Play Dirty: Podcast 
The Woman On Top
A few thing in life are certain—turkeys will be carved every fall, taxes will be due every spring, and Sandra Brown will publish a new best-seller every summer. With more than 70 million books in print, she is the most successful author in Texas. And (pant, pant, moan, sigh) the steamiest.
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By the late eighties, however, Brown had begun to tire of what she called “bosoms-and-biceps paperbacks” and wanted to get into mainstream fiction. “I wanted to add more crime plots with great villains who committed murder,” she said.
The result was 1990’s Mirror Image, a novel wilder than anything she had yet attempted. The book’s heroine is an ambitious San Antonio television reporter who survives a fiery plane crash in Dallas. While she is recuperating in the hospital, her face wrapped in bandages, a mysterious man mistakes her for another woman who was on the plane, the corrupt wife of a famous Texas politician. The mysterious man whispers into her ear that the plan is still on to assassinate her husband. The reporter comprehends the dastardly scheme, and after her face is reconstructed through plastic surgery to look exactly like the dead wife’s, she foils the assassination attempt and in the process falls in love with the famous politician, who never much liked the original wife anyway.
Mirror Image landed on the Times’ paperback best-seller list for five weeks, and Brown never looked back. By 1992, she was releasing her novels in hardcover, the first one being French Silk, about a beautiful owner of a lingerie mail-order business in New Orleans who is suspected of having murdered a television evangelist. Complications ensue when the district attorney who is supposed to bring her down falls in love with her. French Silk spent seven weeks on the Times’ hardcover best-seller list, and every book she wrote afterward also made the list. She knocked out a best-seller about a doctor who takes on a corrupt oil company, one in which a television personality gets a new heart right as fatal “accidents” begin killing other heart recipients, one in which a young public defender stumbles upon a town’s chilling secret, one about a young reporter investigating the potential murder of the baby of the president of the United States, one about a young deaf widow confronting an escaped inmate from an Arkansas prison—and on and on and on, ad infinitum and, to a large extent, absurdum.
When Brown begins to get a solid idea for her next book, she sits down with her legal pad and writes the phrase “Essential Elements” on the top of one of the pages. Even though her settings and stories are very different, she makes sure that every one of her novels contains particular conflicts. First, her hero and heroine must be, in her word, “codependent.” “What I mean by that is that they are bound together by a common problem,” she explained. “The heroine, for instance, is accused of murder, and the hero is a police detective trying to decide whether she did the murder. ”
Her second essential element is that the hero and heroine must “share space.” As she put it, “they must be in each other’s company, sometimes reluctantly, to solve their common problem,” as in Play Dirty, when Griff must share space with Laura, the airline owner’s wife, in order to get her pregnant.
Third, the hero and heroine must develop a “mutual desire,” but that desire always has to be forbidden. In Chill Factor, for instance, the drop-dead-beautiful woman who finds herself trapped in the mountain cabin with the man who could be an infamous serial killer spends much of the book haunted by a truly thorny question: Should she or should she not take him to bed?
These aren’t all of Brown’s rules. Her hero or heroine also has to be “in very hot water within the first hundred pages.” For Brown, being in hot water doesn’t just mean that bad guys are after you. “You are in hot water with your soul. You not only face physical danger, but you must face a major psychological, moral dilemma within yourself that will change your life forever.” By the middle of the book, the hero or heroine has to be in even more severe jeopardy, “facing almost impossible odds.”
Finally, Brown never permits the really mind-blowing sex to occur until the latter part of the book. “Anticipation,” she said, “is everything.” I can personally testify to the wisdom of this last rule. One of the reasons I raced through Play Dirty was because I wanted to get to the juicy bedroom scene between Griff and Laura (for those of you who like to skip ahead, it comes toward the end of chapter seventeen).
Still, a formula is only as good as what you feed into it, and Brown’s longevity is at least as much a product of her bottomless wellspring of ideas as of her rigorous compositional policies. “I don’t know exactly where the ideas come from,” Brown said. “One day, a sentence just popped into my head—‘There was going to be trouble, and hell, he just wasn’t in the mood for it’—and I knew I had a novel” (the novel turned out to be Texas! Lucky, about a rough but noble young heir to a faltering East Texas oil company). “Another time, I was having lunch in New York with Chuck Adams and Michael [Korda], and he said, ‘So, what’s next?’ and I said, ‘Well, all I can tell you is that I see swamps and oak trees dripping moss. I see this ugly company town where everyone works for one rotten person.’ And that became White Hot” (her 2004 best-seller about a woman who returns to her sweltering Louisiana hometown, Destiny, to confront her corrupt father and her older brother, who run the town’s iron foundry). “Rarely does a complete idea come to me. I basically start with just a small scene or a snatch of dialogue and force myself to write and to keep writing. Sometimes it becomes a book.”
As Brown grew more famous, various publishers who owned the rights to her earlier romance novels rereleased them, and they too made their way up the best-seller lists. Even her first novel, Love’s Encore, hit the paperback best-seller list when it was rereleased, in 1997. In the process, the Browns became very rich. For many years, they had lived on a 22-acre ranchette in Fort Worth, where they raised three Longhorns named Boudreaux, Bubba, and Bowie. They later sold the property (the reported buyer was the evangelist T. D. Jakes) and bought their Arlington mansion. They also have homes in Hilton Head, South Carolina, and the mountains of western North Carolina and an apartment in New York City.
But the trappings of wealth have done little to dampen the tenacity with which Brown goes after each new idea. The day I visited her at her office, I asked if she ever thought about retiring, never again having to worry about what the next book would be.
Brown just looked at me. “And what fun would that be? Yes, I love my homes, I love to travel, I love my family, and I love doting on my new grandchildren. But you can only do so much of that. I don’t go to lunch with friends, I don’t join clubs, I don’t have any big hobbies. I work. I come up with stories. I can’t even imagine a life where I’m not sitting around, worried about my next book.”
She glanced down at her legal pad, where so far she only had her heroine waking up in the wrong place at the wrong time. According to her schedule, she had just three more weeks to come up with a story line in which her career-minded heroine gets into some very hot water, faces impossible odds, and shares space with a codependent hero for whom her desires are forbidden, a dark and handsome man who will rip off her clothes, throw her onto a bed, and cause her to make some serious moaning sounds.
“I know I’m not creating transcendent works that will someday be taught in college,” she said, leaning back in her chair and smiling cheerfully. “All I do is entertain. I try to entertain others by sending them into another world for a few hours. When I see my books read on the beach, the pages dabbed with suntan lotion, then I feel as if I’ve done my job.”
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