British author Jackie Collins passed away from breast cancer on Sept 19. She kept the disease a secret for more than six years. Even her sister Joan only found out about it two weeks before her death. Photo: Reuters
English language fiction was such an established business by the 1960s that even the most original authors could only continue familiar genres: romance, crime, thriller, literary. However, Jackie Collins more or less invented the form of storytelling now recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as “bonkbuster”, selling more than 500 million copies of 32 titles that remained in print at her death at the age of 77 on Sept 19.
Books by other authors – including Judith Krantz’s Scruples (1978) and Shirley Conran’s Lace (1982) – 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.
