The 'classic commercial writer'

I have just finished reading Andrew Wilson's enjoyable new biography of Harold Robbins, cheekily titled Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex (2007). I had thoroughly enjoyed Wilson's earlier effort on the great Patricia Highsmith (Beautiful Shadow) and this was another fast but entertaining read.

Most people who read fiction for enjoyment would have come across a Robbins novel at some point in their lives. Some would have been tempted to read at least a few of his enormously popular potboilers with their garish names and seedy connotations. Even in India, where reading trends appear and disappear quickly, Robbins' books remain almost as popular now as they were in the 1970s and 1980s.

"The godfather of the airport novel" was just one of the many nicknames that was attached to Robbins. Airport novels are exactly that - one picks them up at an airport bookstore, reads them during the waiting period for the flight and then chucks them away or store them in a dusty cupboard to be forgotten forever. They are expected to have no lasting literary or artistic value. They will win no literary prizes for great prose or flights of imagination. Robert Ludlum, Sydney Sheldon, Arthur Hailey - these are all classic examples of highly popular airport novelists. But, even among these masters of pulp fiction, Robbins reigned supreme.

By the early 1970s, Robbins was probably the world's best-selling author. He published over 20 books which were translated into 32 languages and sold over 750 million copies. Wilson goes into Robbins' colourful life in detail - how he made up elaborate stories about his early life, how he made and spent around US$50 million during his 81 years, his non-stop womanising and gambling, his rampant use of recreational drugs, his famous parties and orgies, his relationships with celebrities and fellow writers, his up-market pads in the US and France, his 14 cars, his luxury yacht and, of course, why he was such a publishing phenomenon (in the paperback sphere). It is an extrardinary story, rivalling the outlandish plots in any of Robbins' books.

Interestingly, Wilson makes it clear that Robbins was a pretty decent wordsmith at least in the early part of his literary career. His A Stone for Danny Fisher (1952) was praised by critics (who later made a point to bash his every best-seller with glee) - it was later the basis for the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole (1958). Most of Robbins' novels made it to the big screen and television, with varying degrees of success. Many of them were modelled on real-life larger-than-life characters - for instance, The Carpetbaggers (1961), one of his most popular books, was loosely based on the life of tycoon Howard Hughes.

While not even his numerous fans would claim Robbins was a great writer, what few would deny was that he was a born storyteller. Spinning tales (some tall, some short) was what he did best. Robbins could also write very fast during his peak years - he would type out a best-seller in just three months and then take the rest of the year off to party and enjoy life. Because of his prolific output, he was dubbed the "man with the smoking typewriter".

But, towards the end of his life, Robbins grew bored with the writing process. He became sloppy and careless - the same adjectives started to be used in consecutive sentences, in many cases. In one of his later novels, the characters in the first half of the story didn't seem to have much resemblance to the characters in the second half! When his publisher pointed out this discrepancy out to Robbins, the writer reportedly replied that he couldn't care less - his readers would never notice such fine details, he predicted. And that was exactly what happened - not one of his fans wrote in to complain ...

Robbins' decline started in the early 1980s - he suffered a stroke that badly affected his writing and general health. His later books consequently suffered and, to keep the cheques coming in, he had to seek the help of ghost-writers to finish his final few novels. It was not probably the way Robbins would have seen his final years played out but then he never had any illusions about his literary legacy. Robbins never wrote a classic in his life but he could be called the "classic commercial writer" - someone who wrote to entertain the common man and whose main aim was to make as much money as possible from that process.