When I met Penny Vincenzi in the Clarence Hotel I commented on how nervewracking it is to interview another journalist. For although Penny's name is now most familiar as the author behind seven blockbusting novels from best seller Old Sins to her latest, Windfall, she has worked for over 30 years in magazines such as Vogue, Nova, Cosmopolitan and Options.
"In 1989 when I wrote my first novel, it seemed that every woman journalist was being offered huge sums of money to write novels. It never occurred to me to try because I loved being a journalist - I'm the kind of person to think that even brain surgeons are only doing that because they couldn't make it as a journalist."
What finally precipitated her first novel, Old Sins, was an interview with Jilly Cooper, the acknowledged queen of the sex and shopping genre. "I mentioned to Jilly that I had a story in mind and she told me about her agent, Desmond Elliott. When I got back to the office, she had got him to ring me, which is unheard of. I mean you don't share your agent - it's like sharing your husband."
Even Penny admits that what followed is like something out of one of her books - a synopsis and three chapters of Old Sins were auctioned and bought by Century for what she describes as "an eyewatering sum". It meant she could give up the day job, but not without some reservations. "Writing is a very solitary life and I do miss the atmosphere of a magazine office. I had always wanted to be a journalist - my first job was on the parish magazine, and I was fired for being glib about the Ladies Sewing Guild. After that, my first real job was as a very minor secretary at Vogue; it was a fascinating time. There was a young photographer called Tony Armstrong-Jones who was breaking all the models' hearts and another, David Bailey, that was making them cry."
Writing now takes up all of her time; she had produced seven novels in nearly as many years. She insists she's not at all like her characters, who live rather glamorous lives. "The books are definitely wishfulfilment - for both the readers and myself. That said, I really do contest the idea that escapist literature is somehow bad - even wealth and good looks don't make my characters immune from emotion. I think that's why the books work - people get attached to the characters."
She is not in the slightest bit touchy about the label "sex and shopping" being attached to her books but points out that in the caring 1990s, the shopping - if not the sex - has definitely decreased. "The heroines have got a lot more ordinary too. In the 1980s, there were all these heroines who started off making sandwiches and three years later were running Fortnum and Masons - you just can't write that stuff anymore."
Home and workplace for Penny is a house in Wimbledon where she lives with her husband of 37 years, advertising consultant Paul Vincenzi and two of her four daughters.
She says her daughters "cringe" on reading her books, especially the more explicit pages. "Imagine it, your mother not only knowing about sex but writing about it. Dreadful!" Paul, on the other hand, doesn't mind. "I think he quite likes it as everybody thinks he must be no end of a fine fellow to have inspired all these endless descriptions," she laughs.
The future holds more books and the possibility of TV. "I'm too superstitious to talk about it but suffice to say that there is something to be superstitious about. I'm very lucky in that I'm very happy - I don't want to write different books, though people are always asking me when I'm going to write a `good book'. I like what I write. Yes, I'm really very happy."
Penny Vincenzi knocks on wood furiously, and grins.