Sunday Simmons & Charlie Brick

Sunday Simmons & Charlie Bricks was the third novel from English novelist Jackie Collins, published in 1971 by W.H. Allen. It was retitled The Hollywood Zoo in 1975 and then as it is now known, Sinners in 1984.

Plot Synoposis

When she was sixteen, Sunday Simmons decided to become an actress. The daughter of a South American father and French mother, she had a head start - for the two nationalities had produced a rare beauty. She left her birth place Rio to attend a Dramatic Academy in London. Two days after her departure, her parents were killed in a car crash. Sunday was alone: she needed love, hungered for affection.

Charlie Brick was forty and famous. One of the best comedic actors in the world, his success, unfortunately, did not stretch to his relationships with women. Women had never failed to disappoint him. For as long as he could remember they had let him down. Even his wife, Lorna. Lorna was the only "nice girl" he had ever met, a virgin still at twenty-one and Charlie married her - only to find out that he had a cold, unloving partner.

Herbert Lincoln Jefferson was working as a chauffeur for one of the Hollywood film companies. While his grotesquely fat wife watched TV and ate all day, he was indulging in perverse sexual fantasies.

Then Sunday Simmons came to Hollywood to make a movie.And Charlie Brick did the same. And before long Herbert's greatest ambition became to meet Sunday. And, in a bizarre and horrifying climax, he did.

Public Response

Sunday Simmons & Charlie Brick was Collins third bestseller and like her previous two novels The World Is Full Of Married Men and The Stud (Book), her new novel sparked controversy for its sexually explicit nature. "A scandalously sexy novel", read News Of The World, while other critics praised its fresh and new-age approach to the Hollywood players. This would be Collins first novel set in Los Angeles (the previous two had been set in London) and also the first one that centred around the lives and loves of film stars. The character of Charlie Brick was said to be based on actor comedian Peter Sellers, a close friend of Collins at the time.