Not to get all Al Jaffee, but one does have to wonder if Ms. Collins decided (in this weekend’s profile in the Melbourne Age) that snappy answers sufficed to what had to be kind of stupid questions:
“TO BE HONEST WITH you, I find literary writing terribly boring.”
She’s not boring and she’s hardly neglected. But Jackie Collins is the first to admit that she isn’t in the slightest bit “literary”.
“I love Harold Robbins, Charles Dickens and Jacqueline Susann. I like good style and a dynamic story,” she says. “I’ve never wanted to be literary in the slightest.”
In fact, Collins might easily be read as one well-dressed locus for the painful death of literature.
“As a reader, I like fast-paced male fictions of Mario Puzo or Elmore Leonard,” she says.
As a writer, “the last thing I want to do is offer a five-page description of a mist at night!”
Besides, when her work is being taught as literature – albeit in airport thriller/camp fashion — why bother getting in good with the literati?