obituary
aka Jilly Cooper, queen of bonkbusters, horses, large bottoms and shagging.
RIP Jolly Sooper
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
Musings on the byways of popular culture
by 18 Comments
obituary
aka Jilly Cooper, queen of bonkbusters, horses, large bottoms and shagging.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
We will not see her like again.
I never met her in my bookselling days, but the Transworld reps all seemed to adore her. Possibly because she never forgot to send them a Valentine’s card.
Ian Rankin has named Rivals as his favourite book, and assured people he’s not joking. I’m not surprised. That’s the one I’ve read too, and the characters, background details and plotting over several hundred pages are superb.
Rivals is a brilliant book, a vivid, joyful sprawling epic, the best of the Rutshire books. Genuinely sad she’s gone – I saw her give a talk at the South Bank last year and she was on great form.
I never met her, but she seemed a jolly good sort.
Without her, the shelves of charity shops would be very different.
I believe Chazza was the title of the book she was writing when she died
RIP, Ms C
The TV adapt of Rivals in which she had a blink-and-you’ll-miss it cameo was hugely good fun
Oh I shall look out for Rivals then!
See also Jackie Collins. Both mistresses of the Bonkbuster. Never read either of them; not my kind of thing, but both seemed like good sorts.
Jackie C was always good value on a chat show as she was full of anecdotes about the (very) rich and famous, but sadly I thought that the only book of hers that I read, Rock Star, was pretty awful.
I read it after seeing her talk at the time about how much research she had done about the music biz, backstage shenanigans, etc. So upon reading it, hoping to learn some industry secrets, I was disappointed to see that anybody could have got the same “insights” by reading a few issues of Q, Vox, The Word, and maybe the NME.
Still, her books sold like particularly hot and spicy cakes, so she obviously knew what she was doing.
I was introduced to La Collins at a party by my then boss, Sonny Mehta. He was obviously in a mischievous mood. “I was just telling Jackie how much you like her books,” he said, and buggered off. Since I’d never read a word she’d written and was never likely to, this was a difficult conversation…
Particularly sad that she died after a fall, and so was completely unexpected.
I saw her once, years ago. One early evening walking under Admiralty Arch, She looked a million dollars in a very short but very elegant dress and on the arm of a much older man in white tie and tails.
I suspect they weren’t going to Garfunkels on Northumberland Avenue.
The much older man might have been her husband Leo Cooper, who was only 3 years older than her but looked a lot older. Or not.
That checks out, yes
I remember seeing the cover of Riders on the rack when I reported in for my paper round. It bothered me for reasons I didn’t quite understand at the time.
It appears that the hand has moved further up away from the buttock on later editions.
Oh yes. I was going on memory – for some reason I could remember it quite clearly.
One of two celebrities who have complained about something I’ve done at work:
I was working at HMV in Cheltenham a long time ago, and a set of Jilly Cooper branded classical CDs had been launched. Like any right thinking person I buried them at the back of the shop, only she came in looking for them and complained to her record company that they weren’t prominent enough.
As the record company were probably deducting from her royalties for “marketing” and presumably paying HMV something out of that for “store positioning”, she was probably within her rights.