Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Pornography for the Boden set: The Missus, by E.L. James, reviewed

Count Maxim pursues his former cleaner Alessia to Albania – but sex in badly plumbed bathrooms while senseless on raki doesn’t sound that thrilling

E.L. James. [Getty Images] 
issue 01 July 2023

As an erstwhile fellow peddler of dirty books (Ambition, 1989), I’m in two minds about E.L. James. On the one hand, I’m glad that I never made money writing tosh which led legions of gullible women to collude in their own humiliation. Granted, my heroine had SOLD tattooed on her forehead, but so far as I know no murdering man ever used my book as an alibi, whereas, as Wikipedia puts it:

Rough sex murder defence, also known as the Fifty Shades defence, is employed by some people accused of murdering a sexual partner who claim that the death occurred because...

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