Archive for the ‘Romantic novels’ Category

Like many people who spent this past weekend at the RNA conference in the Old Royal Naval College at Greenwich, I’m coming down from a high. So many friends, old and new, so many fascinating books to buy, so many ideas. . .  I am slowly writing up my notes and am struck by two things which other people said and one which I thought myself:

1) Romance is turning into the genre that dare not speak its name. A publisher told us that the readers wanted romance (mystery with an element of romance outsells mystery without it) but didn’t want it called that. So call your romantic suspense ‘psychological suspense’ and you’re in with a better chance of a publishing deal. Later, editors told us they were looking for ’stealth romance’. 

Somehow in the twenty-first century, when every sort of sexual encounter is commonplace in film and television and extreme swearing is positively de rigueur for the aspiring comedian, we have managed to make romance unacceptable.  Um – why? And who does it so bitterly offend? Needs thinking about, that.

2) A thoughtful talk from the RNA’s Koh-i-Noor (copyright Katie Fforde, that one) asserted ‘Romance is not trivial.’ As one who has always said that, when you fall in love, you might as well load a gun and pass it across into the hands of the beloved, I completely agree. Romantic love is dangerous. It can make people crazy. Even if they hang on to some sort of normality, it can still make them do (and think) completely new things that would never have occurred to them before. It is a very big adventure. And what are we, if we refuse the call to adventure?

3) And now my own Brilliant Thought  – well, okay, what occurred to me as I walked back under a glimmering night sky, with the Thames hushing and slushing to my right, Canary Wharf all lit up across the water and a strong whiff of fish in the air … 

Even though romance is not trivial, it can be playful. (Think of the disguised Rosalind teasing Orlando in As You Like It. She ties him up in knots but, once he’s gone, she says to Celia, ‘Oh coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know the fathom deep I am in love’. Quite.) Teasing and fantasy are all part of the adventure, from Mills & Boon to An Equal Music.    

Which brings me to my last point. Up-cheering. Now the buzz is over, I am feeling a bit flat. So I went to The Pyrates by George MacDonald Fraser for a quick fix. And it was such a shot in the arm, I thought I would share a little, in case other people are feeling down, too.

Captain Avery was everything that a hero of historical romance should be; he was all of Mr Sabatini’s supermen rolled into one, and he knew it. The sight of him was enough to make ordinary men feel they were wearing odd socks, and women to go weak at the knees. … His finely chiselled features bespoke both the man of action and the philosopher, their youthful lines tempered by a maturity beyond his years; there was beneath his composed exterior a hint of steely power, etc., etc. You get the picture.

… In short, Captain Avery was the young Errol Flynn, only more so, with a dash of Power and Redford thrown in; the answer to a maiden’s prayer, and between ourselves rather a pain in the neck. For besides being gorgeous, he had a starred first from Oxford, could do the hundred in evens, played the guitar to admiration, helped old women across the street, kept his fingernails clean, said his prayers, read Virgil and Aristophanes for fun, and generally made the Admirable Crichton look like an illiterate snob. However, he is vital if you are to get the customers in.  

Ah yes. The customers. God bless ‘em, every one.

Respected journalist and frustrated romantic. Danuta Kean, had a toot about modern romantic novels in Tuesday’s Daily Mail, following the recent Romantic Novel of the Year Award.  Her particular beef is what we novelists have done to our heroes.  And there’s a poll at the Daily Mail’s website which says that, so far, 71% of people who bother to vote agree with her.  I’m still pondering that one and will possibly come back to it.

But what grabbed me was her reference to her own year as a judge, when we asked a group of men to read two or more of the short listed novels and come along and discuss them.  The jamboree under reference took place in my house and I was catering, so most of my attention in the early stages was focused on serving industrial sized shepherds pie and extracting corks.  My notes are therefore not comprehensive – but I did scribble down stuff that struck me at the time, and jolly interesting it is, if a bit grub-and-booze-stained. 

There were, I think, 9 men at supper.  They had each read at least two;  none of them had read all.  They ranged from 25 – 65, all of them read novels for fun but none of them was in the writing business.  The shortlisted books were:

• A Good Voyage by Katharine Davies (Chatto and Windus) 
• Love and Devotion by Erica James (Orion)
• Small Island by Andrea Levy (Headline)
• The Hornbeam Tree by Susan Lewis (Heinemann-Random House)
• The Tenko Club by Elizabeth Noble (Hodder)
• Ghost Heart by Cecilia Samartin (Bantam World     

From my notes, it is clear that overwhelmingly three things hit me at the time – 1) the guys’ trepidation at reading romantic fiction at all;  2) a feeling that they were spying while doing so;  and 3) what, if anything, they thought romantic.

1)      Trepidation is basically the Bertie Wooster Syndrome.  You may recall that Wooster, endeavouring to retrieve a letter from Gussie Fink-Nottle giving Madeleine Bassett the heave ho,  is surprised mid-burglary by Madeleine herself.  Unfortunately, he is clutching her photograph at the time.  Much moved, she tells him the story of Rose M Banks’s romantic best selling opus Mervyn Keene, Clubman, of whose hero the unfortunate Bertram reminds her.  She does so in a low voice, the reader will remember, ‘with a goodish amount of throb in it’.  What our guys feared, as they squared up to novels that women thought romantic, is encapsulated in the Wooster reaction.  

Well, it was difficult, of course, to know quite what comment to make.  I said ‘Oh, ah!’ but I felt at the time that it could have been improved on.  The fact is, I was feeling a bit stunned.  I had always known in a sort of vague, general way that Mrs Bingo wrote the world’s worst tripe – Bingo generally changes the subject nervously if anyone mentions the little woman’s output – but I had never supposed her capable of bilge like this.‘  Ah, nobody says it better than PG Wodehouse. 

2)     Spying - ‘I feel like a peeping Tom,’  one guy said at the time.   Others, generally the younger end, agreed.  Romantic novels, they felt, were girls’ locker room stuff and they didn’t really want to see in!   Older men tended to be more robust about the revelation of What Women Talk About, but professed themselves puzzled at the results.  ‘It all goes round and round but nobody does anything,’  said one.  ‘If the characters are not going to change something, why don’t they just stop picking at it and shut up?’  Small Island and Ghost Heart were largely but not entirely exempt from this, but A Good Voyage, a modern re-telling of Twelfth Night, was included.

3)    Romantic for Men?  All of our  book group said they had been moved by one or more romantic novels at some point, even if not these.  I couldn’t find one who was a fan of Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights and the Jane Austen afficionados weren’t in it for the romance.  But the Lady of the Camellias had a couple of supporters.  The only contemporary novel that anyone mentioned was Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music, which one of the group thought was true heart-wringing stuff and a bloody good book into the bargain.  (I must say, I agree.)

One other oddity was that they were all easily distracted from character and plot into talking about the socio-political issues of  Small Island and Ghost Heart.  The former benefitted, since nobody thought racism was a good thing.  The latter, in some ways an elegy for pre-Castro Cuba, suffered from those who already had a political position, which was generally that Castro was better than his predecessor.  None of them enjoyed – as I did, profoundly – its utter longing for a Paradise lost.  

I see that at the time I concluded that our group  of male readers weren’t hostile to romantic fiction but :

• they want less talk and more do
• emotional hypchondria a no no
• exclusively domestic and personal stories makes them feel claustrophobic
• want something to be achieved, a mystery solved, or a point to be proved

But, I must say, not one of them, unlike Danuta, commented on the heroes’ sex appeal or lack of it.

Could it be that men and women are different?

Moved – as who could not be? – by this week’s honouring of British Heroes of the Holocaust, I have been re-reading the memoir that RNA President Mary Burchell, first published in 1950. Mira Books republished it in 2008 as Safe Passage under her real name, Ida Cook.

She was very much loved by members of the Romantic Novelists Association, having done a major reconciliation job on the organisation after it tore itself apart in the mid sixties over media sniggers at anything with ’romantic’ in the title.   She was one of Mills & Boon’s brightest stars and proud of it.  ‘I am a born romantic’, she told the RNA, on taking up the presidency.  For her, romance was ‘akin to optimism and the determination to make the best of things, and has taken many people over dreary difficulties and prompted others to dare the impossible.’  She knew of what she spoke.  For, from 1934 to the start of the War, she had been daring the impossible in a big way, helping Jews to escape from Nazi Germany. 

She was only thirty – thirty! -  when her friend, the Romanian soprano Viorica Ursuleac, asked her and her sister Louise to take care of Madame Mayer-Lismann, official lecturer at the Salzburg Festival, who was coming to lecture in London.  Ida and Louise were flattered – they were both serious opera groupies and had encountered Ursuleac and her husband, conductor Clemens Krauss by standing in stage door queues – but bewildered.  The white haired sophisticate spoke fluent English and seemed better able to look after herself than they did.  However, they took her on a sight seeing tour in London and, when she asked whether St Paul’s was a Protestant or Catholic church, asked politely which she was herself.  Mitia Mayer-Lismann was astonished.  But she was Jewish.  Didn’t they know?  No, said Ida, they hadn’t thought about it. And she comments:  ‘We didn’t know – imagine!  We didn’t know that to be Jewish and to come from Frankfurt-am-Main already had the seeds of tragedy in it.’

And that was how a couple of opera-mad civil service typists turned themselves into the Scarlet Pimpernel.  Except that, unlike Sir Percy, they had no League, no contacts, and above all no money.  Mary Burchell had not yet published a book (her first was Wife to Christopher in 1936).  When she got her first contract with Mills & Boon, she left the Civil Service to write full time and a large part of her earnings went into helping refugees.  ‘Our guardian angels must have been looking over our shoulders at that time,’  she wrote.  ‘Before we had any chance to alter our way of living or get into the habit of spending what seemed to us then great sums, the full horror of what was happening in Europe finally, and for all time, came home to us.’

‘And so, at the very moment when I was making big money for the first time in my life, we were presented with this terrible need. …. it was much the most romantic thing that ever happened to us. … If we had always had the money we might not have thought we had anything to spare.  But I still had never handled more than five pounds a week in my life, and suddenly my income was rising to five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand a year;  big money then.’

It was not enough.    Ida started to raise funds, first from friends and contacts, then through speaking to groups, though she had never done anything like it before.  And she and Louise kept going back to Germany and Austria, ostensibly to hear opera, while they organised British guarantors for the people they helped and, just as important, smuggled out jewels and furs so that the refugees would have something to live on when they arrived. 

Ida was often afraid and appalled.   ’Sometimes we thought we could not bear to go back into that hateful, diseased German atmosphere.’  But if they faltered, the friendship and support of Ursuleac and Krauss got them going again. 

Their parents, too, were a great source of strength.  The sisters continued to live at home, putting the flat that Ida had acquired in Dolphin Square at the disposal of the refugees.  Once, returning from a particularly harrowing trip, Ida went into the kitchen where her mother was making pastry, and burst into tears.  ‘If she had stopped and made a sentimental fuss of me I would have cried for hours,’  she wrote.  ‘She simply went on making pastry.  In three minutes I was all right.’  Safe Passage is dedicated to her ‘Incomparable Parents, without whose loving and common-sense upbringing we should never have been capable of doing the things described in this book.’ 

They were truly remarkable.  Ida fought bureacracy – with a truly impressive sympathy for the difficulties of the bureacrat himself, however irritating.  She never got hardened to the sufferings of others, no matter how much awfulness she saw.  She never gave up hope.  She was always sensitive – read her piece on how, in December 1938, the British Vice Consul in Frankfurt told her she couldn’t jump the queue of despairing people, saying ‘I’m sorry.  But do you realize that some of these people have been waiting since seven o clock in the morning to speak to me?  I’m afraid you must go away and wait your turn.’  She had a desperate mother and daughter to help but she noted, ‘As I and the Bauers withdrew, everyone smiled sympathetically, and I had the curious impression that they had become human beings again.  They had rights, just like any other human being.  It had just been demonstrated for them before their own eyes.’    He let Ida come back after hours and the Chief Consul’s teenage daughter, pitching in with her mother, took the details and agreed that they had to see her father.  And he found a way to get the Bauers to England eventually.

The other thing that clearly saw Ida through this terrible time was her sense of humour.  Pushed into bringing a valuable diamond brooch to England in 1938, she was horrified to find ‘a great oblong of blazing diamonds’.  Fortunately, she says, she was wearing a six shilling and elevenpenny satin M&S jumper with glass buttons, so she pinned it on that, daringly left her coat open and hoped everyone would think the brooch came from Woolworths.  They did. 

A wonderful woman.

 My fifth account of a book on the Romantic Novel of the Year long list, though actually this is one I had already read before the list was published.

THE SUMMER HOUSE by Mary Nichols spans World Wars 1 and 2, metropolis and village, big house and slum terrace.   It was a time of enormous change, in social conventions, moral values, class structures and education and one of the many delights of this book is the author’s unobtrusive but faultless sense of place and time.  

Essentially, this is the story of tragedy in three women’s lives – and how they survive and grow afterwards.  The constraints of the times affect the practical outcomes.  But the feelings, described here with a restraint that makes them all the more painful,  are universal.  During the Great War young Lady Helen marries a man her family feels at home with and then, finding him a stranger, falls in love with someone else.  Her family cannot permit her to keep a child that is not her husband’s, so she is hustled into something close to prison until the birth and then the child is taken away.  The moral disdain of those employed to help her through the birth is chilling but the withdrawal of affection from her family is worse and rings heartbreakingly true.   Eventually, widowed and orphaned by the War, Helen sets out to find her daughter.  But the lies she has been told, and holes in the records make it  very difficult – and when she does, she has to confront a whole human dilemma.

Anne  sacrifices everything, including the emotional honesty of her marriage and her own self-aproval, to have a child.  And Laura,  the precious and beloved daughter,  discovers when Anne dies that she has been lied to throughout her life.  The relationship of the three women is spiky and difficult and utterly believable.  They may be jealous, they are certainly fearful, and they have deep wounds to deal with, but they all, in their own way, try to be reasonable, even to those who can hurt them.  Laura, caught up in the consequences of old secrets, does cry out at one point, ‘It’s like a contagion, spreading and spreading.  I don’t feel like being fair.  No one’s been fair to me.’   But these women are practical and honest and, in the end, Laura is fair, in spite of intense provocation.  It is nothing short of heroic.

The most important love affair – well, this is long-listed for the Romantic Novel of the Year, after all – is mainly told from the hero’s point of view, and is a real heart-turner.  He is one of the good guys, quiet and responsible and outshone by flashier chaps – at least two of them in this book.  And then the awful thing happens and he starts to think of himself as a monster.  

A rich, understated book of many dimensions -  including a whole East Anglian village coming to terms with the wartime arrival of American troops.  It is  a five handkerchief weepie along the way with, ultimately a  deeply satisfying resolution, in which steadfastness is rewarded and endurance justified.   A feast

 DECLARATION OF INTEREST   Mary Nichols is an author I am proud to call a mate.  She is also a Treasure of the Romantic Novelists’ Association.  In 2009 she had three books, all in different genres, published within six weeks of each other and celebrated her diamond wedding anniversary.  She got a card from the Queen – and a blog post from us.

This is my fourth book from the Romantic Novel of the Year longlist:  BEACHCOMBING  by Maggie Dana. 

I’ve actually been reading steadily through the long list and not blogging at all in the busy few weeks since Christmas.  (Okay, I admit it, that’s my priorities for you.)   As a result, I’m backed up with notes on several other long-listers.  Will put them up in short order, I promise.

BEACHCOMBING is another first novel.  This time it’s from the MacMillan New Writing stable which, along with Authonomy and the Romantic Novelists’  own New Writing Scheme, are seen as good routes to publication .

Jill Hunter had a boyfriend when she was a teenager, the sort of boyfriend that teenagers dream about and almost nobody finds – handsome, kind, considerate, divinely competent, and not ashamed to hold hands.  They have a moment of passion and then he disappears.  Well, his father is disgraced and the family moves away, but it’s hardly his fault and he never gets in touch.  It niggles.  Even after moving continents, marriage, divorce, two sons and a whole load of life experiences, a bit of Jill still has this question mark – and this template of perfect love.

Flashbacks are an integral part of this book and one of it strengths is that you see how the teenager is still part of the mature woman – and vice versa.  The plot moves from Jill’s beach home (and hanging-on-by-the-fingernails career) in small town Connecticut to London and Cornwall, where friends from the teenage past resurface.   Pretty soon the reader is thinking:  there’s more than one mystery here, but Jill has only noticed the missing boyfriend.  Most satisfyingly, you have to wait but you get the answer to that other mystery too, along with the emotional truth which as a teenager she did not question.     

As for the missing BF – he resurfaces too.  He still has wonderfully kind green eyes.  Jill does what  probably 99% of us would, given the chance.    

This book is very good about female friendship, about kindness, about the shore and the store and the pressures of only-just-earning-a-living.  (The scene where Jill goes head to head with a loathesome client had me punching the air in pure wish fulfilment.  Yay!)  Jill is a practical, up-beat funny woman and you are delighted to spend time with her first person narrative.  She can dream, she can be sad, but basically, she’s a problem solver with a heart, who just happens to be what my grandmother would have called A Bad Picker.

But do not worry, Bad Picker though she is, a true hero is there.  You recognise him because he does things for her that will warm the heart of every woman, well every woman I know, anyway.  Read the book and find out. 

DECLARATION  OF INTEREST    I’d never heard of Maggie Dana until I picked up this book.  So this author is a complete stranger to me, too.

Herewith the third of my readings from the Romantic Novel of the Year longlist:  FAIRYTALE OF NEW YORK by Miranda Dickinson.

This is a first novel which Harper Collins UK Avon imprint harvested from their Authonomy website.  This facilitates writers critiquing each other’s work and is supposed to turn into a full service support-group.  This novel, then called Coffee at Kowalski’s, was well received – you can see some of the comments it got still on the site.  The Authonomy community loved Dickinson’s voice and her characters.

We’re close to chick lit country – narrator Rosie Duncan, self professed optimist, is a British florist living in New York, friend of hyper social New York Times columnist Celia and employer of a couple of lovable eccentrics, Ed the serial dater and Marnie the romantic disaster.  They’re all looking for love, with intermittent success, but they want respect in their work too, and they don’t hesitate to involve their friends in their personal schemes.  We’re in the common ground between Friends and Sex in the City, if you will.  

But, for an optimist, Rosie has  a surprising tendency to see the down side risk (even of free publicity for her beloved flower shop).  She is mourning the old man from whom she bought the shop (he boosted her confidence and taught her to take time out when a huge order  stressed her to breaking point).  And she has dreams in which she’s crying and saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’.  As Mr Kowalski, whose gentle shade haunts this book says, ‘Sooner or later the thing you fear most will come to find you.’  

What Rosie fears is not a Bagshawe Assassin or even a Dillon Despairing Dog.  And no, I’m not going to tell you what it is, because the narrator doesn’t tell for ages.  But, believe me, when it comes, it’s wince-making.  

This is another book about a heroine, moving on, standing tall, dealing with her demons.  It is about friendship, and healing, and the delight of small things.  It is also a love letter to New York, its shops, its Sunday brunches, its frenetic, interlocking social scenes, its past.  In Dickinson’s hands, the Big Apple even turns into a kind place.  

A hopeful book.  

DECLARATION OF INTEREST   Miranda Dickinson is another stranger to me – and I’ve only visited the Authonomy site once before, too.

My second book off the Romantic Novel of the Year long list is PASSION by Louise Bagshawe.

Her publishers call it James Bond for girls and, on first finishing it, my question was ‘Why for girls?’   Because the author is a woman?  

This has all the ingredients of a classic action adventure:  devious men with dubious backgrounds;  relentless, professional killers;  power play at the highest levels;  conspicuous consumption; high octane sex; a nerve-wracking chase; mulitple disguises; and a super sexy, highly trained former secret agent hero who is the best of the best.  Doesn’t sound particularly girly, does it?

What it doesn’t have, I suppose, is the Fleming fascination with weaponry and exclusive brands,  nor the snobbery.  The gorgeous hero was a Barnardo’s boy – now a  billionaire banker, he goes to New York Private Views, but not to casinos or gentlemen’s clubs in St James’s.   And the heroine, though plain, ill-dressed and border-line depressed, is a respected academic . . . 

Ah, that’s why this is one for the girls.  The heroine has a brain.

It starts in Oxford with a teenage romance between don’s daughter and boy from the wrong side of the tracks.  It ends badly, scarring both.  But twenty years later, Will has not forgotten Melissa and the memory causes him to make connections between unexplained deaths . . . and to see, long before anyone else does, that his old flame is probably the next target.  He sets out to save her … and the hunt is on.

The action – and by golly there is plenty of it, edge of the seat stuff – moves from Oxford to London, New York to Boston, rural France and Rome , with stops off in Berlin, Caracas and the Gulf to tune into the Opposition.   The hero is rich - but the Opposition is richer.  The hero is shrewd and skilful with good friends still in the spying business who will help him out.  But the Opposition has limitless resources and access to the intelligence of several governments.  No doubt who the underdogs are and, indeed, Will and  Melissa end on their own with nothing to rely on but their courage, intelligence and resourcefulness.  (Their planning, by the way, separately and together, is one of the most rewarding bits of this book.)

A page turner.

DECLARATION OF INTEREST   Nope, don’t know Louise Bagshawe either.

I’m turning the year with a beastly lurgy. (Coughing so hard, my ribs hurt.) So I thought I would give myself afternoons in front of the fire with a comfort read. Fortunately the long list for the UK’s Romantic Novel of the Year is just out.

First off Waterstone’s shelf was LOST DOGS AND LONELY HEARTS by Lucy Dillon.

Lucy Dillon seems to have beaten the Curse of the Second Novel with this gentle, touching story of human rehabilitation by abandoned dogs. Rachel, glamorous PR person and ex-mistress-of-the-boss, is dumped and fired in one go and fetches up in a small Worcestershire town where her aunt has left her a dog sanctuary. Stunned and sad – and believe me, this writer is very good indeed at sadness and what it does to  people and dogs - Rachel pretty much falls into taking over. The first task is to make the kennels pay – which means finding human partners for the canine boat people under her roof, which in turn takes her out into the life of the town, making plans and crossing swords with the cryptic local vet. The second is to unravel the mystery left by her enigmatic aunt.

The characters are skilfully drawn, mostly well intentioned but often mistaken or, quite simply, inarticulate at the wrong time. The silence that grows between an infertile couple is almost too painful to bear at one point. You can see how it happens but equally, you can’t see how they will get out of it. (It takes a Basset-hound-provoked crisis.)

The dogs are as three dimensional as the human characters and just as engaging. The Basset does tend to take over (when don’t they?) but there is an incontinent Labrador pup and a managing sheep dog, which I also treasure. And recognise.

This is a book about reconciliation and kindness and letting go of bad stuff and it has a wonderfully believable and yet romantic ending.

Fab book. Big fat happy sigh

DECLARATION OF INTEREST Since I know several authors on the long list and at least two are seriously good mates, I thought it would be sound practice to state where I’m coming from, after every book I write about. Lucy Dillon is a stranger to me – unless I’ve met her at conferences and things under her real name of Ermyntrude Gutbucket, of course – and I haven’t read her first book. Yet.

Actually, I don’t think there is a villain in this story, certainly not Mr Rankin. He had to say something, poor chap. He went for short and funny. And Romantic Novelists Red in Tooth and Claw is number one in the Crime Writers’ Joke Book.
It surfaces again and again – in Harrogate last year, at a local conference this;  in print, in after dinner speeches;  year after year, after year.

Rankin said it himself, a few weeks ago, interviewed by The Independent on Sunday. ‘”Crime writers,” he explained, “are usually very well-balanced, approachable people, because we channel all our crap on to the page. In the crime-writing community we joke about romantic fiction writers and how they’re all evil, backstabbing bitches because they don’t have that outlet …” ‘

As I said yesterday, it would be a great story if it were true – rather like Georgette Heyer in Devil’s Cub, saying that ‘Mr Comyn, for all his prosaic bearing, cherished a love for the romantic which Lord Vidal,a very figure of romance, quite lacked.’

But I have just sat reading the RNA Archives, moved to tears sometimes by the affection, the respect, the support these romantic writers have shown for the last fifty years to the new writers (the ’pre-published’), authors both struggling and  successful, and sometimes the damn near post published.

For instance, five years after she died, people were still writing of ‘our dear Mary Burchell’, the ebullient, romantic and supremely generous second President. (Heroic, too. With her heart in her mouth, she and her sister helped Jews escaping from Germany and Austria before the War. Read her autobiography, republished last year as Safe Passage by Ida Cook. )

So – I don’t want to demonise Mr Rankin, or any other writer, of crime or otherwise, and I apologise to anyone who thinks I do.  (Really sorry Paula and Eileen, if you think I was carried away.)  I don’t even want to stop them telling the joke, if they enjoy it. I just thought that someone, sometime, should say, actually it’s not true.

If not now, when?

If not me, who?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when two or more crime writers are gathered together, one of them will say, ‘But of course, Romantic Novelists are the ones who really plunge the knife between the shoulder blades.’ All laugh.

Last night at the Crime and Thriller Awards, it was Ian Rankin.

Bum. Because Ian Rankin is one of my favourite authors and I wanted him to be – well – not up for a lazy laugh, frankly.

To some extent, I see why he did it. Of course, it ought to be true. Writers live by dramatic irony, after all.  In real life, the gore and cruelty merchants should be stamp-collecting trainers of guide dogs for the blind. The love-conquers-all mob should demean their rivals, dispose of surplus spouses and destroy the universe while they’re at it.

But life isn’t like that.

I’ve just been diving through the Archive of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and, in fifty years, what comes across most strongly is the sheer good heartedness of most of them.  No spite,  no briefing against.  There are disagreements, of course;  even rows.  (Usually when there wasn’t enough tea.  But then that first generation was mainly from a class who Told Cook and hadn’t actually had to provide it themselves before.  They soon adjusted.)  But they liked each other and they had a damn good time – and genuinely rejoiced in fellow writers’ success, especially those who came through the RNA’s unique New Writers’ Scheme.  In fact some, like Sheila Walsh and Elizabeth Harrison, stayed on for life, through chairing the organisation and beyond. 

And they, we, have gone on doing it for fifty years.

I didn’t find the Romantic Novelists’ Association until well into my career, and I can honestly say I’ve never found so many friends and like minds in one place before – though we quite often disagree.  And from those who don’t like me, I receive courtesy and a hearing.  How many organisatons of 700 people can you say that about?  

To be honest, the worst you can say about Romantic Novelists is that we can be just a touch defensive.  Rosie M Banks we can take.  (Well, actually, some of us are enthusiasts.)  George Orwell we have learned to live with  - romantic novels should be read by ’wistful spinsters and fat wives of tobacconists’.  But when fellow popular novelists call us back-stabbing harridans, it hurts

And it’s not true.