WICKED LOVING LIES by ROSEMARY ROGERS 667 pages. Avon. $1.95.
Flickering torchlights and wine forced between her lips .. . With a feeling of shock she found her thighs nudged apart .. . There was a stabbing shaft of agony. Her last thought, as she slipped into a state halfway between sleep and unconsciousness was, "And I don't even know his name."
Millions of readers do, and they utter it with a masochistic tremolo last in fashion when lovestruck ladies knelt before candlelit glossies of Rudolph Valentino carrying a horsewhip. The cute brute of the moment is Dominic Challenger, hero of a new novel called Wicked Loving Lies that sold close to 3 million copies in the first month of publication and forms the leading edge of a new wave of mass literary entertainment. Abandoned by Hollywood as too corny and too expensive to produce, shunned by television as unsuitable for the small screen, the costume epic is taking over the bookstalls. Not since the desperate '30s and wartime '40s brought forth Anthony Adverse, Gone With the Wind and Forever Amber have U.S. readers attempted collective escape into the past on such a scale. In 1976 U.S. softcover publishers issued more than 150 historical novels, many of them as paperback originals, and sold better than 40 million copies —about two books a second. In 1977 sales are expected to improve.
The new upsurge of historicals, not surprisingly, is a women's movement: as always, 98% of the people who read paperback historicals and almost all the people who write them are female. Fawcett Books publishes 14 historical romancers, all women, whose books sold 6 million copies in 1976. Bantam's Barbara Cartland, 75, the grandma of the genre and a one-woman fiction factory who can dictate a 180-page book in seven days, has 212 titles to her credit. Last year she wrote 21 love stories of beribboned yore in which, as usual, all the heroines remained virgins to the end.
But it is the "Avon Ladies," as they are known in the trade, who have struck the richest vein. In 1971 Editor Nancy Coffey of Hearst's Avon Books found in her "slush pile" of unsolicited manuscripts an interminable 800-page tome about love in the midst of the American Revolution by a 35-year-old New Jersey housewife named Kathleen E. Woodiwiss. Published in 1972 as The Flame and the Flower, it has sold an astounding 2,348,000 copies —more than enough to convince Avon executives that millions of women readers were yearning for "frequent long vacations from the 20th century."
Rough Diamond. Avon has supplied them. In addition to Author Woodiwiss, Editor Coffey has discovered Laurie McBain, a 26-year-old Smith graduate whose 428-page Devil's Desire has sold 1,268,000 copies, and Joyce Verrette, a former NBC secretary whose 475-page Dawn of Desire has sold 150,000 more than that. But the biggest discovery was made late in 1973 when a rough diamond as big as the Ritz dropped through Avon's transom.