Bedtime stories

The commercial success of erotic literature was the first of many surprises in this journey into a publishing parallel universe. As my Agatha Christie spoof and last year's follow-up -- a same-sex, mixed-race take on the Civil War -- reached ever more readers, I went on to MySpace to do some audience research. Many of them, as I expected, were gay men. But far more were women, most of them straight. This was a shock. "Why?" I asked. "Because I like men," replied one female fan, "and as far as I'm concerned, one man good, two men better." Another related how James Lear was now her favorite bedtime reading -- and after lights out, she jumped onto her (presumably) grateful husband to put theory into practice.

Women aren't just reading porn; they're writing it too. In fact, female writers dominate the field, and these are not "romantic lady novelists." They are writing hard-core sex -- straight, gay and everything in between. There are thriving sub-genres: One writer I met on MySpace does a brisk trade in werewolf porn.

The fact that erotica sells so much, and so widely, suggests that it's really just like any other type of genre fiction -- doing a job for an audience that knows what it wants and where to get it. Crime, horror, sci-fi and romance authors set out their stalls in very similar fashions, offering a mystery, or a fright or a flight into fantasy. The porn writer's offer is just as simple: I'll deliver two good orgasms per chapter (or one, for readers over 40), along with a rattling good plot that will get you to the next sex scene, some likable characters and a big dollop of humor.

The main reason erotic literature remains in a publishing limbo is that it's specifically designed as an inspiration to masturbation. Literary fiction is full of sex scenes at least as dirty as anything I've ever written, but they're "justified" by other considerations. Porn relies on no such subterfuge. Sex in a James Lear novel is there to excite, not to illuminate some grungy corner of the human psyche. It's recreational -- and recreational sex has always been suspect.

When I started writing dirty books, I used a "nom de porn" because, at the time, I was working for the BBC and feared that if the Corporation knew what I was doing, it might terminate my employment. I'm not the first to write filth under a flag of convenience. Anne Rice, for instance, produced S&M porn under the name A.N. Roquelaure, and it didn't do her any harm. Her novels still get made into movies starring Tom Cruise. In the '60s, hard-boiled crime writer Lawrence Block turned out lesbian erotica under the name Jill Emerson.

One disgruntled customer on Amazon described James Lear's books as "smut with pretensions," and I think this is actually quite a good summary of the Lear method. The books are unashamedly smut; the "pretensions" are the added extras. Yes, I offer high literary production values. But as far as I can see, the only difference between a dirty book with literary bits and a literary book with dirty bits is the order of the words.