Happy Birthday, Charlotte Lamb!

Another year, another birthday message for my mother in absentia.

Born Sheila Ann Mary Coates on December 22nd 1937, she later became Charlotte Lamb, best-selling romantic novelist and mother to five children, including myself.

Charlotte Lamb published over 150 novels under that name and various other pseudonyms, her main oeuvre consisting of romances, thrillers, and historical fiction. She died suddenly on October 8th 2000 in her home on the Isle of Man.

One of her favourite birthday presents was a scarlet-leaved potted poinsettia, cheerfully bright, always available at this time of year, and just cheap enough to be a popular present from one of her kids.

Happy Birthday, mum!

Swept Away, featuring the marvellous 'Desert Barbarian'

Swept Away: pub. September 2009

How cool is this? While helping to answer a reader's query about a Lamb novel below, I discovered that a new 3-story edition of classic M&B tales from the 60s, 70s and 80s has been published recently, featuring one of Charlotte Lamb's novels: 'Desert Barbarian'.

In 'Desert Barbarian', the half-Arab hero snatches up the astonished heroine and rides off with her into the desert like something out of the Arabian Nights, after hearing her complain that she is bored of the usual tourist sights. Later, she discovers that the mesmeric 'Khalid' is really wealthy businessman Stonor Grey, and realises she has been made a fool of ...

You can buy SWEPT AWAY on Amazon.uk. I couldn't track down this title on the Mills and Boon site proper, so if anyone knows the link, please let me know.

Here's the title publicity:

This title features love, lust and desire in three classic tales of passion from the 60s, 70s and 80s. 'He moved his lips along her throat with feverish intensity, then returned to her mouth, parting her lips, consuming her in the flame of his own passion.' Lines like these sent hearts fluttering and pulses racing by the light of the bedside lamp as eager eyes devoured the latest Mills & Boon novels throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties.

Today, Mills & Boon novels are more popular than ever before, as enthrallingly passionate as they always have been with a sensual style to suit the sophistication of the 21st century...but there is still a place for the nostalgic romance of yesteryear.

In "Swept Away", three of the best-selling novels from three of the most popular authors, one each from the sixties, seventies and eighties, are brought together in one breathtaking volume to take you back in time to a more innocent world. Even then, however, the path of true love never ran smoothly...

The books in this edition are "Lucifer's Angel" by Violet Winspear, "Desert Barbarian" by Charlotte Lamb, and "Summer Fire" by Sally Wentworth.
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Liz Fielding on Charlotte Lamb on Donna Alward's blog

Browsing a number of romance blogs tonight, I stumbled across Donna Alward's vibrant blog, where well-known romantic novelist Liz Fielding has been discussing her earliest inspiration as a writer. Liz explains how reading an article about Charlotte Lamb and Anne Hampson set her on the path to becoming the iconic romance writer she is today.

I was at a point where I wanted to move onto something bigger when I read a magazine piece about Charlotte Lamb and Anne Hampson and discovered, rather late in life, romantic fiction.

You can read the whole article here, on Donna Alward's blog.

Jane Writes Romance

Just briefly, I thought it might be a good idea to start a new blog for posts about my own romantic writing, so here it is: Jane Writes Romance.

Nice and succinct. Just the way I like things.

Meanwhile, on this blog, if anyone wants to write about a Charlotte Lamb title - favourite, most provocative, most influential - let me know.

Modern/Modern Heat Presents Competition

The line my mother used to write for, now known as Modern Presents - I hope that's right! - had a contest recently, which I entered with a first chapter and synopsis. I didn't win, alas, but four talented writers did and you can read all about their success at iheartpresents.

Some have queried the fact that two of the winners are already published authors, one even with a history of publishing with Harlequin, when many felt the competition was aimed at 'aspiring authors' - which they interpreted as meaning 'unpublished'.

Looking at their books, it seems to me that no rules have been broken. Though I daresay all will be made clear in due course. I myself am published, of course, and still entered within the rules, because I am not under contract to Harlequin. So I have sympathies on both sides of this debate.

However, this contest and the subsequent communications flying about the eHarlequin world have jolted me into updating this blog - neglected for too long!! - so that's one good thing to have come out of it.

The main advice my mother used to give aspiring authors was that, as a romantic novelist, you have to believe in romance, heart and soul. She used to say that readers can spot a fake instantly, the sort of writer who is only in it to make money. To write series fiction well, you have to genuinely love the genre you're working in and believe in its validity, whatever others may say of it and however many rejections you receive on the long path to publication.

Charlotte Lamb didn't have a long path to publication, of course. With talent like hers, it's not surprising that she placed her first full-length novel immediately - with Robert Hale - and never looked back.

For the rest of us mortals though, the path is certainly long and frequently thorny. But one thing we can all do is be genuine about romantic fiction. Because if we're genuine, according to my mother's advice, we can't go wrong.

Charlotte Lamb (almost) in the rain

I found this old photograph of my mother a few days ago, when clearing out some drawers. Not sure when or even where it was taken, but it's obviously quite an early one compared to the other photographs of Charlotte Lamb that I have in my possession.

It's clearly a city. The cars look - to my eyes, at least - American, though that could just be the late Seventies look of the thing. Which would date it to her major US and Canadian tour, organised by Harlequin, that took place circa 1981. (I did actually accompany her on the Harlequin tour, but can't recall if I was 14 or 15 that year.)

Certainly, from the cars, the clothes and my mother's general appearance, I'm guessing this photograph was taken no later than 1982 or maybe 1983.

But who's holding the umbrella?!

Dark Dominion: the Alpha male run amok?

Dark Dominion by Charlotte Lamb was first published by Mills & Boon in 1979, though it's been reprinted in various formats and by other publishers since. The basic plot: Caroline Fox has to decide between James, the forbidding but darkly charismatic barrister she married, and fun sexy Jake, a famous actor she's known since their days at drama school together, who comes back into her life at a time of crisis in her marriage - the crisis having been precipitated by a miscarriage.

I re-read Dark Dominion last week, and was both pleasantly surprised by how gripping and un-put-downable I found it, despite the 1979 publication date, and shocked by how grim this book becomes at times. The story deals with some extremely difficult issues such as separation, rape, potential divorce, depression, miscarriage, adultery, and does not shy away from telling it 'like it is'.

Dark Dominion's genuinely dark heart made me begin to question my mother's take on the Alpha male, something I'd never really done before, perhaps having imagined in my youth that her version of the Alpha male - nearly always a hard-edged, highly driven individual whose courtship of the heroine is as much about sadism as it is about hearts and flowers - was merely a product of her times, and the specific romance genre in which she was writing.

But was it?

Thirty years on, and Kate Walker's recent blog posts on the topic of the Alpha male in category romance certainly demonstrate that times - and our expectations of romantic heroes - have changed.

Today's Alpha male may be hard-edged, but he is neither a bully nor suspect in his sexual tastes. Gone is the truly sadistic growl, the punishing kiss, the retaliatory slap - oh yes, the hero got away with hitting the heroine in a number of Lamb stories, such as Pagan Encounter and Retribution, off the top of my head - and other such dangerous delights.

I remember distinctly a key scene in the superb Call Back Yesterday, where the heroine points a rifle at the hero at point blank range, and he huskily orders her to pull the trigger, because only such an ultimate act of violence could finish what was between them. Thrilling to read, when bound up in the magic of the story, and perfect for their particular relationship. But politically correct? Absolutely not!

Dark Dominion is a hard story to read at times, yet it sparkles with romance when the sexy, drawling, Beta hero Jake is on the scene. You almost wish Jake could win his lady. But of course his lady, in this case, is already married. And that marriage triumphs in the end, because Caroline 'needs' and responds to the darkness in James' character - or so she claims:

Sweat glistened on his pale temples and dewed his back. His hands bruised and explored, their touch rough. He was taking her ruthlessly, without tenderness, but her anxiety and anger was being released into a wild, frenzied response which seemed to incite him into more and more brutal lovemaking. She knew instinctively that she needed it, that some deeply buried instinct was making her not merely accept but want the savagery of his body.

Note: After this particular scene, James insists that she leave him, because he finally recognises that his jealousy is out of control.

Someone once left a comment on this blog criticising some of Charlotte Lamb's early books as sadistic and unpleasant. I thought at the time that this critique was unfair. I am no longer quite so sure. However, that is not to say that I disapprove of these darker Lamb stories, or feel they ought not to have been written. They were immensely popular at the time of publication, and still make dynamic reading. Which suggests that they answered some kind of need in the mind of the reader, just as James' fierce lovemaking above answers a similar, unspoken need in Caroline.

So perhaps such difficult themes do speak to something in a woman's psyche, such as a secret need to be dominated - if only in the bedroom. And while that is no longer a politically correct attitude, and rightly so in most cases, there may come a day when such dangerous thoughts are back in fashion.

Until then, romantic novelists will have to comb a recalcitrant hero's hair and keep him just the right side of civilised.

"Musings on Romantic Fiction from an Academic Perspective"

Gosh, I'm really not very good at updating this site, am I? November 2008 was my last post and here we are in April 2009. I ought to be ashamed of myself.

Well, I was rooting about on the internet today and found a great blog called Teach Me Tonight: Musings on Romantic Fiction from an Academic Perspective, which last year featured this informative and well-judged article about Charlotte Lamb, and in particular, one of her more boundary-pushing novels, Hot Blood ... where the heroine is 52 years old!

It's an interesting read, and I recommend clicking over there. But don't stop at the post itself, because the comments below the blog post are equally fascinating and informative, especially if you're researching Charlotte Lamb or romance novels of the eighties and nineties.

The article also discusses an unusual topic: the age of heroines compared to the age of romance authors themselves, and asks why so many heroines seem 'older' than their apparent ages in the books. The newer romance line Modern Heat is also mentioned, seen by the blogger as one attempt to draw in a younger readership.

By the way, if you've spotted any other blog or website articles on Lamb, or would like to write one yourself and have it mentioned here, please do comment below. Frankly, I need all the help I can get!

Mills and Boon Celebrates 100th Anniversary

An excellent, I thought, programme last night on BBC Four celebrating Mills and Boon's 100th Anniversary. For a few more days you can watch it again at this link: BBC FOUR.

I was a little disappointed that nobody contacted me back about this celebration, as I know some past authors - or their estates - were involved in the 100th Anniversary. But although a few of my mother's books featured in the various programmes shown last night on the BBC, that was as far as her involvement went. Which is a disappointment, given her massive role in creating the modern face of Mills and Boon.

There was also the BBC Four documentary programme detailed below, "How To Write a Mills and Boon Novel", following the progress of novelist Stella Duffy as she attempts to write an M&B and discovers along the way that it ain't as easy as it might appear!

What amused me was how Duffy's natural instincts as a writer had her breaking and subverting the M&B paradigm as soon as she began to sketch out her initial plot, and that she then went on to produce a treatment for the more unusual M&B imprint, Nocturne, which features supernatural stories, rather than the traditional Modern Romance line she'd been originally pitching for.

How to Write a Mills and Boon:...
...Timeshift

To mark 100 years of romance publishers Mills and Boon, literary novelist Stella Duffy takes on the challenge of writing for them. Romantic fiction is a global phenomenon, and Mills and Boon are among the biggest names in the business. The company welcomes submissions from new authors, but as Duffy soon finds out, writing a Mills and Boon is harder than it looks.

Help is at hand from the publishers themselves, a prolific Mills and Boon author and some avid romance fans, as Duffy's quest to create the perfect romantic novel takes her from London to Italy on a journey that is both an insight into the art of romantic fiction and the joy and frustration of writing itself.

Fan Mail from "Sandy"

I feel like it's Christmas. :-)

I've been reading your mom's books ever since I was 14 or 15 (and I'm 45 now!). The first one I read was "The Long Surrender", and from then on I was hooked.

My favorites:

Obsession (my original copy has pages falling out!)
Frustration
Temptation
Forbidden Fire
Stranger in the Night

That's a very short list, but if I listed all of them, it would be about 25 books!!!

Thanks very much for bringing your mom to life in your blog. I'm sure you must miss her very much even now.

Take care,

-Sandy-

Charlotte Lamb's Influences

Some people have asked about Charlotte Lamb's influences as a writer. I can't be comprehensive here, not without researching the question at length, but I shall attempt to answer that briefly by outlining a number of her favourite authors and books.

First, it's important to note that Charlotte Lamb's library was extensive, to the tune of many thousands of books accumulated over nearly five decades of voracious reading. So any comments I make here can only be very general in nature, and some equally important influences may either not be mentioned at all or glossed over. Indeed, I may access more information on this topic and return to it in a future blog entry. Anyone researching twentieth-century romantic novelists and their influences is welcome to approach me by email for a more detailed picture of my mother's reading habits.

In her early days as a novelist, before her all-important shift from Robert Hale to Mills & Boon, her books tended to be more historical than romantic. That blurring of the line between the two genres came from having cut her teeth on the likes of Mary Stewart, Mary Renault - an Essex-born author like Charlotte Lamb herself - and Jean Plaidy (herself the user of multiple pseudonyms such as Eleanor Burford, Victoria Holt and Philippa Carr), all of whom were equally interested in maintaining complete accuracy of historical detail whilst still honouring the romantic element of their plots.

The light Regency romances of Georgette Heyer also held a special place in her heart, Sylvester and Venetia being firm favourites. Several of Heyer's non-Regency historicals were also to be found on her most-accessed shelves - The Conquerer, for instance, and Beauvallet. The influence of Heyer's swift intellectual banter between hero and heroine can be seen at work in almost all Lamb's novels, though perhaps especially at her peak in the 1980s.

Before even that, as a teenager, she had enjoyed steeping herself in the work of nineteenth-century novelists - primarily 'character-driven' writers like Charles Dickens with his rich, eccentrically-peopled novels. Jane Austen was another constant presence on her bedside table. In later years, she loved to listen to classic audio books on her 'Walkman': she owned the entire Austen oeuvre on cassette. Although she loved them all, Emma, I believe, took precedence for her over the more popular Pride and Prejudice. It should be noted that her knowledge of such writers and their works was encyclopedic; her grasp of literary traditions was formidable and far beyond what might be deemed necessary for a career as a romantic novelist.

Favourite twentieth-century authors included Graham Greene, in whose work and biography she was particularly interested, and later crime writers such as Ellis Peters and Ruth Rendell. Her non-fiction tastes lay in gardening and cookery books - interests which often worked their way noticeably into her novels - and more extensively in the field of biography (usually that of other novelists and poets, but also charismatic historical figures like Napoleon, about whom she wrote as Sheila Lancaster in a 1982 novel, Mistress of Fortune).

Of the poets, John Keats and William Blake were perennial favourites. She had a keen interest in poetry, even writing a little unpublished verse herself. Well-read in the works of British and American poets, from the medieval Chaucer through to T.S. Eliot and Stevie Smith, her tastes nevertheless tended toward the conventional and romantic, especially in later life, and away from anything either emotionally excessive - such as the confessional poets - or overly-modernist.

I have not mentioned Shakespeare here so far, but his voice was a constant influence over Lamb from her earliest short stories published in women's periodicals of the 1970s through to her last works. She regularly quoted from his plays and sonnets in her novels, and displayed a profound knowledge of his life and work - and indeed that of other dramatists through the ages - when writing specifically about actors or the stage in her novels. Again as Sheila Lancaster, she even wrote Shakespeare himself into Dark Sweet Wanton (Hodder & Stoughton, 1979), a novel based on the myth of the infamous 'dark lady' of Shakespeare's sonnets.

To trace the pervasive nature of Shakespeare's influence through Charlotte Lamb's writing would constitute a massive research project in its own right and is - sadly - beyond the scope of this blog.

Happy Birthday Charlotte Lamb!

Born Sheila Ann Mary Coates on December 22nd 1937, my late mother, the novelist Charlotte Lamb, would have been 70 years old today.

She was a wife and mother of five, also now grandmother of five. Not to mention a dedicated best-selling novelist whose books were translated into almost every language in the world. She died suddenly, of a heart attack, seven years ago in October 2000. Still very much loved and missed!

This is Charlotte Lamb, pictured with me on a family holiday in France, sometime in the early eighties.


Apologies for the poor quality but these old photographs don't always scan well. It looks like the Loire Valley, with that romantic castle tower in the background. Though it could have been somewhere in the South. We certainly look like we've caught the sun.

So, a rare shot of Charlotte Lamb with a wine glass in her hand. Although her heroines often indulged in dry white wine and the occasional sophisticated cocktail, my mother was a serious non-drinker. So much so, in fact, I can't remember ever seeing her drink alcohol.

I think this must have been Coca Cola masquerading as Burgundy!