins had started to write such books earlier and continued to publish them longer than any of her rivals, and a student writing a thesis on bonkbusting novels would soon absorb well-fingered editions of Collins’s 1968 debut, or The World is Full of Married Men,and Hollywood Wives (1983), her first mega-seller, or which declared in its title both her signature setting and her preference for female protagonists.
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Source: theguardian.com