Melanie Blake's Reading List

"Oh my goodness, Lace. If you only read one book from this list, it’s this one. I want you to read all of them, but if you’re only going to pick one, then go for Lace . It’s the biggest whodunnit of all, but in a way that you could never have expected. It’s about three girls who go to a Swiss boarding school and discover boys. They’re the best of friends, and one of them gets pregnant. They all talk about it collectively and it’s written in such a way that, as the reader, you don’t which one of them it is. It’s such a clever book, so well written, I don’t think I’ve read anything like it either before or after. They make a pact that they’re going to give up the child and that whichever one of them does well and has the money to bring the child up first will go and get her. Then they give the child away. Each one of them ends up being very successful. One is the editor of a top magazine. One of them is the boss of a huge charity and another one is married to a count. They’re all huge, but none of them pick up the child. It drives them apart. They’re not in touch, really, anymore. Then the plot slips to the daughter, Lili, who ends up becoming a famous porn star (the book was ahead of its time because what are we living in now? Pornland). She tracks them down, all three of them, and brings them together in a hotel room in New York. That leads to one of the most infamous and memorable lines of all time, ‘Which one of you bitches is my mother?’ That’s the jaw drop because we still don’t know. And they leave the room and they all go off without telling her. Then there’s a knock on the door, and we find out. I always forget who it is. I’ve read the book and watched the miniseries so many times, and I always remember to forget. Then, when she turns up, you go like, ‘Oh, it was her. ‘ Then you get flashbacks and so on and you go on to Lace 2. God, I love that book."

"I remember this book having such an impact on me. It’s about transformation and revenge, which is a theme that seems to be developing here. These books are all about wronged women and revenge, which probably tells you a lot about these authors. It’s about not taking things lying down. The leading female in this book is not very attractive. She has a relatively attractive husband who doesn’t treat her very well and gets tempted away by a romantic novelist. The wife then just goes on this absolute mission to destroy both of them, at the cost of actually abandoning her children, which is a bit questionable. [SPOILER ALERT] I still remember the book to this day. I don’t want to spoil it for readers who haven’t read it, but she has surgery to actually look exactly like the woman her husband left her for. She doesn’t stop until she’s got this woman’s life. It’s one of the most remarkable stories ever, and the TV dramatization won just about every award there was. So we have got a theme here, that these books are about wronged women getting revenge. Let’s see if it continues."

"This would be my second choice after Lace . If you want an easy read, go for this one—although it’s massive (also a word that she uses about Lysander, the main character). I love this story, and I love it to this day. I love the principal idea of it. I love everything about it, and I think they should redo it over and over again. As I said, what I like about Jilly Cooper’s books is that, as a working-class person from the wrong side of the tracks, you get taught to be able to connect with the upper classes. It’s not right, but it’s us and them. It’s like My Fair Lady. We’re Eliza Doolittle and unless we get taken over by Professor Higgins, we have nothing to do with them, and vice versa. Whereas Jilly Cooper books bring us together, because we really like the women. They’re troubled, and they’ve got problems like us. Just because they’ve got money and they have upper-crust accents doesn’t mean their lives are perfect. They’re not. This book is set in the countryside (it’s part of the Rutshire Chronicles ). It’s about this foppish, fit, gorgeous, rich-boy loser, of which I’ve met loads, and I’m sure you have too. Life is a charm for him, but he doesn’t do anything. He’s a playboy. So he ends up being cut off by his family because they think he’s not a good representative for them. He’s sent away from central London—where he’s been gallivanting and enjoying the naughty posh boy Annabel’s lifestyle—and they banish him to their country retreat. That’s the punishment. So he ends up in this sleepy village thinking, ‘What am I going to do here? It’s so boring.’ And then his best friend, Ferdi, comes down and says, ‘This place is a gold mine. Look around, all the women here, their husbands are cheating on them. Why don’t you teach them tennis but do deals with them? You can help them get their husbands interested in them again and make a lot of money.’ So that’s what Lysander ends up doing. It’s like a double bubble, because the women reinvent themselves. Marigold, for example, has become frumpy, she’s not really looking after herself anymore, but as she starts to train with Lysander… Obviously, he does shag them all because it’s a bonkbuster, but as soon as they start having rumpy pumpy with him, they start bringing themselves back to who they were originally. It makes all the husbands jealous and brings them back into line. It’s just great fun. It does exactly what it says on the tin."

"Yes, Hollywood Wives was one of her biggest hits. Hollywood Wives is, I would say, the closest thing to my books. It’s about Hollywood wives who are being left behind because their husbands are cheating. It’s about how these women re-empower themselves to get back on top and become the winners and either leave their husbands and take everything they’ve got or if they keep them, they’re the ones who are in control. They then become the powerhouses, and that is the moral of the story. These women don’t have to sit back and take it. We’re following a complete and utter pattern with these books. It’s funny how you don’t realize there is a theme until you start talking about them. Yes. Jilly’s is rural, and the sex is outrageous. Bonking in a hay barn is the equivalent of bonking in a penthouse in Manhattan—it’s just as extreme. I have had sex in a penthouse, but not a hay barn…I haven’t had that moment in a little village somewhere with the gorgeous Lysander. It’s on my list. The sex is explicit in all of them. Jilly Cooper sent me a card when I had a hit with Ruthless Women, saying, ‘Welcome to the bonking club.’ It’s like an official accreditation. Also, I only found out after she died, but apparently she said that I write just like her, only filthier. And I guess I would, because I’m a new generation. I also got an endorsement from Jackie Collins’s daughters, because I dedicated my book to her. I actually met Jackie, maybe nine days before she died. I got asked to write the foreword for Jackie’s reissues. That was a school-girl dream come true! The book that I read at school that made me believe that I could do all this has now got my name on it and my words next to hers. It’s crazy, isn’t it? These books are of their time. That’s their charm. My books are more outrageous because mine are of my time. I’ve lived and worked in the same places these books were based in. I’ve lived in the cutthroat, backstabbing, shagging, cheating world of show business for 25 years. I’ve been at the coalface in front of everything. I’ve seen it all. They say write about what you know, and I did."

"Dolly Rawlins is a mob wife. She’s married to Harry Rawlins, a gangster boss. She’s the main woman of all crime, but because she’s female, she doesn’t do any crime herself. None of the women do, they’re just the wives of the criminals, and they do as they’re told. The men are all very sexist. It’s very much that era of The Sweeney , “Hello me old China, shut it!” But then there’s a security van heist and things go wrong. Harry and his men are caught and some of them die. With Harry dead, Dolly—who in the screen adaptation is played by the wonderful Ann Mitchell—looks at his ledgers. She finds out about a robbery they had planned. She and the other widows have nothing now, so they decide to do the job themselves. They take it on, and they pull off this massive robbery. It’s just brilliant. It’s groundbreaking. It’s still fresh to this day. They just remade it a couple of years ago as a Hollywood movie. It was rubbish. I didn’t like it at all. But the point is, it’s still on the radar. But the original TV series, I must have watched 100 times and never got bored. It’s so good. Again, it’s about women taking control. It’s brilliant. It’s massively complicated, and it’s brilliant. There were two books, Widows and Widows’ Revenge and a later one called She’s Out. I get the chills just talking about it because we’d never seen or read that before. We never read about women who would get together and carry out a hardcore robbery with shotguns. I think they blow up a track and rob a train, which is how they transported all the money around in the old days. Widows has always been my favourite. I was actually on the set of Prime Suspect with Helen Mirren, but nothing compares to Widows. If you haven’t yet, watch Widows . Don’t even read the book. Go to the TV series because it’s faithful to the book, which a lot of them aren’t. Lynda La Plante wrote it and she also produced it with Verity Lambert. It was written, produced and made by women. Treat yourself to watching it: you will not forget it. You can tell I am not a woman who is grifting. I know my topic! And make sure you finish my book because it is brilliant, if I say so myself. When you know that you’re ending something, you give it your all. Vengeful Women is the last in the series so I put everything into the book, everything."