Maxim Jakubowski (born 1944) is an English writer whose career braids crime fiction, erotica, science fiction, rock criticism, and a long stint as one of Britain’s most visible editors of adult and mystery anthologies. Born in England to Russian-British and Polish parents and raised in France, he has also lived in Italy and traveled widely—biographical range that shows up in the polyglot settings of his crime and erotic novels. For kink-media readers he matters less as a single-title “BDSM novelist” than as a bridge figure: a mainstream crime editor who also built the Mammoth Book of Erotica shelf, co-edited illustrated erotic photography books, and later surfaced as half of the bestselling romantic-erotica brand Vina Jackson.
Editor, Critic, and Murder One
Jakubowski edited science-fiction anthologies including Twenty Houses of the Zodiac (1979) for the 37th World Science Fiction Convention (Seacon ’79) in Brighton, and Travelling Towards Epsilon, an anthology of French SF to which he also contributed a short story. He has edited major Jack the Ripper collections and reference works. As a reviewer he ran columns for Time Out London, The Guardian, and later Crime Time, becoming a familiar British voice on detective fiction for decades.
After managerial roles in book publishing at the Virgin Group, Penguin, and the Hearst Group, he left corporate publishing to open Murder One, the UK’s first specialist crime and mystery bookstore. The shop closed in 2009; Jakubowski blamed the internet for undercutting the bricks-and-mortar specialist model. That arc—from corporate lists to a cult crime shop to online reviewing—tracks how British genre culture moved from high-street discovery to algorithmic shelves.
Novels: Crime, Lust, and Hybrid Forms
His novels include It’s You that I Want to Kiss, Because She Thought She Loved Me, The State of Montana, On Tenderness Express, Kiss Me Sadly, Confessions of a Romantic Pornographer, I Was Waiting for You, The Louisiana Republic, The Piper’s Dance, Just a Girl With a Gun, and The Exopotamia Manuscript. Short-story collections include Life in the World of Women, Fools for Lust, Death Has Thousand Faces, and the collaborative American Casanova. Ekaterina and the Night (2011) fused crime with erotica, as does The Louisiana Republic (2018). Later books include the fantasy The Piper’s Dance (2021) and the noir thriller Just a Girl With a Gun (2023). The title Confessions of a Romantic Pornographer is not a coy joke for this site’s audience: it names a writer who treats sexual frankness as literary material rather than only marketing spice.
He is a regular broadcaster on British TV and radio and was voted the fourth Sexiest Writer of 2007 in a Crimespace website poll—an odd, period-internet metric that still captures how his public persona mixed crime-scene authority with erotic-book branding.
Awards, CWA Roles, and Screen Work
For many years Jakubowski chaired the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He has served as chair and judge for the Crime Writers’ Association International Dagger, sat on the CWA committee, and is a past chair of the Crime Writers’ Association. In October 2019 he received the CWA Red Herrings Award for lifetime achievement. Other honors include the Karel Award for contribution to European science fiction and the Anthony Award at the Toronto Bouchercon for best non-fiction of the year for One Hundred Great Detectives. In November 2024 he was presented with the David L. Goodis Award at Noircon. In 2025 he was set to act as Executive Producer for the Factory TV series, based on Derek Raymond’s novels, produced by the FX Network with Hardy, Son and Baker (known for Taboo and A Christmas Carol). Since April 2024 he has been editor-at-large for Bedford Square Publishers.
Erotica Anthologies and the Vina Jackson Reveal
Beyond single-author novels, Jakubowski’s adult-shelf impact is editorial. He edited The Mammoth Book of Erotica (Carroll & Graf / Robinson; original 1994, revised 2000) and, with Marilyn Jaye Lewis, The Mammoth Book of Illustrated Erotica (2002) and The Mammoth Book of Erotic Photography (2004). Those Mammoth volumes helped normalize large, trade-paperback erotic anthologies in English-language bookstores through the 1990s and 2000s—right beside crime and SF Mammoth titles, which is exactly the crossover brand his career embodies.
In January 2020 The Guardian reported that he was one of two authors behind the pseudonym Vina Jackson, who between 2010 and 2011 wrote a series of ten bestselling romantic erotica novels under the “Eighty Days” brand. The books hit the Sunday Times bestseller list multiple times and were published in 31 countries. For BDSM and erotic-romance readers, that revelation reframes Jakubowski: not only a crime critic who dabbled in dirty books, but half of a commercial erotic-romance machine that sold global domination-and-desire fantasies under a feminine pen name while he continued to chair awards and edit crime lists in public.
Other Writings and Select Bibliography
Under the pen name Adam Barnett-Foster he wrote the short story “Un Avocat pour Dolorès.” His stories have appeared in more than forty anthologies. In the 1980s he also wrote books on rock music. His crime-review column ran about ten years at Time Out and eleven at The Guardian (ending 2010), then moved online to Love Reading and, since 2017, Crime Time. The non-fiction book Following the Detectives was shortlisted for several mystery-field awards.
As author with Malcolm Edwards he published The Complete Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Lists (Granada, 1983). As editor, landmarks include Twenty Houses of the Zodiac (1979), 100 Great Detectives (1991; 1992 Anthony Award for Best Critical Work), Jack the Ripper: Comprehensive A-Z, London Noir (1994; nominated for a 1995 Anthony for Best Anthology), Past Poisons: An Ellis Peters Memorial Anthology of Historical Crime, and The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper (2008). A full bibliography of well over 120 books is maintained on his website.
On a BDSM and adult-literature site, Jakubowski’s usable map is clear: French-raised Anglo writer; Murder One crime specialist; lifelong reviewer; Mammoth erotica and erotic-photography editor; novelist of lust-crime hybrids; secret co-author of the Eighty Days romantic-erotica bestsellers; CWA lifetime honoree still packing awards and TV credits into the 2020s. He is a professional of the dirty bookshelf who never left the respectable crime shelf—and that double literacy is precisely why his name keeps circulating wherever erotic fiction and detective culture share a display table.
