The L.A. Novelist Who Doesn’t Get Her Due

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Jackie Collins, who wrote flashy, sex-filled Hollywood thrillers, isn’t often thought of as a canonical Los Angeles novelist.

I didn’t regard her as one, at least—until I read Sophie Gilbert’s essay about Collins , the latest entry in The Atlantic ’s series “ The Writer’s Way .” Collins wrote shiny 1980s “bonkbusters,” as one critic called them; in her novels, including her breakthrough, Hollywood Wives , she turned gossip about scheming producers and backbiting socialites into gripping, soapy dramas long before reality shows made such stories commonplace.

Until I learned more about these works, they felt to me like a surface treatment of the complex city best captured by Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Octavia Butler, and Eve Babitz.

It didn’t help that they were set in Beverly Hills, which, in my nearly five years living in L.A., I knew mostly as a nexus of unaffordable baubles and posh podiatrists’ offices.

But Gilbert’s exploration of the writer and the enclave made me realize that her novels fit right into the city’s long literary tradition.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic ’s Books section: The sadness of being the “Last Man” Cereal has strayed too far .

The novel that looks death in the eye “ Abstract ,” a poem by Jane Hirshfield In addition to creating steely characters who advanced the idea of middle age as a woman’s powerful prime, Collins was a “devoted” fan of Mickey Spillane, the hardest of hard-boiled-detective novelists, and the influence of noir comes through in her treatment of Beverly Hills: “Jackie genuinely loved the neighborhood for its clean white lines and endless sky,” Gilbert writes, “but she was also drawn to everything it contained beneath the surface: its roiling currents of fame, power, and degradation.” Beneath the shimmering surfaces, dark shadows always lurked.

“Sunshine or Noir?” Mike Davis asked in his nonfiction masterpiece about Los Angeles, City of Quartz .

The binary of light and dark is ingrained in the L.A. canon; it animates not only Chandler’s literary potboilers, but also Babitz’s sad-girl stories, Butler’s numinous dystopias, and Didion’s alienated meditations.

Collins was, like these writers, an insider with an outsider’s soul.

“I don’t live the Hollywood lifestyle,” she told an interviewer (while sitting poolside at her stark-white mansion, mind you).

“I move in it.