STAR INTERVIEW
Bringing sexy back
Melanie Blake is a formidable woman with a mission, to bring back bonkbusters, as Tina Jackson discovers
What did you write in lockdown? A first draft, some poems? Melanie Blake blasted out a bonkbuster. Reworking the classic 1980s formula of sex, sleaze, trash, glamour and high society for the 2020s, Ruthless Women is the addictive page-turner you will shamelessly devour in one sitting, revelling in the vicarious thrill of highprofile catfights set in a the world of a soap opera where anything goes in the competition for global ratings.
It’s a world of drama, divas and volcanic hissy fits that celebrity agent Melanie knows well. Her first novel, the bestselling The Thunder Girls, drew on her experience as a pop manager. As a celebrity agent, Melanie’s clients include some of soap’s biggest names. But the success of The Thunder Girls and the stage show of the same name, and a frantic working schedule, meant that she wasn’t thinking of writing another book.
‘The Thunder Girls was so successful, with the stage show,’ says Melanie. She’s as high-octane as the character’s she’s created – it’s her face on the front cover – but incredibly down to earth and friendly as she talks up a storm about the book. ‘I thought I wouldn’t have time to write another book. Then Covid came. Everything got cancelled. I’ve been working since I was twelve, I’ve never had a holiday, never had a day off.
Even on the day of my mum’s funeral, I worked. For the first time in my life, there was nothing to do, no phone calls, no emails, no schedules to check, nothing to do. I just split up with my boyfriend as well. Then two weeks into lockdown I got the inspiration for Ruthless Women.’
Melanie wrote a first version of The Thunder Girls twenty years before it was published – she’d shelved it at the time because of industry demands to make her girl group members younger. ‘So that book was a book I’d had forever. I knew those characters, I knew it well,’ she says. With Ruthless Women, she wrote from a standing start. ‘I wrote for several weeks sixteen hours a day,’ she says. ‘The characters possessed me. They took over my brain and woke me up in the night.’