In 1960 the Attorney General, Lord Somervell, left his entire Georgette Heyer collection to the Inner Temple Library. Quite apart from having a name that makes him sound as though he had stepped straight from one of Heyer's Regency romances, Somervell was inadvertently providing an anecdote that would get recycled over the years whenever someone wanted to show just how different Heyer was from the normal run of popular historical novelists. Professional men and clever women have always lined up to say just how much they relish Heyer's world of rakes, pistols at dawn and spirited heroines with a penchant for cross-dressing. AS Byatt said so in a piece in a 1969 edition of Nova and, like Somervell, finds herself trotted out as proof that Heyer is different from Catherine Cookson or Barbara Cartland. Clever people like the way Heyer makes the Regency sound real, goes light on the love stuff and rattles along at the pace of a mail coach that is determined to beat its own record: she is like Jane Austen but without the boring bits, of which there are more than most of us care to remember.

Heyer has been the subject of a biography once before, by Jane Aiken Hodge in 1984, 10 years after Heyer's death at the age of 71. Now Jennifer Kloester has stepped into the frame, boasting a bit too loudly about the fact that she has tracked down new letters and been given material by Heyer's only son, the late Sir Richard Rougier, yet another splendidly named character. But if ever there was an example of how biographical research lies inert unless it is imagined into life, then this is it. Kloestler has written a book as flat-footed and deaf to history as Heyer's were attentive and perfectly pitched.

To be fair, Kloester's task is not a particularly easy one. Heyer is a hard woman to warm to, although you do find yourself developing a sneaking regard for the way she conducted her writing life. She was appalled by personal publicity, thought biographical puffs were twaddle and tended to greet any request for a photographic session with the announcement that she was just off to the South Pole. The idea of meeting a fan for a drink at the Ritz, mooted for publicity purposes, struck her as "quite fatuous". The denigration of her readers isn't pleasant, although her refusal to have anything to do with her fellow "inkies" seems entirely sensible. She never missed a deadline, didn't fish for compliments, and worked on a carefully calibrated mixture of cigarettes and Dexedrine. She heroically provided not just for a husband who failed to pull in a substantial income until he was middle-aged, but also two hopeless brothers and a couple of stalwart aunts. She regarded income tax as a particularly filthy trick aimed directly at her, but could never be bothered to sort out her finances, perhaps because she would then have no reason to carry on writing like a fury. She was quietly proud that her son Richard turned out so well  he didn't just have a name like one of her heroes but the looks, brains and dash too  but would have rather died than told him so, having a particular dislike for what she called "soul-throbs".

Although it would take a more skilled writer than Kloester to make us like her subject, she might still have done useful work in helping us understand just why Heyer was so popular, selling a million copies each year in Britain alone by the time of her death. Kloester has a vague line about how Heyer's world of sparkling shoe buckles helped people get through the grey days of the depression and the second world war, but this won't quite do. Heyer didn't become a global phenomenon until the mid-1960s, by which time both Cilla Black and the Queen  neither women who had particular reason to want to escape their circumstances  were declaring themselves ardent fans. Nor does Kloester look in any detail at what makes Heyer Heyer and not, say, Barbara Cartland, that publicity-mad confection of rouge and frou-frou who ripped off her rival's research and still managed to get most of the details wrong.

Heyer's prose is often described as "sparkling" but in fact it is closer to bracing, as if a particularly energetic attendant at Bath had given you a brisk rub down with a loofah. Yet Kloester pays no attention to its particular music, preferring instead to tell us more about Heyer's periodic research raids on the London Library. Even here, though, there seems little interest in how this raw material got transmuted into narrative gold: on one occasion Kloester tells us that Heyer's meticulous first draft was often her final one, yet on another she describes her submitted manuscripts as "typically full of additions, deletions and interpolations".

The chief problem with this book, though, remains the way that Kloester is in thrall to the much-vaunted letters and other material that she has tracked down in archive collections around the world. Heyer was an emotionally contained woman who wouldn't have dreamt of dumping her inner life on to paper. Yet Kloester is determined to lay out her dusty treasures, and the result is a narrative that often reads like a particularly pedestrian round-robin, full of golfing holidays in Scotland, ailing sisters-in-law and spats with the dratted tax man. In short, she has managed to pull off something you might have thought impossible: she has made the creator of Regency Buck and Lady of Quality sound like a bit of a bore.

Kathryn Hughes's biography of Mrs Beeton is published by HarperPerennial.

If you love reading novels, have an even moderately developed sense of camp, and are not too much of a literary snob, Georgette Heyer is just about the best fun it is possible to have between soft covers: romantic, funny, zippy and, because she wrote the same book over and over, entirely reliable (as the publisher Carmen Callil once put it: "She just used Jane Eyre and jiggled it around 57 times").

Before I started writing this piece, I took down from my shelves The Black Moth, her first novel, published when she was just 17; it tells the story of Jack Carstares, the disgraced son of an earl, who turns highwayman in order that he might live on the land from which he has been banished without detection. I turned to the first page. Bliss. "Clad in his customary black and silver, with raven hair unpowdered and elaborately dressed, diamonds on his fingers and in his cravat, Hugh Tracy Clare Belmanoir, Duke of Andover, sat at the escritoire in the library of his town house, writing." Now, be honest. Don't you long to know what happens next?

But alas, writers are not their books. Georgette Heyer was neither romantic nor funny nor zippy. She was a sour and rather cynical snob, rapacious when it came to money, mean-spirited when it came to other writers and to her readers, whose fan letters she liked mostly to drop straight into the nearest wastepaper basket, and with a strangely overdeveloped sense of her own importance. Granted, on occasion, Heyer would play at "little me". Such was her fear of "vulgarity", even she was induced to indulge in false modesty from time to time. Mostly, though, her preference was for a bracing game of "marvellous me".

When, for instance, her long-suffering literary agent had the temerity to call her novel Penhallow "a grotesque", she went berserk, writing to him: "Carola Oman [a friend] calls it my 'Lear', & says my characterisation is 'brilliant'. So damn you!" Her idea of wit seems mostly to have been sarcasm. Only on the matter of reliability is she impossible to fault. Heyer turned out two (mostly well-written) novels a year for almost four decades, a feat she performed with the help of gin, fags and Dexedrine. Under the influence of the latter, she could write for up to 24 hours at a time.

Heyer was born in 1902, the daughter of a school teacher with aspirations, and grew up mostly in Wimbledon. She thought of herself as a "sheltered daughter", a position she relished, and as a Victorian and a reactionary: by the time she was in her 20s, her dislikes included bohemians, Freudians and "studio parties". The Black Moth began as a story told to her younger brother, Boris, but its casual beginning didn't mean that her delight, on hearing that Constable wanted to publish it, was unbounded. She conducted her contract negotiations  she was, remember, only a teenager  with a beady and unblinking eye, thus setting the pattern for her entire career. Heyer liked nothing better than to moan about her finances, even when she was selling by the million. After all, insisting loudly that she only wrote for "sordid gain" gave her the perfect excuse for writing one Regency romance after another rather than the big, serious book of her dreams.

In 1925, she married a mining engineer, the superbly named Ronald Rougier, and together they did stints in Africa and Macedonia. When Heyer fell pregnant with her first and only child, however, they returned to Britain, where Rougier ran a sports shop in a Sussex village. But the business was not a success. Heyer now found herself the main breadwinner, and her pace increased yet further, with the result that she succumbed to an "internal poisoning" (otherwise known as a nervous breakdown).

Yet still the books came, and when Ronald eventually qualified as a barrister, the pair moved to a smart apartment in the Albany, Piccadilly, a home that appealed to the snooty Heyer for obvious reasons. After this, there is little to report. She wrote lots more books. She liked to watch her husband, with whom she did not share a bed, playing golf. She was once invited to lunch with the Queen  who is, along with Cilla Black and AS Byatt, a Heyer fan  though she did not much enjoy it. (My dear, the Duke of Edinburgh's manners!) She died of lung cancer in 1974, the author of 55 novels.

What, I wonder, is the point of this book? Who is it for? According to its jacket, Jennifer Kloester is "the foremost expert on Heyer" (as if the world's universities were crammed with her competitors, all of them writing PhDs on The Grand Sophy and Regency Buck). What this means in practice is that she tells you everything  I mean everything  about a woman whose life was simply not very interesting. This is a biography in which the pregnancy of a daughter-in-law is giant news. Yes, Kloester has had, courtesy of Heyer's late son, Sir Richard Rougier (the high court judge who once claimed never to have heard of bouncy castles), unbridled access to Heyer's papers, but since these include no exciting love letters, and nothing in the way of literary gossip, one wishes she had not felt obliged to quote from them so extensively. (One letter, in which Heyer complains to her agent about her publisher, Heinemann, is reprinted over three pages.)

As for the mystery of Heyer's writing  how it works; why so many intelligent people love it  Kloester simply does not go there, and her book is thus squeezed dry of all the joy it might have had. If you want fun  if you want elopements and quadrilles, velvet britches and sprig muslin gowns  you will have to go back to the novels, still in print, and still the greatest and most surprising of pleasures.