Bedtime stories

It was six years ago that I first dipped a toe in the murky waters of literary pornography. Unable to get a deal on my second “proper” novel, I knocked out a quick -- and extremely filthy -- gay reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Kidnapped” (which is still, I believe, the most homoerotic book ever written) and had it published in Britain by the now-defunct Zipper Books. “The Low Road,” as it was called, sold briskly, and another was commissioned. This time, I gave the same treatment to George Du Maurier’s 1894 novel, “Trilby.”

Pornography was a world I knew very little about at that time. Dirty books, erotic literature, one-handed reading -- call it what you will -- is the last great taboo of the publishing world. Bookstores and supermarkets are happy to stock titles in which children are abused, women victimized and men brutalized, but if you look for books in which consenting adults enjoy each other for the sexual entertainment of readers, you’ll be lucky if you find a few dog-eared copies hidden away at the back, near the bathroom. Erotic books don’t get reviewed, and you won’t be seeing their authors on “Oprah” any time soon.

The Internet, however, tells a different story. Erotics outsell literary fiction by vast margins, and, freed from the embarrassment of walking up to the counter at Borders or Wal-Mart, readers adopt a pick-and-mix approach. Straight women read gay male porn; straight men read lesbian erotica; everyone seems to enjoy everyone else, and the publishers and authors thrive.

After my second dirty book appeared, Zipper’s parent company closed -- leaving Britain without a dedicated lesbian and gay publishing house, as it remains -- and there the story might have ended. But James Lear, my porn alter ego, just wouldn’t lie down, and before I knew it I had another novel -- an Agatha Christie-style country house murder mystery called “The Back Passage” -- ready to go. No British publisher would touch gay erotic material, but it received a warm welcome from San Francisco-based Cleis Press, which brought it out in 2006. It’s been on the bestseller lists ever since and is now in its fifth edition.

Now, “James Lear” and “Rupert Smith” publish more or less alternately. “He” outsells “me” by a healthy margin. He’s been nominated for awards. There’s even a film treatment in the pipeline.

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.