London - Oh, no. Oh yes, yes, yes! Brace yourselves, ladies. Here we go again.
Next month a sexy new book called Maestra will be published - a decadent tale of lust and lacy underwear, complete with a panting female protagonist, which threatens to make Fifty Shades Of Grey look like a spinster’s tea party in a cheerless church hall.
Written by a female historian, it features anti-heroine Judith Rashleigh, a young woman who likes to attend sex parties wearing not much more that a drop of scented oil and a trace of a smirk.
Judith is the kind of seductress who can remove a gentleman’s trouser belt with her teeth and who believes that the trick to conquering men is to “make yourself into whatever it is they can’t quite admit to themselves they want you to be”.
She also has the sleuthing talents of a max-strength Miss Marple, noting that one man she meets is “too dapper to be anything but sleazy”. She suspects another conquest is not quite what he seems, shortly before she kills him. What can I say? Judith’s a bit like a rogue, sex-mad James Bond, only not quite so caring and nurturing.
Rashleigh’s creator is an academic called Lisa Hilton, who writes under the name of LS Hilton. She is a glamorous Oxford graduate known for writing well-reviewed, scholarly biographies about significant figures such as Elizabeth I and Nancy Mitford. Unfortunately, they don’t sell as well as a rip-roaring read featuring a murderess skipping across the fleshpots of Europe, plunging knives into carotid arteries as she goes. Judith is steely, Judith is angry, but mostly Judith just likes rough sex.
“Women don’t need saccharine sex. Nobody ever asked James Bond about his emotions,” said Hilton in an interview with The Times over the weekend, in which she admitted she wrote Maestra as a kind of “revenge fiction” for being bullied at school.
Like Judith, she comes from Liverpool and knows all about trying to fit into the gilded worlds of London and elsewhere. She says she attended sex parties to research her novel, but wouldn’t say if she joined in or not.
After dusty years in academe, she has already become the kind of literary pin-up who poses nearly naked for magazine shoots and has sold her film rights to Hollywood.
Naturally, she is keen to portray her heroine Judith as a feminist icon, but I wonder if Hilton’s vivid depiction of a woman who behaves like the worst kind of man is something we should admire? If this is new sexual liberation for women, count me out.
By page two - two! - of Maestra, our dauntless heroine is at the kind of orgy where naked waitresses serve hot lobster pastries along with small glasses of wine that are almost as flinty as Judith’s heart.
The canapés have barely been digested before the candles are snuffed and the real purpose of the evening begins. “Her robe tumbled about her legs,” begins one throbbing sentence, as Judith eats some strawberries and feels “taut”. It goes without saying that she makes her excuses - and stays.
A month before it hits the bookshelves, Maestra is already causing tremors of pleasure in an industry desperate to find a successor to the hugely successful Fifty Shades of Grey franchise which whip-cracked around the globe in an orgy of sales five years ago.
Back then, a largely unsuspecting public had no idea that something called mommy porn was about to conquer the world.
With her reams of badly written, bondage-loving fan fiction, somehow fashioned into a bestselling trilogy, author EL James started a whole new market in mid-market erotica. Her books were sold in supermarkets alongside dishwasher tablets and biscuits; her words were turned into a Hollywood film, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and starring Jamie Dornan as the wealthy, domineering billionaire Christian Grey.
It seemed to spark an appetite for popular fiction featuring the kind of morally dubious heroines we would admire from a distance; strong but flawed women whose motives were always open to question. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl begat The Girl On The Train by British author Paula Hawkins - both featuring murder, sex and female ambition bound up in one dangerous literary package.
Yet perhaps none of these comes on quite as strong as Maestra. Here, among the 340 blinging pages of sex, cocktails, yachts and murder, is a story destined to scorch into the bestseller charts, then blaze on to film screens. And I have a sinking feeling that when the body count starts to rise and Judith begins to eke out her revenge, women in cinemas will not scream - they will cheer instead.
The book has already been sold in 35 countries and the film rights have been snapped up by Amy Pascal, producer of the forthcoming all-female Ghostbusters. The book will be adapted by Erin Cressida Wilson, the current go-to screenwriter, who has just completed the film version of last year’s bestseller, The Girl On The Train.
There is much to cheer. Maestra is a dark thriller - the first book in a planned trilogy - set in London’s art world and among Europe’s flash new billionaires who move in shoals from St Tropez to Portofino.
It is sharp and extremely well written, with knowing references to everything from designer clothes to glossy magazines. There are even moments of black humour. Judith is the kind of serial killer who feels ‘less guilty about murdering a man who reads Jeffrey Archer for pleasure’.
Yet it has troubling undertones. Whereas Fifty Shades seemed to be aimed at women who were bored and housewives who were tired of sex and longing for a bit of harmless suburban fantasy, Maestra is for the generation weaned on match.com and dating apps, in a world where online porn and sexual gratification are summoned at the click of a mouse by sharp-edged modern women who believe monogamy is for squares.
Judith feels cleansed by having sex with strangers, sometimes more than one stranger at once.
In many ways, Maestra follows the Pretty Woman narrative. In the famous film, Julia Roberts plays a gorgeous, wholesome prostitute and audiences are encouraged to believe that sleeping with rich men to get what you want is an acceptable pastime. Then and now, many feel it is not a career path to be encouraged or glamorised.
Certainly, Judith must endure some pretty horrific sexual encounters along the way and Hilton does not spare us the details. Her heroine copes by having a restorative glass of cognac or a new handbag from Chanel to buck herself up. In real life, I’m not sure the recovery is so simple.
Hilton argues that in crime fiction, terrible things happen to women’s bodies, but it is still verboten to show a girl with a cheerful attitude to having unusual types of sex.
It was interesting, though, that despite her sexual bravado, she refused to tell reporters her age. The unmarried mother, who has a ten-year-old daughter, would only admit to being around 40.
Whatever you might think, be prepared for an onslaught while Hilton prepares herself to become the spokeswoman for a new kind of unabashed female sexuality that’s even more upfront and unapologetic than the last one.
In the coming weeks, Maestra’s distinctive cover, with its teasing, oblique imagery suggestive of intimate female anatomy, will become the focal point of a national advertising campaign featuring railway station billboards, posters on buses and no escape.
For the next six weeks, lorries with the book’s cover plastered along their sides will truck up and down Britain’s motorway system, pumping home the message that this is not a book that can be ignored. Don’t be scared, girls!
Millions will see Maestra as nothing more than literary Viagra, featuring a beautiful young woman just trying to make her way in the world. Or is Judith Rashleigh something much, much more sinister?
* Maestra, by L.S. Hilton, published by Zaffre on March 10.
Daily Mail