TV writer La Plante rips into ‘novelist’ Katie Price

Does the TV crime writer Lynda La Plante have a case of sour grapes? La Plante has launched a withering attack on the millions spent by publishers on "dross" and "tripe" by celebrity novelists such as Katie Price while failing to acknowledge that she was an actress first and writer second, and that her best-selling crime novels have all been published on the back of her reputation as a TV writer, with Widows in the 1980s and then Prime Suspect.

"She's hardly a literary figure,” said one London publisher who attended last night's Specsavers Crime Thriller awards where La Plante decided to let rip. "I don't mind watching Prime Suspect myself but it's hardly a solid platform from which to launch an attack of this kind."

La Plante, who was being inducted into the 'hall of fame' at last night's ceremony at the Grosvenor House Hotel, said: "The publishing industry is going to implode. They can't pay the millions to these celebrities." Noting that Price's second book Crystal had outsold the entire Booker Prize list in 2007, she huffed: "She's a terrible thing for young girls who just want pink welly boots."

At least Price - aka glamour model Jordan - was not in the audience. Martine McCutcheon, like La Plante an actress turned writer, was at the ceremony however and there were red faces when La Plante said: "I have nothing against Martine McCutcheon, but who knows what she was paid."

La Plante might actually have been on firmer ground attacking McCutcheon because the former EastEnders actress's debut novel The Mistress - the first in a three-book deal with Pan Macmillan – has yet to be published. The book trade has no idea whether McCutcheon will prove to be a bestseller - and therefore worth the money she's being paid -  or not.

When the first chapter of The Mistress was published online recently, her writing was described by one critic as a "truly awful piece of pedestrian drivel". The website Anorak called it "a work of parody that should make the nation's satirists hang their heads in envy". But then romantic fiction is not an area of publishing where the critic's word carries much weight. ·