We made it! All 20 books summarised in three parts. I hope you’re ready for your Summer reading list, be it in quarantine or on a beach, country/rules permitting.
It’s been a real joy to do and I hope you enjoy my selections too, any other ideas, feel free to post them below.
Valley of the Dolls
Plot: How far will YOU go to climb the Valley of the Dolls?
Comments: We’re into prime pulp now, the very best of the best. The creme de la creme of escapist magic. As I read someone say once about the legacy of Susann, if I could write like Susann, don’t you think I would? This is a intensive look at showbiz, which reads majestically. Famed for being a huge, and I do mean HUGE bestseller, with an equally famous movie that remains in the echelons of bad but watchable movies (and for me, one particular scene which features one of our heroines, the boozed up actress, commenting on the moral degradation of society with ‘boobies, boobies, boobies.’ Say what you see, Nellie.) We have three different women, one a mousy secretary, one a bold actress raring up for her big break and the other a model/actress. We start in 1945 and go into the 60s. We have three fairly different archetypes, one a sensual sex kitten who wants to be known for more than her body, one an everyday woman striving to have a career in the modern word, and the other your teen actress wanting fame, fortune, and adulation. Their lives are all enter-twinned and they also experience various Hollywood heartaches, including disease, divorce, addition to the dolls. There’s also a lot of betrayal going on throughout the novel, specifically the hedonistic Hollywood life, filled to the brim with selfish, catty people ready to knock you to push themselves up.
Susanns’ success was highly criticised as critics argued she stole famous people’s identity and made them into barely-disguised copies, and how! it was obvious that Nellie was Judy Garland, even inadvertently copying Judy Garland’s loathing of Los Angeles with Judy complaining that it never rained in Hollywood and Nellie complaining that the sun was always ‘there’ like a ball of orange. Also obvious was the old ham Helen Lawson being Ethel Merman, supposedly because Susann became obsessed with her, so Merman virtually had to do a restraining order. In a book filled with memorable moments my favourite individual aspect was Anne Welles’ inability to escape her engagement in the first act, which she agreed to feeling that she should, only to get caught in the congratulatory celebrations. Susann’s writing here and throughout the rest of the book is, without doubt, superbly entertaining.
Quote: “I’ve got a library copy of Gone with the Wind, a quart of milk and all these cookies. Wow! What an orgy!”
Review:Jacqueline Susann’s 1966 novel Valley Of The Dolls is seen as a trashy, kitsch entertainment about pills, sex and ambition. It’s all of that, says Julie Burchill, but its message – that bad, brassy girls can have the last laugh – was bold, subversive and feminist. No wonder it’s being reissued; a bracing tonic for our conformist times – Julie Burchill
Author trivia: I have a lot of time for this woman and read a Vanity Fair piece about her life. It had plenty of tidbits about the fact that Susann was exceptionally naive, to the point where she had to ask her editor how much sperm was needed for a face mask (in an arguably even trashier book) via milk carton sizes. Equally excellent was the feud with Truman Capote where he described her as a truck driver in draq, which led to her demanding an apology, only for him to apologise – to the truck drivers. She got her revenge in her final book with a wizened, drunkard Napoleon designated to be Truman.
Cruising
Plot: A serial killer is targeting the gays in steamy, seemy New York
Comment: A super controversial book then, when the film was released and now. It’s dated, very dated. The lexicology is very much a product of its time, although the title is fairly clever, referring to the police on the beat and the cruising for sex angle. The views of the characters make them appear fairly cardboard cutout and there’s a hell of a lot of prejudices going on within the general narrative, whilst the book is peppered with slurs. That said, it was 1970 and this was unleashing the S&M underbelly to two cops, so go figure. The story revolves around three individual narrators, all male and all with varying views of masculinity. John Lynch, who suffered from nearly being drowned when he was a kid by his friend’s father who now, as a rising New York cop has to help solve a chain of murders being gay men. To be specific from one summary: sex is the game, death is the prize as a sex-haunted killer is on the loose – preying on unwary victims, prowling the parks, the alleys, the Village bars (it sounds dramatic and it IS dramatic). John’s boss, Captain Edelstein is chasing promotion, even though Lynch clearly resents him as a Jew (Lynch has a lot of anger towards all minority groups) and comes up with the unique idea that Lynch, to solve the case masquerades as a gay clubbing-goer undercover sleuth, chasing drugs, sex and the laws of attraction. And, eventually he becomes friends with his gay neighbour, so I guess you can argue he gains some crucial character development. That, plus he could be a homosexual himself. Twist! The killer is also featured as the third favourite, the self-hater and his character is particularly menacing in the finale. It’s super short and easy to read in an afternoon and gape at such a seamy book, with one Goodreader referring to it as ‘hot garbage’, which fits in nicely in the pulp fiction stakes. The book was made into Al Pacino’s ‘I wish I didn’t do it’ movie, even though he campaigned for the role and beat out Gere. For a long time Pacino wouldn’t talk about the film, which was suitably lurid, and Friedkin adds “that’s a good thing because he’s not very eloquent.”I also found out that De Palma wanted to make the movie. What that would have been like, considering he did Dressed to Kill which, of course is on my top 20 erotic thrillers chart (which Cruising didn’t make.)
Quote: “The knife itself was unchanged, just as cool and sleek as the day he’d bought it, not a nick on it. That was the way to go through life. Leave your mark, stay unmarked yourself.”
Comments: “Brilliant and, sadly, unforgettable…One of America’s most persistent sexual nightmares.” – Gore Vidal
Author Trivia: This dude was a prolific New York Times writer. Nobody knew seemingly nothing about him when he died apart from that he was working on a new novel, Witnesses, which, it can’t be denied is a good title.
Sins
Plot: Revenge on the Nazis, revenge on the men, the sins of the past return to roost.
Comments: This bold and exciting book is incredibly well-paced and begins in France during the brutal occupation by the Nazis during the war shattering and tearing up the Junot family. It’s a very Kane and Abel beginning with Hélène escaping into an uncertain future. Slowly, but surely Hélène rises to the top becoming a hugely successful editor of her magazine. However, although she has huge personal success, she still demands revenge on all those who crossed her. In a clever twist, the albino Nazi officer (superb idea, Judith*) who caused her so much distress is blackmail by Hélène into becoming a shareholder, and during each shareholder meeting come to Paris, only not direct. No, instead he must take a circuitous route via Israel. And as part of the contract, he must abstain from plastic surgery, disguise or first class privileges, for if he gets spotted. That’s his just reward. I read it many years ago and it deserves a reread, so get reading and talk to me about your reasons for liking this pulpy, soapy saga of heartbreak and success.
Quote: Hélène was a beautiful, iron-willed, erotic, blackmailing monster. In short, dangerous. She had the power to destroy him. She had almost used it once, and he could remember it only too well. It had been a far-too-close shave. He had no illusions. It could happen again. The familiar hatred prickled hotly behind his ears. Gott mi Himmel! How he despised her.
Judith Gould is a fictional American writer of romantic novels, and is the pseudonym used by co-authors: Nicholas Peter “Nick” Bienes and Rhea Gallaher, who are actually both men. In addition to being writing partners, Bienes and Gallaher are also involved romantically. They lived together in room 600 of the famous Hotel Chelsea in NYC, regarded as the hotel’s most luxurious suite.
Could there be any more exciting trivia than this? I doubt it.
The Other Side of Midnight
Plot: The love, lust, hatred, revenge of Noelle Page laid bare.
Plot: Very, very readable. I can’t remember how I discovered this but Sidney Sheldon was really revered as a taut writer of thrillers with stupendous twists. Like so many of these books on the list it’s not just a humdrum story which lasts a couple of weeks. This spans the years, going through wars and lovers, characters arriving, disappearing and nothing being quite what it seems. The mechanics of the story are both simple and superb with a young Noelle Page betrayed by her family early on and sold by her parents to the first wealthy man. Noelle learns early on that sex is power (lots of descriptions as sex being like pressing certain buttons) and ends up in Paris during the war. She meets and falls for Larry who betrays her in typical war style by loving and leaving her pregnant. She attempts suicide, aborts the baby and decides that Larry will never be free of her. Here the story becomes coincidental and also testament to Sheldon’s taut storyteller. With her new lover who has unlimited money on his side she coaxes Larry back into the fold, and forces him to realise that a life with her is no life worth living. Only, Larry is married, and Larry must ditched his wife, as well as her other mistresses to experience nirvana. We also have a second character, the young Catherine, who is the super intelligent individual who married Larry during the war. Can she trust Larry? Of course she can’t. And then we add more twists and we have a tragic story featuring those ingredients of love, lust, hatred and betrayal…
Quote: “To be successful you need friends and to be very successful you need enemies.” “If you don’t know why,I could never explain it to you.” “A thousand times more crimes have been committed in the name of love than in the name of hate..”
Review: His writing style is loose and unfulfilling in his later works, and The Other Side of Midnight was the best we ever got from him, unfortunately. I would say if you have never read the novel, or like me, you read it a long time ago, put it on your beach reading list for summer fare. – Beth Mulrooney
Author Review: Sheldon was a Golden Age of Hollywood writer who came into writing pretty late. His first novel is infamous for being pulp-tastic, The Naked Face, one review was so fun I’ve added it to his trivia: The Naked Face was Sheldon’s first novel and it is awful. I mean, it is spectacularly terrible. The book is about a psychoanalyst named Judd who, after the murder of one of his patients and his receptionist, is next on the hit list of some crazed murderer. The first two victims of this killer are a gay guy and a black woman, I think that explains the territory we are in here with Sheldon’s fantasy. In fact, I will happily call this entire novel racist and astoundingly homophobic, but that doesn’t even begin to describe this mess of a novel.
One major plot point is that a gay man was seeing Judd in order to ‘cure’ his homosexuality. How could anyone take this novel seriously after that? The novel’s one black character is only present for a few pages but her impact is immense. She speaks in such heightened ebonics that you wonder if Sheldon ever actually met a black person and at one point she speak my favourite line in the whole novel, “If you don’t ball me quick, I’ll go out of my cotton-pickin’ mind.” YIKES. What was Sheldon thinking!?
All considered, Sheldon is the seventh most successful author, above Jackie Collins but behind Kingmaker, Harold Robbins.
Petals on the Wind
Plot – Damn you, momma, Cathy won’t let you get away with it.
Comment: Petals on the Wind is by far and away the best book on my trash fiction chart. A really ridiculous, uncontrolled novel that swings lustily into new and unexplored territory and, as a sequel manages not to be a tepid rehash, in fact I find it far superior.
The growing pains of the remaining Dresden dolls are languidly explored at first. They’re all damaged kids, physically and mentally. But, with our narrator, Cathy, very much primed and focused on revenge. The word revenge becomes the anthem of the book. REVENGE REVENGE REVENGE! And the second anthem of the book, sexuality. In a nutshell once coy Cathy is being pursued by 4, count ‘em, FOUR men in this book – roughly about 3 either unsuitable or bad choices. There’s her brother of course, which is an obvious no-no, a dancer, Julian who takes creepy pantomime villainy to almost camp levels (the surprise he wasn’t a depraved homosexual only beaten as a concept that he´s a sex offender – more on this later) and Paul, their adoptive father who, from the moment he sees Cathy makes overt overtures that he wants her. I´m not saying Cathy didn’t have daddy or brother issues but Paul’s sleaze factor throughout felt dirty and sinful. These male beaus are a great tool in Andrews’ arsenal because she chooses two types of men. The malleable men (Paul and Christopher) who are martyrs to Cathy, waiting years for her hand with blind, pathetic devotion. Who would do this? In theory, no one, but we know there are desperate people out there. Andrews makes a brilliant case for these characters to be the type of men you´d go for, unless you wanted her second type of men, the vicious, manipulative, libertines.
So, in a piece-de-resistance that I find spectacular, incredible and truly delightful, Cathy manages to snag the mother’s husband. This family are OBSESSED with keeping it in the immediate family. Yes, Cathy hangs with the husband as a bitter, scarlet mistress plotting her next move. As Bart defiles her several times Cathy, ever a lover of revenge plots her own girl gone wild type plot. Oh and she meets and abuses the grandmother again. 50 shades of mad!
V.C Andrews had an unbelievable precision and intelligence with her novels. This saga of 5 was completely hers, before her relatively early death and the ghostwriter came on in. So this saga, these twists, these lines were all hers, and for that, God gave us the good stuff. Who knew it’d be so fun to leave the attic.
Quote: But I kissed him, then jumped from his bed and raced back to my room, slamming and locking the door behind me. What was the matter with me? I should never have gone to his room and gotten into his bed. Was I as evil as the grandmother said?
No, I wasn’t.
I couldn’t be!
Review: Hey, guess what? Flowers in the Attic was only the beginning of this sordid tale! – Neva, Goodreads
Author Trivia: She died and left quite a legacy. This article sums up the personal tragedies which befell her, her unfulfilled passions and how her books have such a ‘seize the day’ vibe which is the major reason we read. This is absolutely, without my doubt my favourite of all the individual books on the list and the first book I am going to read in audio form to eventually add for your pleasure.
Lovers and Gamblers
Plot – A sort of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall before they were married, with sexy results.
Comment: Obviously anyone who knows me knows that Jackie Collins remains totally and utterly unique in the hallmark of bonkbuster fiction. I read all of her 31 novels and they were all a tonic. This is her most sweeping and wild success even if she is known for the beautifully paced, wildly original Hollywood Wives. It’s laced with sex, sprawls with flashbacks (Jackie has a unique way of fleshing out character biographies, but not too fleshy, with some paragraphs summing up years of her life. In that way, she has a style of summarising in the style of a movie) and the action sweeps from London to LA to Monaco to various cities in America to Rio to the Amazon. It just keeps going. The characters are called Dallas and Al. Dallas had this crazy upbringing in Florida on an animal farm, became an orphan and starting in a prostitution game with the kinky Bobby, who was a real firecracker. Al, on the other hand is the archetype Mick Jagger. He’s from London, screws anything on legs and has a voice of pure soul. He’s no longer content with his frump of a wife and flits around. That is until he meets Dallas. The second half features a chaotic touring schedule which has a rooster of random characters, from Al’s dud of a son to a sexually liberated photographer who falls in love with Al’s manager and younger brother. Then, out of nowhere there’s this electrifying third act set in the jungle where they have to get out of the Amazon alive and in one piece, even though the world believes the most famous couple in the world are long long dead. It’s all so so good.
Quote: All of it it, but I’ll choose, When Melanie slid confidently into bed alongside her husband she was aghast to find herself embracing feminine curves. Linda had been similarly aghast and Paul had been hoping a freak earthquake might hit New Orleans.
Review: ‘Robbins, Susanna, JC does it best’ – Newsweek
Author Trivia: She signed a photo for me and for that I’m forever grateful. I always quite liked that Barbara Cartland referred to her debut as filth, and I especially like her eponymous name, the Proust of Hollywood. Indeed, she was.
Return to Peyton Place
Plot – a Roman-a-cleft of the author facing the music.
Comment: I read all four of her novels and this author had quite a story. And not a good one. After the hurricane success of Peyton Place (the novel of the ’50s) she admitted that life was easier poor. This sequel was clearly written when she was half cut and 98 unedited pages were fleshed into this. So technically, thank you ghostwriter. More embarrassingly due to a lawsuit a character was renamed, using an Italian name for a Greek character, which was super confusing. Even if she didn’t want to write it I think it’s a totally worthy addition to the chart. It’s a bit like those watchable reunion specials where everyone looks older and it’s nice to have the crew back together again. In this roman-a-cleft Alison is back in Peyton Place (the return) to see her success weaponised against her. Her book, Samuel’s Castle has done well, very well, but people feel it’s too familiar and more or less is Peyton Place, which was a problem the author had in real life. Also, Alison, like momma before her is having an affair with a married man. Selena, the abused poor relation in the first book is doing well with her ambitions to open a shop, only her love, Ted wants to get in with a Boston blue-blooded girl, and Selena is mighty pissed. Mike, nee (I guess) Tom has been fired by Ted’ vindictive mother who is part of the school board and everyone has to pick a side on Alison’s dramatic return to the town. That vindictive mother, Roberta, resents the Bostonian, Jennifer hugely and plans to kill her off a-la Roberta’s first husband. Pulptastic plot-lines as well as plenty of scrappy dialogue makes this a sequel suitable for any respectable pulp fiction chart.
Quote: “Oh, is it hard, Ted?” she asked. “Why should it be? I knew back before the trial that the great Ted Carter wasn’t going to be able to afford a murderess for a wife. So why should it be so hard for you to tell me about your new girl?”
Review: “If I’m a lousy writer, then an awful lot of people have lousy taste.” – Grace about her books, and general criticism
Trivia: ‘This is just a little Peyton Place and you’re all Harper Valley hypocrites’ remains one of the best legacies for the book. It surely inspired my absolutely favourite show, Desperate Housewives, which will be my next chart on the blog. How’s that for a hook?
greatbritain1989 