The name James Lear came from a combination of my own middle name and the surname of my favourite Eurodisco star, Amanda Lear, to whom I have occasionally claimed to be married. I chose to publish my erotic novels under a pseudonym for the simple reason that, when The Low Road came out, I was earning a substantial part of my income from the BBC, and I feared that if the Corporation knew what I was doing with my other hand, it might stop commissioning me. Many male American writers have served an apprenticeship writing dirty stories, among them the crime writer Lawrence Block who, as Jill Emerson, turned out lesbian porn in the Sixties. Pauline Réage, author of the deeply filthy Histoire d'O, was in reality the translator and editorial secretary Anne Desclos, who wrote the novel as a bet. Horror queen Anne Rice wrote copious amounts of sadomasochistic erotica as A N Roquelaure – and her other novels still get made into movies starring Tom Cruise. I'm by no means the first literary author to dabble in pornography. Like her, a growing number of writers are creating one-person porno cottage industries. Hyperactive New Yorker Rachel Kramer Bussel, a Penthouse contributing editor, has edited 20 erotic anthologies, contributed to about 100 more, and writes a regular sex column for the Village Voice. In America, there are writers who make a very good living out of nothing but erotic literature. There are specialists in sub-genres like crime porn, horror porn, fetish and historical. There are Surrey housewives turning out explicit male homosexual porn. It's a field dominated by women, who approach any and every kink with gusto. If the readers are diverse, the writers are even more so. One man is good, two men are better." Another woman recounted how she enjoyed my books at bedtime, and then, when the lights went out, pounced on her (presumably grateful) husband to put her reading into practice. As one (straight, female) James Lear fan wrote, "I like reading about sex, and I like men. Women read about men, men read about women, everyone gets off on everyone else and nobody cares about categories. In the world of literary fiction, an author's sexual preference has a massive impact on the way his or her books are marketed, reviewed and sold in porn nobody cares much. A lively blogging community reviews and discusses the latest releases with a healthy lack of pigeonholing.
Thanks to networking sites like MySpace, writers can market their work to its target audience – and, if you can't find a publisher, who cares? You can publish it yourself, either in print or online. The internet is largely to thank for the rise of erotic literature it's easier, and less potentially embarrassing, to buy dirty books from Amazon than from your local Waterstone's (who don't stock them anyway). There's an alternative constellation of literary stars in the world of porn – people who will never get invited to Hay, but who enjoy bigger sales than their legit counterparts. James Lear's most enthusiastic fans are straight women, who love reading about male/male sex. Books sell in large quantities – The Back Passage is now in its fourth reprint – and are gobbled up by extremely diverse audiences. Pornographic fiction, erotica, "one-handed reading", call it what you will, is a publishing parallel universe. Then Zipper Books ceased publication, and there the story might have ended – but for the fact that James Lear – my "nom de porn" – had developed a life of his own. It took longer, because I took a great deal more care over it, and again, it enjoyed brisk sales. The Low Road sold its edition quickly, and I was asked for another – this time a steamy backstage drama modelled on Gerald du Maurier's Trilby, entitled The Palace of Varieties. I tossed it off in about a month, and it was duly published by the gay porn imprint Zipper Books.
"It's easy to get published, and you sell a lot of books." As these are the only words that a writer ever really wants to hear, I rushed home and embarked without much thought on a filthy homosexual rewrite of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, entitled The Low Road. "Have you ever thought of writing porn?" he asked. It was a fairly typical outpouring of frustration and incomprehension at the state of British publishing. A few years ago, I was complaining to a fellow writer about my inability to find a publisher for my second novel.
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