Pearse and Moore toast a quarter-century of collaboration

For a writer with 10 million-plus sales worldwide, Lesley Pearse is refreshingly grounded. Asked how she describes her work, she laughs, labelling it “Enid Blyton for grown-ups”, fully owning her place as “a mass-market writer”.

“I see writing books as a complete entertainment. I think we’re far too sniffy,” says Pearse. “People used to tell me, ‘I don’t normally read books like yours’, which was quite hurtful. It implied books ‘like mine’ weren’t worthy of their interest. I think that’s beginning to change. I know I’m always going to go down well in supermarkets, and perhaps not in the terribly serious bookshop. But when someone says to me: ‘I haven’t read a book since I left school, I read one of yours and it was fabulous; now I’m a reader,’ that is far more important to me.”

Pearse says she is no longer as “schmaltzy” or “soppy” on the page as she once was, a sentiment holding true if her 26th book outing, The House Across the Street, is anything to go by. It runs the gamut of gritty topics, from domestic abuse, to murder and abduction. However, while her writing may be gaining an edge, she maintains that if something makes her cry as she is writing it, she knows she’s on the right track. “That’s been going on since I first started and I don’t think I’m ever going to change that philosophy,” she says.

For inspiration, Pearse has much to draw on. By the time she made her literary début, she had already been a Playboy Bunny in the 1960s and boutique fashion designer; she had married a trumpeter who played in Dusty Springfield and Lulu’s bands (the second of three marriages), and had a song written about her by David Bowie (“A Couple of Kooks”). She has also been no stranger to hardship: at three years old, her mother died suddenly, leaving her in an orphanage run by nuns while her father was away at sea. At 18, she fell pregnant and was forced to give up her son for adoption—to this day she has never been able to trace him—and, shortly before her first novel Georgia published, aged 48, the shop she owned went into administration, leaving her with heavy debts.

Coming from “the kind of background where you wouldn’t have aspired to be a writer, any more than you would to be a concert pianist or Shakespearian actress”, Pearse says her big break, 25 years ago, “seems like only yesterday. Had I known then what was going to happen, I would’ve been overjoyed. At the time I had a failed business and my marriage was breaking up. When the first book came out I was pretty joyful, but I never thought [my career] would get to where it has and that so many changes would happen so late in my life.”

Lived experience

Now 73, and with little intention of retiring, thoughtfully Pearse adds of her colourful life to date: “I think that is the secret to being a writer. Imagination is all very well, but you need a bit more to write about, don’t you?” Her long-term editor, Louise Moore—then of Methuen (1988–92) and William Heinemann (1992–97), now m.d. at Michael Joseph—agrees, calling an author’s experiences “an important ingredient”. “If you have had a tough time early on, you understand human suffering and behaviour in a way it’s very hard to if you have sailed through life and nothing’s touched the sides,” she says. “It can happen, but I think you have to understand that in order to write in a way that people identify with. And people do identify with Lesley, and other writers like her.”

Pearse is a “must-have” author for Moore and for Penguin, while for the writer, Moore continues to be “vital” to the process—she describes the production of a book as “like delivering a baby: the editor is the midwife and it’s always a lot better than if you had done it on your own!”

In the infancy of both of their careers, remembering the day a dog-eared manuscript for Georgia landed on her desk, Moore says despite being “very, very junior” she knew “instantly” she wanted to publish it—a leap of faith Pearse repaid when she followed Moore from Wm Heinemann (then part of Reed Books) to Penguin in 1997. Moore recalls: “I’d only just been given the job, by someone who took a chance on me. I started reading the first page [of Georgia] and just didn’t stop. I was there, glued to my seat, seven hours later. And I thought, ‘Well I don’t know’—I didn’t have much experience—‘but I can’t stop reading this’. It was great for her and it was great for me, because immediately people thought, ‘Oh, maybe she can do this’.”

Her intuition paid off when her first acquisition became an immediate hit. And, come Moore’s move to Penguin with Tom Weldon and Helen Fraser—at a time when they were “trying to prove themselves”—she says it was “huge” when Pearse and her then-agent Darley Anderson agreed to join them. “They went away to ‘think about it’, then came back half an hour later, screaming ‘we’re coming, we’re coming!’ It was wonderful—and spontaneous.”

Pearse explains: “There wasn’t really any point in thinking about it. I was going to stay with Louise whatever happened. As far as I was concerned, I was back where I belonged; it was like family, and still is.”

Moore says the authors who accompanied her—Sue Townsend and Marian Keyes—were “absolutely shining stars for us... [their loyalty] hopefully means you haven’t let them down at any stage. You always have to see that these authors are the core of what we do and what I do. If we don’t have them, we have nothing.”

Lesley Pearse (centre) with her agent Tim Bates and editor Louise Moore

Commercial awareness

Since those heady days, Moore says the industry has changed “immeasurably”, particularly in its professional- ism, but that long-term relationships with authors remain “the best thing about the job”. She also believes, in spite of the challenges in commercial publishing, that author brands like Pearse are “better off than ever”.

“They are authors who are unique, they are brilliant at what they do. For every company, there are must-haves. Lesley is a must-have. [Commercial] authors are, in fact, better off than ever because people can see how good their books are now, they can read reviews on Amazon, and the way we can spread the word—using newsletters and Facebook pages—is fantastic. It used to be that you could package a not particularly good author and pay for promotion, get it out there, and it would sell. You can’t get away with that anymore.”

Staunchly commercial in taste, Cambridge graduate Moore doesn’t believe the way she commissions is likely to change, but says the way people are now exposed to books online means readers aren’t distinguishing between literary and commercial titles in the same way. “All our publishing at PRH really reflects that... on the whole, publishing does cover a broader spectrum now,” she says.

Asked what unites the books on Michael Joseph’s eclectic list, Moore replies in a heartbeat: “Authenticity and originality. And you’ve really got to read on.

“The word ‘commercial’... I never know what I mean by that. I think it’s an ever-blurring line but it’s that book where the narrative drives you through. You can find that with very literary authors as well—David Mitchell, Ian McEwan or Donna Tartt, for instance—but you have to keep reading. We’re not in it just for the love of the language, let’s put it that way.”