I was lucky enough to meet Jackie Collins about a week and a half before she sadly passed away. It was wonderful to see her in the flesh as Jackie Collins is somebody that I have felt connected to throughout my entire reading life. Jackie Collins was the author, above all others, who has constantly kept me entertained for nearly four decades. Her stories of the rich and the famous, their glamour-dipped lives and their vulnerabilities were the first books I ever read in my adult life. My mother had read one and I remember picking it up from her bedside table and reading the cover lines and thinking it sounded beyond fabulous. I must have been about 12 and the book was Jackie's first ever novel, the ground breaking The World Is Full Of Married Men, a novel set in the swinging sixties and full of sensational scandal. Sex, sin and a man getting actually what he deserved - his come-uppance for being a cheating swine. I found it wondrously rich, decadent, salacious, scandalous and a read that I had to turn the pages so quick for that my fingertips began to burn. I loved it and I have been reading her sagas ever since.
Deadly Obsession
I have always been a fan of Jackie's on two levels. One as a reader, loving her beautifully crafted tales, but secondly as an aspiring novelist. People know that I now too write 'Jackie' style books, 'bonkbusters' they seem to call them (a phrase that Jackie hated). When I started writing my first, Trinity, it was Jackie's books that inspired me and they still do to this day. I too wanted to create a world of escapism where readers would want to immerse themselves in a tapestry of love, lust, glamour, greed and glory, all led by a host of fabulous women. My latest, Deadly Obsession, typifies this.
I count my blessings to have met Jackie, a truly remarkable talent, but I am also thankful that I can savour her words for forever and a day. Her legacy lives on through her writing, through her characters and through the action that was jam-packed, cover to cover. To have my writing compared to hers is nothing short of amazing, but to me I agree with something that JC said when I met her - 'nobody writes a Jackie Collins book'. She was so right. I write 'Nigel May' books and if people find them anywhere near as satisfying as I do Jackie's then I am truly blessed. Long live the glamour!! And Jackie will always be the Queen!