It might seem like a stretch to claim that everything I’ve ever learned I learned from bonkbusters, and yet in an odd way it’s true. Krantz was the “queen of the bonkbuster”, those glitzy novels with their gaudy covers and snappy often one-word titles – Scruples, Lace, Rivals – that dominated commercial fiction in the late 1970s and 1980s, spinning stories of fabulous lives lived at full tilt and stuffed full of sex, secrets and shopping.Īs a teenager, I thrilled to those books: to Krantz’s Scruples, in which her formidable heroine, Billy Ikehorn (nee Winthrop), essentially anticipated the hipster shopping experience by about two decades, opening the shop that gave the book its title, a perfect pleasuredome with an on-site bar in which women tried on shoes and sipped champagne while their husbands drank beer and played backgammon to Shirley Conran’s Lace, every 80s schoolgirl’s most feverish fantasy (just ask them about the notorious goldfish scene), in which four women meet at an elite Swiss finishing school before going on to conquer the worlds of fashion, publishing, journalism and (more randomly) charity fundraising and to Jilly Cooper’s Rivals, which gave the genre a very British spin by having her heroes compete for an ITV franchise while fitting in the odd game of naked tennis.
I t was hard not to see the death of Judith Krantz at the age of 91 last week as the end of an era.
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