Howard Buten, Philippe Djian og H. Buten Betty Blue (4, 1989) | Philippe Djian

They were predicting storms for the end of the day but the sky stayed blue and the wind died down. I went to take a look in the kitchen - make sure things weren't getting clogged up in the bottom of the pot. Everything was just fine. I went out onto the porch armed with a cold beer and stayed there for a while, my face in the sun. It felt good. It had been a week now that I'd been spending my mornings in the sun, squinting like some happy idiot - a week now since I'd met Betty.' BETTY BLUE remains a cult book and film nearly twenty years since its first outing. The extraordinary story of an erotic, doomed love affair has transfixed hundreds of thousands of readers around the world.