THE second that the cameras stop rolling for her live interviews, Jacquie Walton heads straight for the loos to scrape off the make-up that has been so carefully applied to her face.

"I never wear it at home, but I have to for the cameras, even though I find it really uncomfortable," said Jacquie.

Her name and face may not be all that familiar, but Jacquie is climbing up fame's ladder, as the writer Maxine Barry, who pens steamy novels that capture the imagination - including hers.

You see Jacquie, 36, has never had a boyfriend and has never had sex.

The last time she kissed a boy, she was 15 and didn't like it very much, so she decided not to do it again.

Her success has taken off in recent months and Jacquie has appeared on many well-known television shows, including Richard and Judy, Kilroy, The Time, The Place and Esther. Jacquie may spend a lot of time in TV studios, but when the interviews are over, she returns home to Lower Heyford, where she lives in a comfortable semi with her elderly parents Leslie and Joyce.

"They're very proud of me. Dad proof reads my books and doesn't mind them. He's more interested in spotting the errors, like the time one of my male characters was wearing a skirt rather than a shirt, and mum reads them after they're published.

"She never criticises, but she doesn't like reading the sexy bits. I always know when she's got to a steamy part because she starts flicking the pages quickly!" said Jacquie. She has, she says, found the contentment that many people never achieve.

"I know I get invited on to shows because I've admitted I'm celibate, but I can't see what's wrong with that. I could marry and have children, but I don't want to.

"I'm not actively looking for a man and I don't think, in reality, that I'm likely to marry or have children. I'm happy with my life and I don't think it's odd. It just seems to me that other people have difficulty understanding that I don't want what they do. "My parents aren't bothered either. They've already got 13 grandchildren, so they're hardly relying on me to carry on the family line!" she said.

Every time Jacquie's publisher contacts her about appearing on a chat show to promote her books, she knows the question will come up.

"I always know. I'm sat there thinking 'here comes the old chestnut again' as they ask me how I know how to write steamy sex scenes when I've never had sex.

"Usually I say 'well, I write murder mysteries but I've never committed a murder'. I have an active imagination and, let's face it, this is the 1990s.

"You can find out anything you want to know just by watching telly!"

Jacquie's latest TV appearance was on the late night Channel Four series For The Love Of..., when panellists sat round a table and talked about celibacy.

"I wasn't on my own and I wasn't the unusual one. There was a consecrated virgin, a Dominican monk, a woman clown who hadn't had sex for 13 years and a woman who claimed that other women who have sex before marriage were nothing more than amateur prostitutes. "Still, it was interesting and it gets my name known," said Jacquie, whose seven books have now been translated into every language, from Russian to Polish and Hebrew. My books are sold in America too.", so it's lovely to get letters from readers there. And the reviews have been good too, so I live in hope," said Jacquie.

Although Jacquie has been churning out more than a book a year since her first success, Caribbean Flame, hit the shops in 1993, she still finds it difficult to keep the momentum going of continuous success in the public eye.

"Would-be authors struggle and struggle to get their first book published.

"Then, when you have, there's a constant demand to produce the next one, and the next, and get yourself well-known so that people want to go out and buy your books.

"I know I'm setting myself up when I go on telly and talk about my virginity but I look at it in a different way. If someone decided to buy one of my books just to read the sexy bits and see if they can catch me out, then that's fine. As long as they're reading them, I'm happy."

Jacquie's latest book, Dark Desire, written under the pen-name Maxine Barry, has been chosen by her publishers, Scarlet, as the first hardback book in the series of women's fiction novels published by the imprint of Robinson Books at £12.99, in July.

Jacquie's next paperback is called Melting the Iceman and is set in a fictional Oxford college.

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