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!

Fans & Top Fives

An aspiring romance writer blogging under the name Tumperkin had this to say about my mother this week:

I have a nostalgic fondness for the old 'black rose' Mills and Boon romance novels of the late 1970s and early 1980s. My mum had a sizeable stash of them and her favourite author was Charlotte Lamb who wrote prolifically for Mills and Boon in the 70s, 80s and 90s. She published over 100 novels with them as well as other single titles.

Read more ...

Thanks for that, Tumperkin, and I wish you all the very best in your own quest to be a romantic novelist. Although I'm published in other fields, I've written six full-length romances myself over the years and not one of them has seen a bookshelf, so I know how desperately uphill that struggle to be published can feel at times!

Tumperkin lists her top 5 favourite Lamb titles as:

1. Frustration
2. Dark Dominion
3. Fever
4. Obsession
5. Duel of Desire

What's yours?

In Memoriam Anne Weale

It was with great sadness that I learnt recently about the death of one of my mother's oldest friends, Anne Weale.

Charlotte Lamb and Anne Weale were both compulsive letter-writers, and after the invention of the fax machine (though before email became popular) they would fax each other sharp, witty, and incredibly detailed multi-page letters on a daily basis. Indeed, it was not unusual for them to send and receive these lengthy faxes several times in a single morning, knocking a topic like romance editing, the latest bestsellers, cover images for a new book, or even some hot publishing gossip back and forth like a couple of top-notch literary tennis players!

I'm sure if my mother had lived to see the widespread use of email, their daily correspondence would have taken on new and even more epic proportions!

For the past few years, Anne Weale had been blogging on literary and other matters at Bookworm on the Net, amongst other writing tasks she was involved in. She was kind enough to mention this Charlotte Lamb site several times on her blog, inviting people to come here and read it. Her death has left me saddened and chastened, knowing that I have not been blogging here as frequently as I used to.

I hope to make up for that in the future. Especially since my father recently sent me a few photographs and other items that belonged to my mother that I can blog about here.

Meanwhile, here is something written by Kassia Krozser last month on 'Romancing the Blog' about Anne Weale and her legacy: Thoughts from a Disorganized Mind.

The comments make interesting reading too.