Maxim Jakubowski: Crime Editor, Mammoth Erotica, Vina Jackson

Maxim Jakubowski, born in 1944, is an English writer whose career runs through crime fiction, erotica, science fiction, and rock criticism. He has long been one of Britain’s most visible editors of adult and mystery anthologies. He was born in England to one Russian-British parent and one Polish parent, raised in France, and has also lived in Italy. The travel shows up as polyglot settings in the crime novels and the erotic novels. For readers of BDSM, fetish, and adult fiction, he matters less as the author of one BDSM novel than as a bridge: a senior editor of mainstream crime who also built a shelf of erotic literature. The sex in the books is adult. The crime books are not how-to manuals.

He edited science-fiction anthologies, including Twenty Houses of the Zodiac (1979), prepared 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 story. On the crime nonfiction side he edited major Jack the Ripper collections and reference works, including Jack the Ripper: Comprehensive A-Z and The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper (2008). Those are editorial and reference jobs, not instructions for a crime.

Murder One and the Mammoth erotica shelf

As a reviewer he wrote for decades in Time Out London, The Guardian, and later Crime Time. The crime column ran about ten years at Time Out and eleven at The Guardian, ending in 2010, then moved online to Love Reading and, from 2017, to Crime Time. He held managerial roles in book publishing at the Virgin Group, Penguin, and the Hearst Group. After he left corporate publishing he opened 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.

On the adult shelf he edited The Mammoth Book of Erotica (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 large trade-paperback erotic anthologies sat in English-language bookshops through the 1990s and 2000s beside the crime and science-fiction Mammoth titles.

In January 2020 The Guardian reported that he was one of two authors behind the pseudonym Vina Jackson. Between 2010 and 2011, under that name and the Eighty Days brand, they wrote a series of ten romantic erotica novels. The books hit the Sunday Times bestseller list more than once and were published in 31 countries. For BDSM and erotic-romance readers, the reveal puts a commercial machine of domination-and-desire fantasy under a feminine pen name next to the public crime editor. 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.

The novels

The novels braid sex and crime. They 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, 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) and The Louisiana Republic (2018) fuse crime with erotica directly. 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. It names the attitude: sexual frankness treated as literary material rather than as marketing spice. He is a regular on British television and radio. In 2007 a Crimespace website poll voted him the fourth Sexiest Writer, a period-internet metric that still catches the mix of crime-desk authority and erotic-book branding.

Awards and the later credits

For many years he chaired the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He has been chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, chair and judge of the CWA International Dagger, and a long-serving member of the CWA committee. 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 One Hundred Great Detectives, published in 1991, which won the 1992 Anthony Award for Best Critical Work. In November 2024 he received the David L. Goodis Award at Noircon.

Since April 2024 he has been editor-at-large for Bedford Square Publishers. The source text says he was set to act in 2025 as executive producer of the television series Factory, based on Derek Raymond’s novels, produced by the FX Network with Hardy, Son and Baker, the company known for Taboo and A Christmas Carol. The erotica shelf and the crime shelf are both his working ground.