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Judith Krantz, Best-Selling Author and Journalist, Dies at 91

Judith Krantz, Whose Tales of Sex and Shopping Sold Millions, Dies at 91. Margalit Fox from The New York Times has her obituary:

Judith Krantz, who almost single-handedly turned the sex-and-shopping genre of fiction into the stuff of high commerce, making her one of the world’s best-selling novelists if not one of the most critically acclaimed, died on Saturday at her home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. She was 91.

Her publicist, John Tellem, confirmed the death.

Though she did not publish her first book until she was 50, Ms. Krantz reigned for decades afterward as the international queen of poolside reading. Her 10 novels — beginning with “Scruples” in 1978 and ending with “The Jewels of Tessa Kent” in 1998 — have together sold more than 85 million copies in more than 50 languages.

Most became television movies or mini-series, many of which were produced by Ms. Krantz’s husband, Steve Krantz.

What drove Ms. Krantz’s books to the tops of best seller lists time and again was a formula that she honed to glittering perfection: fevered horizontal activities combined with fevered vertical ones — the former taking place in sumptuously appointed bedrooms and five-star hotels, the latter anywhere with a cash register and astronomical price tags.

A hallmark of the formula was that it embraced sex and shopping in almost equal measure, with each recounted in modifier-laden detail.

“Recklessly she flung herself out of her clouds of chiffon plumage only to appear in her resplendent flesh, lying totally naked on a pile of horse blankets, laughing softly as she watched Stash Valensky, momentarily bewildered and taken by surprise, struggle out of his dinner jacket,” Ms. Krantz writes in her second novel, “Princess Daisy” (1980). “Soon, very soon, he was as naked as she. He savaged her abandoned flesh with an urgency, almost a cannibalism, he hadn’t known in years.”

Elements of Ms. Krantz’s formula had existed piecemeal in earlier fiction for women, conspicuously in the work of Jacqueline Susann , the author of “Valley of the Dolls” (1966) and other steamy novels of the 1960s and ’70s. But Ms. Krantz was almost certainly the first writer to combine the steam and the shopping in such opulent profusion — and to do so all the way to the bank.

Read full post in The New York Times

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