By James Aitchison

Think today’s bestsellers, and the usual suspects spring to mind: J. K. Rowling, Danielle Steel, Lee Child, Stephen King, John Grisham, David Baldacci and James Patterson.  And while their sales achievements make headlines, some less familiar names have outsold them.

Take the Bard, for example.  William Shakespeare has traditionally topped bestseller lists even before such lists existed!  Shakespeare’s plays and poems have sold anywhere from two to four billion copies!

Likewise, Agatha Christie joins Shakespeare as a top mover and shaker.  Sales of her 86 books are also estimated to have reached four billion. 

At number three on the charts, but arguably less visible nowadays, is Dame Barbara Cartland, whose 723 romance novels racked up a tidy one billion in sales.  In the 1970s and 1980s, Cartland’s output was staggering.  In 1976 alone she wrote 23 novels, earning her a Guinness World Record as having written the most novels in a year.  In 1983, the Guinness Book of Records named her the world’s top-selling author.  Cartland, step-grandmother of Princess Diana, died in 2000 aged 98.

Romance, clearly, is a genre that inspires best-selling novels.

English novelist Georgette Heyer pioneered the historical romance category and its subgenre, Regency romance.  Such books were commonly known as “bodice rippers”.  From 1932, Heyer released one romance novel and one thriller every year.  By the time of her death in 1974, Heyer was selling over one million paperbacks a year.  Her 56 novels remain in print.

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American Harold Robbins, who died in 1997, was one of the best-selling authors of all time.  His 25 novels — including The Carpetbaggers and The Dream Merchants — sold 750 million copies in 32 languages.  Robbins honed his storytelling skills in Hollywood, working in movies before switching to novels.  He started as a clerk at Universal Pictures in 1940 and by 1957 was a studio executive.

Like Robbins, Sidney Sheldon also worked in Hollywood.  Sheldon wrote screenplays, produced movies and created popular TV shows such as I Dream of Jeannie and The Patty Duke Show.  At age 50 he made the switch to writing romantic suspense novels such as The Other Side of Midnight and Rage of Angels.  His 21 novels went on to sell 300 million copies in 51 languages.  He is frequently considered one of the top 10 best-selling fiction writers of all time.

“Indian summer is like a woman.  Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle …”  Thus begins Peyton Place, the controversial novel that exposed sex, sin and hypocrisy in a small American town.

Dubbed “one of the best-selling dirty books of all time”, it had been rejected by virtually every American publisher.  When it was first released in 1956, its success was unprecedented; ironically, the Bible was the only book that outsold it!   

Selling 8 million copies in hardcover and 12 million in paperback, Peyton Place became a movie with Lana Turner and later a TV show starring Mia Farrow and Ryan O’Neal.

Its author Grace Metalious — herself living in a small town and loathing its hypocrisy — reaped fame and fortune, but tragically had a self-destructive relationship with alcohol.  She died aged 39 from cirrhosis of the liver.  While Metalious is largely forgotten now, Peyton Place has come to be a synonym for any outwardly respectable town hiding torrid, scandalous secrets.

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Charles Hamilton, writing under a string of pseudonyms, was one of Britain’s most prolific authors.  Born in 1876, Hamilton specialised in stories of schooldays and adventures.  He is estimated to have written more than 100 million words!  Using the pen name Frank Richards, Hamilton created the iconic obese schoolboy Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School.  Both Hamilton and Bunter have largely faded from memory.  Certainly, such a character would be politically incorrect today.

Another British author often overlooked, A. E. W. Mason wrote such stirring novels as The Four Feathers and Fire Over England.  Both novels were filmed to great success.

The Four Feathers, published in 1902, explored courage and cowardice in wartime.  A young British officer refuses to fight for king and country and is presented with four feathers, a sign of cowardice.  He sets out to redeem himself in a thrilling story which has been filmed no fewer than seven times.

Fire Over England was set in the Elizabethan era.  Sir Laurence Olivier starred in the 1937 filmversion.

James Hilton was another British-born author who found success in Hollywood.  Hilton, rarely remembered these days, wrote three of the world’s best-selling novels: Lost Horizon (1933), Goodbye, Mr Chips (1934) and Random Harvest (1941).  Each became a major movie.  Hilton also won an Academy Award for his screenplay Mrs Miniver.  He died in 1954.

Scottish-born A. J. Cronin was a massively successful international novelist in the 1930s and 1940s.  Trained as a physician, he poured his experiences into his novel The Citadel, which was the highest selling book of the 1930s, with US sales exceeding 7 million by the late 1950s.

The Citadel follows the story of a young doctor who experienced injustice in the medical system of the time.  As Cronin stated in an interview, “I have written in The Citadel all I feel about the medical profession, its injustices, its hide-bound unscientific stubbornness, its humbug … The horrors and inequities detailed in the story I have personally witnessed.  This is not an attack against individuals, but against a system.”  The Citadel led to the establishment of the British National Health Service.

Cronin’s other works include Hatter’s Castle, The Stars Look Down and The Keys of the Kingdom, about a Scottish missionary in China.  The film starred Gregory Peck.

Interestingly, Cronin retired to Switzerland where he became godfather to Audrey Hepburn’s first son.

Two British adventure novelists at risk of being forgotten are Hammond Innes and Geoffrey Household.

Sussex-born Hammond Innes achieved great popularity with 30 adventure novels including Wreckers Must Breathe, The Trojan Horse, Attack Alarm, Hell Below Zero, Campbell’s Kingdom, The White South, The Doomed Oasis, and The Wreck of the Mary Deare, many of which were filmed.  He sold 40 million books and was translated into 40 languages.  In the 1950s, Innes spent six months traveling to settings all over the world, researching them for his novels, and then spent six months writing.  An avid sailor, many of his books featured stories at sea.

Innes’s heroes were invariably ordinary men thrust into extreme situations.  Stories unfolded as they relied on their own wits to survive hostile environments or overcome larger conflicts around them.

Likewise, Geoffrey Household’s protagonists were strong, capable men with a high sense of honour which dictated their course of action.  As an author, Household described himself as “sort of a bastard by Stevenson out of Conrad … Style is enormously important to me, and I do try to develop my hero as a human being in trouble.”

Household served in British Intelligence in the Second World War in Romania, Greece and the Middle East.  Not surprisingly, international intrigue and espionage feature in many of his novels: Rogue Male, The High Place, A Rough Shoot, Fellow Passenger, Watcher in the Shadows, Red Anger and The Last Two Weeks of Georges Rivac. 

Bestsellers in their time, Household’s novels have never been out of print and deserve to be read.  Rogue Male was filmed with William Holden starring as a big game hunter trying to shoot Hitler.

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Most critics agree that three best-selling British authors are best forgotten: Edward Bulwer-Lytton, T. Lobsang Rampa and Dennis Wheatley.

Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, the 1^st Baron Lytton, was a prolific best-selling author in Victorian Britain.  Today he is not remembered for his prose, but rather the famous phrases he coined: “The pen is mightier than the sword” and “The great unwashed”.  The poor fellow also wrote “It was a dark and stormy night”, which has become synonymous with terrible writing. T for Tuesday Lobsang Rampa was in fact a Devonshire surgical fitter who presented himself as a Tibetan monk.  Cyril Henry Hoskin had never been to Tibet and could speak no Tibetan but insisted that the spirit of a Tibetan lama had entered his body and wrote his books.

His first book The Third Eye, published in 1956 was a runaway success.  Arguably, it was perfectly timed to capture public interest in mystical Eastern religions.  The book relates Rampa’s life, growing up in a Tibetan monastery where, according to Rampa, a small hole was drilled into his forehead to arouse “the third eye” and enhance his powers of clairvoyance.  The book tells of yetis and even seeing his own mummified body from an earlier incarnation.

More books with occult themes followed and notched up sales of 5 million.

Denis Wheatley carved out fantasy, suspense and the supernatural with great success.  From the 1930s to the 1960s, his books sold 50 million copies.  He concocted plots with such dangers as satanism and black magic, spiced with sex and bigotry.

During the Second World War he was reportedly hired by Churchill to think up devious distractions for the war effort. 

In later years he also devised board games.

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Some bygone authors remain in print, but mostly their books reside in second-hand bookstores.

Some simply fell from fashion, or their genres were conquered by more modern, better skilled authors.

Importantly, each bygone author, in one way or another, has brought literature to where it is today.