Farewell Jackie Collins, creator of the bonkbuster novel and tireless trouper

The Anglo-American writer Jackie Collins, who died of breast cancer at the age of 77 on September 19, more or less invented the form of storytelling recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary as "bonkbuster", and sold more than 500 million copies of 32 titles that remained in print at her death.

Books such as Judith Krantz's Scruples and Shirley Conran's Lace encouraged the birth of the term for stories in which women went in search of sexual and financial fulfilment in a milieu of first-class cabins and five-star hotels. However, Collins had started to write such books earlier and continued to publish them longer than any of her rivals, and a student writing a thesis on bonkbusting novels would soon have well-fingered editions of Collins' 1968 debut, The World is Full of Married Men, and Hollywood Wives (1983), her first mega-seller, which declared in its title both her signature setting and her preference for female protagonists.

Collins understood the importance of exhaustive media promotion of new titles, especially on television, where the author should ideally look as if they had just walked out of one of their own narratives.

Central to Collins' success was the assumption that she was fictionalising people and events she had seen or heard for real. She was the daughter of a major showbiz agent, Joe Collins, the sister of the movie star Joan Collins and the wife of the nightclub owner Oscar Lerman, whose properties included the key '70s London watering-hole Tramp. His business interests in Los Angeles gave her the familiarity with the American high life that drove her major books. Anglo-American by nationality, she became increasingly an American novelist.

Collins always kept a sharp eye on market trends. After Mario Puzo's Mafia saga The Godfather became one of the biggest-selling titles in publishing history, Collins published, in 1974, her own mob story, Lovehead, a suggestive title that caused some squeamishness among booksellers and was later renamed The Love Killers.

Subsequently, organised crime became a recurrent Collins theme, although, characteristically, the novelist set out to feminise the mob novel. Chances (1981) introduced the character of Lucky Santangelo, heiress to an American mafioso. The sequence of books about her - including Lady Boss, in which the heroine takes over a Hollywood studio - reached nine with The Santangelos, which was published just days before her death.