Popular Fiction Since 1900 Other Recent Books by Clive Bloom

Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900 Other recent books by Clive Bloom CULT FICTION: Popular Reading and Pulp Theory GOTHIC HORROR: A Reader’s Guide from Poe to King and Beyond (editor) LITERATURE, POLITICS AND INTELLECTUAL CRISIS IN BRITAIN TODAY Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900 Clive Bloom © Clive Bloom 2002 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2002 978-0-333-68742-0 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-0-333-68743-7 ISBN 978-0-230-28749-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230287495 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bloom, Clive. Bestsellers : popular fiction since 1900 / Clive Bloom. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. English fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. Popular literature – Great Britain – History and criticism. 3. Books and reading – Great Britain – History – 20th century. 4. Best sellers – Great Britain – Bibliography. I. Title. PR888.P68 B58 2002 823Ј.9109 – dc21 2002020886 109876 54321 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 Contents Preface xi Acknowledgements xiii 1 Origins, Problems and Philosophy of the Bestseller 1 2 How the British Read 29 Literacy 29 Assessing literacy levels 29 Literacy in practice 32 Reading and the Influences of Cinema, Television and Radio 35 The Library System 42 Librarians, Sales and the Female Reader 50 Publishers 55 Building on an established market 55 The market for hardback books 59 The Paperback 61 Paperbacks and Pulp Fiction 64 Censorship 70 Contemporary Publishing 74 3 Genre: History and Form 85 4 Best-selling Authors Since 1900 107 An Age Passes, an Age Begins: 1900 to 1918 110 Florence L. Barclay 110 Arnold Bennett 111 John Buchan 112 Edgar Rice Burroughs 113 Hall Caine 114 Marie Corelli 116 Arthur Conan Doyle 117 Charles Garvice 118 Elinor Glyn 119 Nat Gould 120 v vi Contents Robert Hichens 122 William Le Queux 124 W. J. Locke 124 A. E. W. Mason 125 E. Phillips Oppenheim 126 Baroness Orczy 127 Sax Rohmer 128 Effie A. Rowlands 128 Berta Ruck 129 Edgar Wallace 130 Dolf Wyllarde (Dorothy Lowndes) 131 The Interwar Years: 1919 to the Early 1930s 132 Agatha Christie 132 Warwick Deeping 133 Ethel M. Dell and Ruby M. Ayres 134 Jeffrey Farnol 135 Sidney Horler 136 E. M. Hull 137 A. S. M. Hutchinson 137 J. B. Priestley 138 W. Riley 139 Rafael Sabatini 140 Sapper (Herman Cyril McNeile) 140 Mary Webb 141 P. G. Wodehouse 142 P. C. Wren 143 World War Two to Suez: The Late 1930s to 1956 144 James Hadley Chase 144 Peter Cheyney 144 John Creasey 145 A. J. Cronin 146 Lloyd Douglas 146 Daphne du Maurier 147 C. S. Forester 149 Stephen Francis (Hank Janson) 150 Erle Stanley Gardner 151 William Golding 151 Georgette Heyer 152 James Hilton 153 Hammond Innes 154 Contents vii W. Somerset Maugham 155 Margaret Mitchell 156 Nicholas Monsarrat 156 George Orwell 157 Mary Renault (Mary Challans) 158 Nevil Shute 158 Mickey Spillane 159 J. R. R. Tolkien 160 Dennis Wheatley 162 The Paperback Years: 1957 to 1974 164 H. E. Bates 164 Sheila Burnford 164 Arthur C. Clarke 165 James Clavell 166 Jackie Collins 166 Len Deighton 167 Dorothy Eden 168 J. T. Edson 168 Ian Fleming 169 Frederick Forsyth 170 Winston Graham 171 Arthur Hailey 171 Joseph Heller 172 Victoria Holt/Jean Plaidy (Eleanor Burford Hibbert) 172 Susan Howatch 173 Ken Kesey 173 Louis L’Amour 174 D. H. Lawrence 174 Norah Lofts 175 Alistair MacLean 176 Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) 176 Grace Metalious 177 James Michener 178 Michael Moorcock 178 Andrea Newman 179 Harold Robbins 179 Bernice Rubens 180 Wilbur Smith 181 Jacqueline Susann 182 Morris West 183 viii Contents Joseph Wambaugh 183 Herman Wouk 184 John Wyndham 184 The Last Decades: 1975 to 1999 186 Douglas Adams 186 Richard Adams 186 Ted Allbeury 187 Virginia Andrews 188 Jeffrey Archer 188 Jean M. Auel 189 Desmond Bagley 189 Iain M. Banks 190 Maeve Binchy 191 Barbara Taylor Bradford 192 Barbara Cartland 193 Tom Clancy 194 Shirley Conran 195 Catherine Cookson 196 Jilly Cooper 198 Bernard Cornwell 198 Patricia Cornwell 199 Michael Crichton 200 Clive Cussler 200 Colin Dexter 202 Nicholas Evans 203 Colin Forbes 204 Dick Francis 204 George MacDonald Fraser 205 Alexander Fullerton 206 Alex Garland 206 John Grisham 207 Thomas Harris 208 Sarah Harrison 208 James Herbert 209 Jack Higgins (Harry Patterson) 210 Peter Hoeg 210 Sheila Holland (Charlotte Lamb) 211 Nick Hornby 212 P. D. James 212 Penny Jordan 213 Contents ix M. M. Kaye 214 Leo Kessler 214 Stephen King 215 Judith Krantz 216 John le Carré 217 Robert Ludlum 218 Colleen McCullough 219 Patrick O’Brian 219 Edith Pargeter (Ellis Peters) 220 Rosamunde Pilcher 221 Dudley Pope 221 Terry Pratchett 222 Claire Rayner 223 Douglas Reeman/Alexander Kent 223 Ruth Rendell 224 J. K. Rowling 225 Salman Rushdie 226 Dora Saint (Miss Read) 227 Tom Sharpe 228 Sarah Shears 229 Sidney Sheldon 229 Danielle Steel 230 Jessica Stirling (Peggy Coughlan and Hugh C. Rae) 231 Craig Thomas 231 Sue Townsend 232 Joanna Trollope 232 Alice Walker 233 Irvine Welsh 233 Mary Wesley 234 Phyllis A. Whitney 235 Appendix 1 Number of individuals out of every 1000 who could not sign their name on a marriage register: 1896–1907 236 Appendix 2 Extract from Beatrice Harraden, ‘What Our Soldiers Read’, Cornhill Magazine, vol. XLI (Nov. 1916) 237 Appendix 3 Booksellers from whose returns the Bookseller compiled its bestseller list during the 1930s and x Contents 1940s under the title ‘What the Other Fellow is Selling’ 239 Appendix 4 From the Mass Observation Archive (ref. FR 2537): ‘Reading in Tottenham, November 1947’ 240 Appendix 5 From Mills and Boon, ‘A FINE ROMANCE ...is hard to find’ 244 Appendix 6 British Library loans 1987–8, showing the top 100 authors as recorded by the Bookseller (13 July 1990) 245 Appendix 7 Comparative library loans between 1988 and 1998 by genre (source: Public Lending Right, 1999) 247 Appendix 8 Waterstone’s and Channel 4’s survey to discover the greatest books of the twentieth century (1996) 248 Appendix 9 Which companies owned what imprints at the end of the twentieth century (source: Key Note, 1999) 250 Appendix 10 Helena Blakemore, ‘Gender Bias in Publishing and Reviewing’ 252 Appendix 11 From the Bookseller (Web page: 20 Dec. 1999) 254 Appendix 12 Comparative paperback bestseller lists showing relative change over the last decade of the twentieth century (source: Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, 2001) 257 Appendix 13 World Book Day 2000 Poll to find Britain’s favourite writers 258 Notes 259 Bibliography 264 Name Index 271 Subject Index 276 Title Index 281 Preface Across the first seventy years of the twentieth century few records were kept of best-selling fiction, its authors, its readers, its production or its distribution. Those records that were kept were tidied away into box files and ledgers and left to gather dust until Hitler’s bombs or Ameri- can university bulk buying reduced them to an ashy or archival destiny. Only in the last quarter of the century did proper records, centrally available, make sense of the jumble of information that made up the bestseller market, and those were somewhat contradictory at best, given the guarded nature of accounting. Many hours of research often brought to light problems to which there was no immediate solution – the record remaining fragmentary. Research into the history of publishing is now a thriving, if slightly eso- teric, branch of literary history, but the literary history of the bestseller is in fact embryonic. Yet to undertake such a work is to gain an insight into one of the popular arts of an entire nation over a hundred years. To achieve this one cannot work alone and I am happily obliged to acknowledge a veritable army of researchers, helpers and well-wishers without whom this book would not have appeared. They are, in no par- ticular order: Lynette Grypp; Ron Sutsko; Alison Main; Theresa Urbanic; Scott Eden; Meagen Ryan; Amy Crawford; Margaret Walsh; Courtney K. Sosnowski; Renée Ireton; Kimberley K. McGhay; Colleen Crowley; Kelly G. Puzio; Alexandra Matthews; Christina Grace; Laura Haden; Kristina Zurcher; Adam Manella; Denise M. Krotzer; Edward Dawson; Karen Lorenz; Annie Thompson; Anne Anderson; Allyson Luck; Meggan Newland; Kristina Peterson; Colleen Conway; Erin Kappler; Ed Dawson; Melissa Radey; Kathleen Scheibel; Kristen Doyle; Laura Anne Weiler; Courtney McDonough; Frank Chetalo; Katie Caspersen; Meghan Fitzgerald; Ryan Furmick; Tom Moran; Janine Bemasere; Sheryl Hahn; Tonya Lentzo; Marty Moran; Kathleen Sclef; Lindsey Hamilton; Lesley Belden; Beth Wladyka; Shaye Loughlin; Tara Lynn Jewett; Nora Mahoney; Malin Stearns; Sara Jost; Corinne Mahoney; Andrea Allocco; Allison Fashek; Jeffrey J.

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