Mary Jo Putney

Mary Jo Putney

Patricia Rice

Patricia Rice

Susan Fraser King

Susan Fraser King

Anne Gracie

Anne Gracie

Nicola Cornick

Nicola Cornick

Andrea Penrose

Andrea Penrose

Christina Courtenay

Christina Courtenay

WWR – our September reads

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Anne here. Yes, I know it’s already October, but since we now only blog on Mondays and Thursdays, and since Andrea has a brand new book out and was blogging about it on Monday, we thought you wouldn’t mind a September blog in October.
We have a lovely range of book recommendations for you this month.

We start with Nicola. This month I’m recommending a book that’s a real treat for Regency fans! The Gentleman’s Dilemma by Jane Dunn is a classic Regency romance that reminds me how wonderful it is to read the Real Thing. Jane’s deep knowledge and love of the Regency period is evident in every well-chosen phrase and description and her characters are emotionally layered and so appealing.

Ferdinand Shilton, handsome, rich and kind, is looking for a wife who will fit neatly into the rational way in which he runs his life and will not trouble him too much. He has already found a suitable candidate. And yet he still feels oddly lonely and dissatisfied, and a meeting with Madeleine Rose, a poor relation, only seems to discompose him further.

Madeleine is living on the charity of her not-particularly-pleasant aunt and her family, and escapes her real-life situation by secretly writing a romantic novel. When her life and Ferdy’s become entangled, she is drawn to his heroic qualities whilst he is disturbed to find that Madeleine seems to prompt all sorts of strong and unwelcome emotions in him, upsetting the balance of his life.

I do love a kind hero, and Ferdy is such a sweetheart, whilst at the same time being pretty stalwart – it’s a difficult balance to pull off but Jane Dunn does it perfectly. Ferdy really needs to find himself and understand what he really wants before he and Madeleine can build a future together.

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Financial Skullduggery is Nothing New!

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Crypto, Bitcoin, Blockchain . . . today’s hi tech currency is a mystery to most of us, and rumors abound about the possibilities of financial skullduggery. But worries about the money supply are nothing new—as I discovered when I began  researching my latest Wrexford & Sloane historical mystery, Murder on Threadneedle Street, which releases tomorrow!  (You can read an excerpt and order a copy  here.)

It’s often said that money is the root of all evil—and counterfeiting has been around so long that it’s often called the world’s second-oldest profession. Regency England (historians broadly define the Regency as the years 1800-1837, when Queen Victoria came to the throne) was particularly susceptible to forgers in the early1800s, and many of the reasons mirror the same issues we’re facing in our own fraught times.

Regency satirical cartoon on banknotes

I love history and diving down the research rabbit holes that lead to the more obscure—and interesting—aspects of an era is because those elements often reveal more about society’s hopes and fears than the standard narratives. And so, what really fascinates me about Regency England is that technology and scientific discoveries were happening with dizzying speed—and the changes that these innovations  created were disrupting society in so many ways. The Industrial Revolution was kicking into high gear. Steam engines were mechanizing mining, weaving, and manufacturing. Inventors were patenting marvelous new inventions like precision lathes and other mechanical wonders that did things faster and better than humans. (Sound familiar?) Workers, craftsmen and cottage industries were losing their jobs to these new innovations and like many of us, they were terrified and confused by this brave new world.

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Hollywood History

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cover of Close-up to MurderMy upcoming book, Close-up to Murder, is a break from historical romance but still has roots in history—if one can call early Hollywood historical. I mean, it was over a century ago, so it ought to qualify.

The basic beginning of Hollywood was the usual real estate development—rich guy failed at farming, subdivided the land, sold empty desert lots to rich people back East, and mansions began appearing. The city was incorporated in 1903 with a post office, markets, livery, and hotel, ready for the railroad to deliver mountains of eastern gold in the form of rich New Yorkers in search of sunshine. It merged with Los Angeles in 1910.

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Ask-A-Wench: Heroes and Heroines of Childhood

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This month’s Ask-A-Wench feature emerged from a Wenchly discussion about favorite books and shows we loved as kids. We discovered some in common, and some unique to each. Did our childhood idols influence our novels later? Definitely! Here are our favorites – we’d love to know yours as well!

As a child, did you have favorite heroes or heroines from books, TV, or movies? Did they help shape your fictional characters when you grew up to write books?

Mary Jo here: As a kid, I would read anything available, but novels by preference.  I don’t recall looking for heroic archetypes, but I always wanted the good guys to win.  This turned out to be good preparation for writing romance. <G> I would read boys’ sports stories and science fiction novels like Robert Heinlein’s SF juveniles.  But I also liked books with strong female leads:  Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, and Trixie Belden, Girl Detective.  

Sadly, my school library would only let me borrow two books a day and I usually finished those by supper time.  This left me free to watch television in the evenings. Westerns were really big then, so Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy and more. (Maverick, yes!)  Reading is a lifelong addiction. Ask me how I know!

Anne here. Growing up, I didn’t have TV, but I still managed to see quite a few shows at the homes of friends, and also on my grandmother’s TV. She wouldn’t let me watch “that dreadful horror show” (The Addams Family) but watching Robin Hood was quite acceptable, being “historical”. I loved Robin Hood. He was decent, honorable, loyal and smart and, as played by Richard Greene, he was also very handsome. It was filmed before I was born, but I watched an episode on YouTube recently and thought it still held up quite well. (Our version didn’t include advertising.)

As for heroes in books, I think most of mine were animals — especially Kiki the cockatoo in the Edid Blyton “Adventure” series who made me laugh. I did love Kim (Rudyard Kipling) and several others, but the animals always starred for me — The Call of the Wild (Jack London), many different horse books (eg The Silver Brumby series by Elyne Mitchell) and more.

The heroines? As other wenches have said, they were usually disappointingly passive, and did things like prepare picnics and do the washing up! (grr, Enid Blyton!) I had to wait until I was eleven when I began my lifelong readership of Georgette Heyer to discover heroines I could identify with — clever, bold, independent and nobody’s domestic helper. 

As for them influencing my own characters, my heroes tend to be honorable and decent and my heroines tend to be somewhat independent, and though they might start out being under some unworthy man’s thumb, they pretty soon step out from under.

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