Is gratuitous salaciousness a crime?
One of the more controversial climaxes of the publishing industry year used to be the annual Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award — which appears to have taken a permanent vacation in 2020 when the magazine claimed people had been ‘subjected to too many bad things’ during the Covid pandemic.
Will it be making a comeback soon? Or has the powerful click-bait tool, originally set up in 1993 to mock literary novels featuring ‘unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature’, lost its libido and cutting edge?
Although past winners include Melvyn Bragg, Richard E Grant, Nicholas Royle, Norman Mailer, Ben Okri, Tom Wolfe and Morrissey, the annual naming and shaming of serious authors had become far less relevant than its nineties and noughties heydays.
At its peak, the Bad Sex award was great PR, guaranteed to generate plenty of column inches. A nudge-nudge, wink-wink joke from the bods at the Literary Review mag to share with their mates in the publishing industry. What’s not to like about posh grub, a pint of stout and a glass of wine in a drinking hole like the aptly named In & Out (Naval & Military) Club in St James’s Square, London?
The only folks embarrassed by the literary jamboree jape were the authors pilloried out of context for daring to write badly about sex. Crime writers for some reason escaped censure, perhaps an indication of the London-centric publishing industry’s own class system where they aren’t taken seriously (that’s an article for another day).
In the real book buying world, sex sells, irrespective of genre. Back in the 1960s, DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover sold 200,000 copies on the day of publication a month after the jury in a famous court case said explicit descriptions of disappointing sex littered with four-letter words like f**k, sh*t, tw*t and sl*t weren’t obscene.
Fast forward several decades, and actress Gillian Anderson’s brilliantly marketed book, Want, was an instant No 1 bestseller this Autumn. Billed as a homage to Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, Gillian’s book showcases women anonymously describing their imagined sexual encounters. The Erotic Review, relaunched in Spring 2024 with a mission to explore desire, says it is considering starting a Good Sex prize to celebrate rather than denigrate limp writing about acts of sex in fiction.
So, as I asked earlier, has the ‘bad sex’ joke finally worn off?
Author Julian Gough thought so several years ago, when, writing in the Guardian in 2019, he said the ‘bad sex award’s ‘basic premise — that authors are adding unnecessary and lazy sex to increase sales — is not just wrong, it's the reverse of the truth. The award very deliberately avoids shortlisting actual pornography or erotica and instead targets authors who are trying to be honest about desire and sex, however distasteful the results may be.’
More recently in 2022, London-based author and creative writing lecturer, Jonathan Gibbs, agreed with Julian’s premise. He wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that ‘good sex writing does exist – and here, sticking to the parameters of the award, I essentially mean the sex scene in the literary novel or short story, ignoring outright pornography or its kissing cousin, erotica. Which is not to say the scene should not be arousing, but its primary object should be to serve the story. The writing should teach us about the characters. Ideally, it should teach us about sex, too.’
Both writers highlight the challenge to writers and their publishers. There is no reason why writing about sex should be a taboo subject just to avoid ridicule from the likes of the Literary Review journalists. But writers have a responsibility to themselves and their craft to think carefully about inserting gratuitously salacious sex acts into their stories if it doesn’t drive narrative or reveal stuff about characters.
Although my new crime thriller, After the Bridge, has hard-hitting adult themes such as sexual assault, attempted date-rape, self-harm and incest, I hope I’ve managed to steer clear of any gratuitous salaciousness. Even as a self-confessed hard-boiled crime writer, I should never glorify violence, sexual abuse and aggression, an ethos echoed belatedly by film producer Ray Burdis who said in the Guardian last month that he regretted glamorising The Krays in his eponymous movie and is making another film that will portray the mobsters as they really were.
It is a precarious balancing act ensuring a hard-boiled novel doesn’t become a decaffeinated cosy crime story. If in doubt follow the late great Elmore Leonard’s ‘less is more’ recommendation when he said avoid detailed descriptions of characters in crime fiction in his 10 rules of writing. Writing about sex should be as simple as the rest of your prose. Anything else runs the risk of gratuitous salaciousness.
And on that red-light warning, maybe the Literary Review judges should consider renaming and rebranding their award, celebrating the most gratuitously salacious novel of the year rather than simply sneering at bad sex in books.
This article was originally published in the February 2025 edition of the Crime Writers Association Red Herring magazine.
