How Melanie Blake is the best author of steamy romance novels since Jilly Cooper

After the sad loss of national treasure Jilly Cooper this month, Melanie Blake is the last "queen of the bonkbuster" standing. Or should that be the last one reclining in a luxurious four-poster bed with a come-hither smile playing around her pouting lips? Cooper, Jackie Collins, and Shirley Conran have all gone, but relative new girl Melanie, with two Sunday Times Top Ten best-sellers under her Louis Vuitton belt, publishes the third instalment of her Falcon Bay trilogy, Vengeful Women, next month. Jilly adored her writing, dubbing it, "Just like me but filthy - Melanie is carrying the torch for a new generation."

Jackie Collins's daughters have said she would have loved me too, says Mel, 49. "I don't know if the Queen has read my books, but she loved Jilly, so I suspect she'd lap them up." Blue-eyed blonde Blake isn't sure about the bonkbuster label though. "I just heard a professor of female erotica tell Jeremy Vine the word is a misnomer, because these books are hard to write well." And when they are written well, they sell like ice cream in a heatwave. To date Melanie has sold one million books across all formats. The curvaceous agent-turned-novelist has proved remarkably prescient. Her 2022 book Guilty Women - the second in the trilogy - predicted the collapse of TV soaps years before Neighbours was cancelled. Blake adapted her debut novel, 2018's The Thunder Girls about an all-woman pop group, into a hit stage musical featuring EastEnders's Carol Harrison, Coleen Nolan, and Coronation Street's Bev Callard. When journalists asked why there was no sex it, Melanie half-joked about writing something filthier. It was Harrison who persuaded her to pen Ruthless Women. The first part of the trilogy sold a quarter of a million copies in the first month alone. "Carol inspired the whole thing. In lockdown she said, 'Why don't you write that book, the dirty one? Write it about soaps and the way we've all been had over."

Had over how? "When I wrote Ruthless Women, EastEnders stole the storyline from my book. I went to lunch with an EastEnders executive with Carol and pitched the whole idea of how he could bring back her character, aka Louse Raymond, and he used it without bringing her back...EastEnders executives are the worst for dishonesty."

Speaking to Melanie is an experience. Words flow out of her unfiltered, like a burst dam, and the most repeated phrase in our conversation is "Don't print this." With her designer bags, fake furs and real diamonds, she looks like she has just swept in from TV's Dynasty. Melanie has the strength of Joan Collins's Alexis Colby - and her amorous appetite. "Lots of my own experiences are in the book," she admits. "I like rough and tough guys half my age. I've broken more younger men's hearts than anyone I know. They always want me to stay. Once you've been with older powerful women, younger women lose their appeal. Men want sugar-mamas too. "Women are ageless now; we have work done to fight the ageing process. And soap women act like men. They see something they like, and they take it." She pauses and adds, "I've been sexually assaulted by soap stars. I have been at award dos where hands have slipped inside my dress. Some I pushed away and some I didn't push away."

Stockport-born Melanie doesn't mind taking the initiative either. On a TV studio visit she walked past "a gorgeous technician in his 20s, ten minutes later we were shagging in the toilet." And as Jilly no doubt would have said, both emerged looking flushed. "When I write, it all pours out of me. I have no control. It's like being Whoopi Goldberg's Oda Mae Brown in Ghosts. Writing Ruthless Women, I dropped out of contact with everyone and finished it in seven weeks flat. The second one took 13 weeks, the latest took two years." She says she writes because "these women exist to me; for 25 years I have lived and breathed soaps. They speak to me. I've never needed the money. Soap actresses want the world to know what they go through. You can't make this stuff up. You have to have lived it."

The latest page-turning thriller, Vengeful Women, written 30 months ago, features a psycho-killer and sees soap fans interact with AI clones of their favourite characters. "It's a lot darker," says Mel who adds that a famous actress enjoying acar-sex scene in the novel was inspired by a real-life Emmerdale star. Melanie's own childhood was scarred with harrowing incidents. At 16, a stranger threatened to kill her with a hammer. Shortly after she was chased by a would-be rapist junkie. She toughened up quickly, telling a groping cabbie who put his hand up her shorts, "Give me your takings or I'll call the police - I took all his money." A predatory panto producer who performed a sex act in front of her, got similar treatment, and was obliged to hand over the full fee for a part she didn't do. Blake's childhood in Greater Manchester was traumatic. Her printer father was sucked into "a born-again doomsday cult," when she was six. "We had no curtains, no carpets, no home comforts, he smashed my dolls - it was as close to Dickensian as you can get."

She left home at 16 and never went back. Growing up, Melanie identified with strong women she saw on TV like Alexis and brassy Bet Lynch. At 17, she bought a one-way ticket to London and did promotional work for two years, giving away Tequila shots etc. She also found an on-off lover in late rock star Michael Hutchence. "He offered to pay off my £50,000 debt. I said no then he bought me a ring with two sapphires hearts and said 'If you ever get in trouble take it to the jewellers." When she finally did, it was valued at £50K. "I still have it."

Mel blagged her way into a job as a camera assistant on Top Of The Pops, working with everyone from Aerosmith to Whitney Houston via Madonna, Kylie and Anastasia. After befriending Gillian Taylforth in the EastEnders car park, she joined an extras agency and within weeks was in the Queen Vic, "watching Barbara Windsor and Jessie Wallace rowing like wildcats - it was much more interesting off-camera than on!" Blake became a full-time extra on Emmerdale and Coronation Street, meeting and befriending future flatmates and clients Beverly Callard and Claire King. She also represented Claire Richards, the Nolans, Patsy Kensit, Stephanie Beecham, and Sherrie Hewson. She is offered TV roles "constantly" - including series 2 of Real Housewives Of Cheshire. "My publisher really pushed me to do it, but I said no. All they wanted me to do was have a bitch fight and make headlines. I don't want that. I don't think of myself as famous. Celebrity Big Brother would have been best. I couldn't do the jungle."

Her hot novels have traditionally sold well in colder Eastern European countries, but Australia, Malaysia and South Korea have bucked the trend. She might leave Crouch End, north London and move down under, she says. Melanie wants to thank Bond girl Eunice Gayson - Sylvia Trench in Doctor No and From Russia With Love - for one early leg-up. "I was friends with her daughter and told her mum about my plan to write The Thunder Girls. Eunice said 'Don't just talk about it, do it!' She gave me the key to her penthouse in Marbella and said 'Go!' so I went. I'd gone from a Stockport council estate to a Bond girl's amazing apartment...and I wrote it in a week."

Pop icon David Bowie also encouraged her. "I met him four times on Top Of The Pops. He asked what I wanted to do, I said I wanted to write and he said 'Well then you must'. And every time I saw him after that, he'd ask 'How's the writing going?' Bowie, the Bond girl and bonkbusters. The 3 Cs - Conrad, Collins and Cooper - have gone, but I've got the 3 Bs."

Mel says working at the BBC made her security conscious. "I met so many famous people. On one day I met Cher, Beyoncé, Britney Spears, The Rolling Stones and Bon Jovi and nobody patted me down. I'm not a nutter, but I could have been. It only takes one..."

Her autobiography is written finished. Will there be another bonkbuster? "It's down to the fans," she says. "If this book doesn't go Top 10 I'll never write again."

*Vengeful Women by Melanie Blake is published by Piranha Publishing on November 6. Pre-order your limited special edition hardback, available on Amazon while stocks last!