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By Root 794 0

(“presidential memoirs,” for example, or “women’s novels”), books and authors differ. No sooner has somebody said that science fiction is dead than a science-fiction novel—the late Carl Sagan’s Contact, for example, or Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park—proves the statement untrue. The reverse holds good, which is that any attempt to capitalize on successes like these by publishing similar books will invariably fail. Historical novels were said to be dead until The Clan of the Cave Bear demonstrated that it was only necessary to find a new way of writing one; many people in publishing will look you in the eye and tell you that romantic fiction is dead, despite the fact that every book Danielle Steel writes is a best-seller, as are those by Anne Rivers Siddons. Many publishers believe that the glamorous, glitzy novel is dead, despite Judith Krantz. For that matter, hardcover mystery novels were thought by many publishers to be in such a bottomless decline that most of them got rid of their mystery imprints at just about the time when Mary Higgins Clark was writing her first novel.* (Mary would go on to write an uninterrupted string of twenty-one best-sellers and to become and remain one of my closest and dearest friends.)

A GOOD illustration of this—indeed, an object lesson—was the publication of Shirley Conran’s Savages. Something of a name to conjure with in the United Kingdom, Shirley Conran became an overnight success in the United States when S&S published her first novel, Lace, in 1982. The book succeeded partly because of its eye-catching tag line (“Which one of you bitches is my mother?”), partly because it was a shopping and brand-name-dropping novel in the tradition of Judith Krantz’s Scruples, and partly because it was brilliantly (and on Conran’s part ruthlessly) promoted. There is a certain market, always, for a novel that combines sex, romance, and the address of the right shoemaker in Paris, and Lace was written to capitalize on this market.

Joni Evans and I bought Lace, in fact, precisely because it seemed to us that S&S had been slipping in this market since the days of The Love Machine. Of course, we had Jackie Collins, which was a very good thing, but we hadn’t made Jackie Collins, since she had already been a very successful writer when she left Warner Books for S&S. We had built up her sales, but that isn’t at all the same thing as launching somebody from scratch, which was the challenge when we agreed to pay a major amount of money after reading the first draft of Lace.

Unfortunately, Lace was one of those novels that read better on the first read than on the second. I had been carried away by the bold first line, the sheer energy of the story, and all the extravagant descriptions of life in the world of haute couture. It was, as one woman reader said, “like eating M&M’s while masturbating,” and indeed there was something mildly sinful about the book, like overindulging in a good Swiss patisserie, a feeling of being unable to stop but slightly sick at the same time. A closer inspection of the manuscript once we owned it revealed certain flaws of logic, plotting, and even ordinary common sense. In addition, it was far too long and full of somewhat schoolgirlish passages, which work in the United Kingdom but read strangely to Americans. I girded my loins for battle and waded in, and pretty soon Shirley Conran herself was ensconced in an office next to mine, doggedly rewriting in a tiny hand, making out wall-size charts of the chronology and the interaction of the characters, in many different colors of ink, and driving a succession of typists mad. Early in the proceedings Shirley presented me with a sweatshirt that bore the legend SHOW, DON’T TELL! as a response to my constant advice to keep the book moving by writing scenes instead of narrative and description. On the whole, few writers have taken to criticism with more cheer and harder work than she did, and we soon became friends. Her determination was something of a force of nature and was, in its own way, infectious. The marketing plans for Lace