Ballsy, brash and brill, Jackie Collins’ book characters were just like her — download your free copy of Chances today

WITH titles including The Bitch and The Stud, she is the queen of the bonkbuster novel.

Jackie Collins, who died aged 77 five years ago, has sold more than 500million books worldwide and her legacy lives on.

Now, all of her novels are being reissued with new introductions and Sun readers can download a FREE ebook of her 1981 work Chances, the first in her sexy series featuring Gino and Lucky Santangelo.

To whet your appetite, we have an extract from chapter one below.

And below, a Jackie superfan explains why they are books EVERYONE should try.

WHEN Jackie Collins first published her bestseller Lucky in 1985, a New York Daily News review declared: “So hot it will have to be printed on asbestos.”

Given the proliferation of online porn, today’s youth would probably view Jackie’s writing as tame.

But to me and millions of other readers from the pre-internet generation, her books were almost a rite of passage for young women to understand that sex wasn’t just for the pleasure of men.

And boy, were some of the antics shocking for their time.

Her 1983 runaway success Hollywood Wives involved a scene where a film director dies of a heart attack while “in flagrante” with a movie star — his, ahem, manhood wedged inside her.

But Jackie’s female characters were rarely portrayed as victims. They were brash, ­confident and unapologetically ballsy — just like the author herself.

She once said: “My heroines kick ass. They don’t get their asses kicked.”

The #MeToo movement is currently highlighting the inequalities that characterised part of the Hollywood movie industry dominated by the likes of Harvey Weinstein, but Jackie’s books focused on it decades ago.

“I’ve always written about the double ­standard that exists between men and women, and it really p***es me off,” she said in an interview shortly before she died in September 2015. Quite.

To a certain extent, they still exist to this day.

A couple of female authors I know have even taken to using just their initials so their gender doesn’t put off potential readers who might otherwise, saints preserve us, dismiss it as “women’s fiction”.

Jackie’s books were often dismissed by ­“literary critics” as being trashy, but it never bothered her.

She knew that it takes as much skill to write a “bonkbuster” (every single one of her 32 novels made the NY Times bestseller list) as it does a so-called “literary masterpiece” — otherwise, we’d all be swathed in ­leopard-skin while living in a mansion with gold-plated taps and millions in the bank.

So she ignored the ­dissenters and just let her 500million sales across 40 countries do the talking.

That many readers can’t be wrong.

Like me, they regard her as a feminist hero — an author who created a new breed of empowered female characters who took control of their lives and weren’t waiting around on a man to do it for them.

Be it The Bitch, The Stud, Lucky (family motto: “Never f**k with a Santangelo”) I ­hoovered them all up when I discovered Ms Collins in my early twenties, and writing this article has made me want to revisit them all over again. After all, they’re ­timeless as well as brilliant.

I interviewed Jackie a couple of times over the years and her refreshing normality and honesty made her great company.

She never forgot where she came from.

Born in North London in 1937, she was expelled from school at 15 (“I was a ­juvenile delinquent”) and, not long after, reportedly had an affair with the then 29-year-old Marlon Brando.

She initially went into ­acting while living with her older sister Joan in LA, but at 18 she returned to the UK and decided to focus on writing.

Her first book, The World Is Full Of Married Men, was published in 1968 and became a bestseller.

In the early 1980s, she moved back to LA and ­settled there with husband number two Oscar Lerman and daughter Tracy from her first, short-lived marriage to Wallace Austin.

She and Lerman had two more daughters before he died of prostate cancer in 1992.

In the late Nineties, she was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer but, typically for the tough broad she was, kept the news mostly to ­herself because she wanted to protect her ­family from public scrutiny about it.

Just two weeks before her death, she flew to the UK to tell sister Joan and, ­amazingly, gave an interview to ITV’s Loose Women.

I wasn’t on that day, but was in the building and chatted to her in the ­corridor.

She looked ill and I ­suspected she had ­cancer, but mentally she was as sharp and funny as ever and her chutzpah will live on for ever in those strong female characters she created all those years ago and are as relevant now as they ever were.

So if you have never read a Jackie Collins novel, do yourself a favour and make sure you take advantage of the free ebook Chances.

And if you’ve read it before, then you’ll be as enthusiastic as I am to read it again.

Jackie was a literary trailblazer and I’m proud to be one of her greatest fans.

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