As an erstwhile fellow peddler of dirty books (Ambition, 1989), I’m in two minds about E.L. James. On the one hand, I’m glad that I never made money writing tosh which led legions of gullible women to collude in their own humiliation. Granted, my heroine had SOLD tattooed on her forehead, but so far as I know no murdering man ever used my book as an alibi, whereas, as Wikipedia puts it:
Rough sex murder defence, also known as the Fifty Shades defence, is employed by some people accused of murdering a sexual partner who claim that the death occurred because of injuries sustained during consensual sex. Advocacy group We Can’t Consent To This has identified… 60 police suspects or defendants in the UK who have stated from the outset or later plead this defence, 45 per cent of which resulted in a lesser charge, lighter sentence, acquittal, or the case not being pursued.
On the other hand, I’ve been extremely envious of James for making all that money when I practically spent my humble £100,000 advance on the way home. After six Grey books and a complete lulu of a film, James is now set for life from her decades acting as chief pornographer to the Boden set and can do as she pleases – which appears to have been nursing a secret desire to be a sexed-up Barbara Cartland all along.
The Missus is a follow-up to The Mister. They sound like novelisations of EastEnders episodes but concern the romance of the Cornish Count Maxim and the Albanian Alessia, his former cleaner – ‘She used to empty a bin of condoms every time she cleaned for him’ – and recent ‘betrothed’. The opening paragraph has all the molten dynamism of a bank holiday trip to Homebase: ‘My footsteps echo an urgent beat on the hard reflective floor, and I squint beneath the unremitting light of the fluorescents.’
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