Charlotte Lamb, Queen of Romance

Happy Birthday, Charlotte Lamb!

2011-12-22T11:22:00.000-08:00

Today, 22nd December, would have been my mother's 73rd birthday, by my somewhat numerically challenged reckoning.

So Happy Birthday to Charlotte Lamb, novelist extraordinaire!

My scanner isn't working again, so no new photo this time. Apologies for that. I'll get it fixed asap. But here are some of my personal favourites from among her books: Dark Dominion, The Tilthammer, Sweet Compulsion, and of course, a popular favourite from her golden era at Mills & Boon, Call Back Yesterday.

Meanwhile, if you have any favourites of your own, do leave a comment and let me know. I may be able to arrange a feature on any requests you may have, such as a Lamb book you've heard about but not yet read.

And do continue to ask about books you haven't been able to find online, or whose titles you've forgotten. Someone out there may have the answer you're looking for.

Now for a little plea.

Although this blog gets hundreds of hits every week, very few people leave comments, which means it's hard to know if I'm hitting the right note or not. So to encourage me to blog more often, do please leave comments to let me know if you've found my features on Lamb books interesting, or if you'd rather read other types of features, perhaps. Or contribute your own reviews and reappraisals. I'd also be happy to feature scholarly articles on Lamb books, plots, influence on later writers, or her style of writing.

Basically, I'm open to new ideas. Try me!

Victoria Lamb

Lang Hyland: the Womaniser in "Obsession"

2011-10-22T02:36:00.000-07:00

[Spoilers Alert!]

Re-reading Charlotte Lamb's "Obsession" last night, I was struck yet again by the difference between the modern romance hero and the Lamb hero of the late seventies and early eighties.

"Obsession" was first published in 1980, one of the ten or so books written around that time which have passed into Mills & Boon history as Lamb classics.

- Lang Hyland was undeniably attractive; he was also, equally undeniably, a womaniser - three months was the average life of one of his ladies. As his secretary, Nicola was in the best position to know all about Lang and his ways - and his secretary was what she intended to remain; she had no intention whatsoever of being just another scalp on Lang's belt. -

Yet a scalp on his belt is ultimately what Nicola does become. Though this being Mills & Boon, there's a price tag attached for our promiscuous hero - it's marriage or nothing with Nicola. For she is a 'good girl', unlike her married sister Caroline, whose adulterous dalliance with Lang earns her Nicola's fury, and - presumably - the reader's disgust. Nicola is so good, in fact, she has never allowed a man to have sex with her. And I use the verb 'allowed' deliberately. For Nicola's much-discussed virginity in this book is about control, not morality. It is not merely a chip to bargain with on the marriage mart, but a way of controlling the men in her life - and there are two other professional males vying for a potential place in her bed; she is no lonely virgin, desperate to be loved, unable to interest a man. Nicola's virginity is a calculated withholding of intimacy that allows her to remain superior to Lang and his promiscuous affairs.

Nicola, the secretary, the anchor of office life, is the moral core of "Obsession". We identify with her as the cool, unruffled receiver of Lang's reprehensible advances and congratulate her on the smooth running of the dangerous jungle atmosphere in which Lang moves and strikes like a tiger. The label 'tiger' is applied to him - and other men like him - at least three times in this book.

- Lang had the instincts of a jungle animal: keep free of cages and keep your claws sharp. He prowled around the firm like a sleek tiger, seeing and hearing everything, constantly alert. -

He is a sexual predator and lord of the office. Yet Nicola is presented to us as the power behind the tiger. She runs the show from her desk, discreetly, her eyes lowered, 'smiling like a crocodile and using a voice like melted honey' as Lang observes at one point. 'At first I thought you were just a simple-minded bitch. Then I realised you did it deliberately. And very effective it is too. It's hard to go on shouting at someone who smiles back with sunny good temper and agrees with everything you say.'

Was it really OK for a Mills & Boon hero to call the heroine 'a simple-minded little bitch', even back then? Even familiar with Lamb's violent heroes, I felt a frisson of disquiet on re-reading those lines. A warning, perhaps, for Nicola to get out while she can. You tame these men into marrying you, but do they really change after they've tumbled into the trap? Do they not simply revert to type a few years after they've 'put a ring on it' and go back to dating other women - and perhaps slapping you around for good measure?

Later in the book, following an argument, Lang spanks Nicola before having sex with her for the first time. It's a full-on spanking: 'He wasn't just playing; he was slapping her hard, intending to hurt.' Seconds later, he's 'kissing her ruthlessly, his lips fierce and hot.'

What kind of impact did this apparent assault have on readers in 1980? Today, accustomed to the rigidly controlled, politically correct romance of Harlequin and its competitors, you almost need protective gloves to handle a book like "Obsession". Yet spanking and forced sex seems to have fitted more easily with romance in the early eighties, which was just beginning to test the limits of what was acceptable in this kind of series fiction. Some women may have been appalled, yes. (The ones who were not reading Jackie Collins that decade, for instance.) But some may have found it exciting to return to the pre-feminism model of Dominant Male, Submissive Female - as does Nicola.

- For a few seconds Nicola resisted him with every ounce of her strength,' the paragraph quoted above continues, 'then she gave up the useless contest and her arms curved about his bent head. -

The word 'contest' seems an interesting choice of descriptor for a confrontation where a man spanks and then has fairly rapid sex - almost no foreplay - with a woman whom he knows to be a virgin. Once more Lamb presents us with 'The Sex War' where the woman appears to lose, but secretly wins (because she subdues the male and snares him into marriage). The 'bent head' of the hero above is an image of male submission - not dominance. Though Lang's lovemaking here is curiously one-sided for a Lamb hero. Most of them spend rather more time encouraging the woman to respond as a sexual creature; Lang is more brutal and driven, a highly self-interested hero for whom Nicola's capitulation is at least as exciting as her body.

By contrast with Nicola, Lang's 'other women' are presented - by Nicola, of course, who can be considered our narrator here - as stereotypical 'fluffy blondes' who 'totter in high heels' and who possess a 'vocabulary ... of around six words, all of them apparently indicating yes.' This is another politically incorrect aspect we seem to have lost in modern romance: the snarky heroine or 'bitch' who denigrates other women, particularly those who are less fastidious than her about having sex outside marriage, describing the hero's previous girlfriends as 'girls' with 'Identikit faces and bodies'.

Nicola, on the other hand, has a wide vocabulary and an independent mind. Does not sleeping with the hero give her this, perhaps? Is that the subtle inference behind Lamb's contrasting of these two female 'types', the promiscuous fluffies and the tough virgins? That you give it up at your peril? Lang is right to be suspicious of her crocodile smile, of course. For while smiling pleasantly at him, Nicola is thinking less than pleasant thoughts about her unreconstituted boss: 'You charming and delightful man, she thought. I just love working for you. I'd like to push you down the lift shaft.'

To consider "Obsession" as a romance is to do it little justice as a study of sexual tension in the office, and of sexual hang-ups in general. Both Nicola and Lang are obsessed with each other, of course. Lang is obsessed with going to bed with her without being forced into marriage first, and Nicola is obsessed with controlling men and her own sexual appetites.

Ultimately, the contest in "Obsession" is not between Nicola and Lang, but between Nicola and her (only gently hinted at) obsession with remaining a virgin until she is married. A contest she loses, of course, though with Lang's red-faced offer of marriage ringing in her ears soon afterwards as a salve to her pride. (Sex before marriage in a 1980 Mills & Boon novel? Holy crap!) Which is precisely how it should be in a short romance.

"Hot Blood" gets another outing with Harlequin Treasury

2011-07-20T10:58:00.000-07:00

Click to read another fresh and interesting take on Charlotte Lamb's "Hot Blood" - which is a May to December romance from 1996. It was recently reissued as a Harlequin Treasury book, I believe, though I can't find the link for that.

The new review of "Hot Blood" has been posted today, 20th July 2011, on Dear Author, via Sunita's to be read challenge.

Thanks to Embrace romance author Rachel Lyndhurst for spotting this with her eagle eyes and passing on the link!

I discussed "Hot Blood" in an earlier post where it was considered in an academic light.

Charlotte Lamb and Carole Mortimer

2011-04-25T10:22:00.000-07:00

I finally got the scanner to behave today, thanks to my husband's persistence long after I would willingly have thrown the computer across the room. So here at last is a never-before-seen photograph of my mother, Charlotte Lamb.

To see an enlarged version, just double-click the photograph.

Richard Holland, Sheila Holland (aka Charlotte Lamb), Carole Mortimer and Jane Holland (aka Victoria Lamb)

I'm not entirely sure where this was taken. Any suggestions gratefully accepted. That's my father on the end, of course, then my mother - we seem to be wearing scarily similar floral dresses - then one of my mother's closest friends, the romantic novelist Carole Mortimer, looking smart and professional as ever, and me on the far end.

I would date this photograph somewhere in the late 1980s, or perhaps around 1990.

Hopefully more photographs to follow, now that I have mastered the secrets of the scanner ... including some classics like Charlotte Lamb with Janet Dailey, with Alan Boon, and so on.

Happy New Year, Charlotte Lamb Fans!

2010-12-28T08:48:00.000-08:00

I'm aware that I still owe this blog the second part of my article on The Long Surrender - long overdue, I agree, but events overtook me! - but meanwhile, this is a New Year message to all Charlotte Lamb readers out there and a round-up of how 2010 looked.

A Very Happy New Year to everyone reading Charlotte Lamb novels for the very first time - welcome to the club! - and to those faithful readers with old Lamb editions firmly on their keeper shelves.

This year 'Charlotte Lamb, Queen of Romance' spread its blogging wings to include extracts from diary entries and links to sites such as Smart Bitches, Trashy Books which were featuring discussions of Lamb titles.

The latest of these links has to be the one which arrived in my inbox only this afternoon, courtesy of the lovely Fabiola from a French romance website, Les Romantiques.

At Les Romantiques, Charlotte Lamb features - in a lovingly detailed three page article - as this month's Author of the Month in their spin-off webzine, Issue No. 37, December 2010.

For the French-speakers among us, you can download that issue as a PDF, which is all in French, at this link: http://www.lesromantiques.com/Webzine/Webzinedec2010.pdf

And the latest news is, we may soon be seeing the publication of a digital edition of one of Charlotte Lamb's rare early historical novels, originally published under the name Sheila Holland.

Watch this space for more details!

"The Long Surrender" Part One: Sex, violence and two suicide attempts

2010-10-26T02:46:00.000-07:00

Found an interesting blog entry whilst trawling the net for a cover picture of one of Charlotte Lamb's best-known and perhaps most controversial classics, The Long Surrender. I have a copy here - several, in fact - but my scanner is not currently working. Some annoying software conflict that I am trying to fix. Meanwhile, I had to go online to find this not terribly satisfactory image:

The blog I found is called The Tyranny of Reading and, in a blog post from April 2007, discusses The Long Surrender in glowing terms, largely for the memorable sex scenes, the 'obsessive' violence of the hero, and the heroine's repeated suicide attempts - the only complaint, by someone leaving a comment, was that the sex was not graphic enough!

What is interesting is that modern readers of Lamb - including the inimitable Sarah from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books - on the one hand frequently accuse Lamb of writing over-violent sex and abusive relationships, yet on the other hand praise her for the power of these same stories, commenting on their unputdownable quality.

The reader at The Tyranny of Reading seemed to suffer no such qualms, simply enjoying the book for what it is - a product of the sexually confused late seventies, and strikingly honest in its portrayal of a troubled marriage looking for love. Indeed, on a blog post relating to the equally violent and traumatic Night Music - which, as I recall, also features a suicide attempt of some description - the blogger complains about 'the years of PC dross that followed' these more violent predecessors.

It needs to be underlined, sadly enough, that Lamb's diaries and letters reveal her own discontent with the politically correct direction in which romances began to turn from the early eighties onwards. Popular romance writers are nearly always at the mercy of marketing and sales teams, who decide what the market wants and instruct the editors accordingly. It was a pity that Lamb's great strength - the portrayal of loving but obsessive relationships - became unacceptable just at the peak of her career.

The Long Surrender is quite difficult to get hold of, by the way. But I'll be blogging about the plot and the writing itself in more detail in "The Long Surrender" Part Two. Busy enjoying a re-read right now.

10th Anniversary

2010-10-08T12:27:00.000-07:00

Today, October 8th, is the tenth anniversary of Charlotte Lamb's death.

Looking back at her diaries, I am once more struck by how universal the writer's processes and dilemmas are. What I feel, as a fellow novelist, to be my own personal struggle with the raw material out of which a novel or other piece of writing is born, is in fact a struggle shared by most, if not all writers.

So, on March 3rd 1972, in a fairly typical entry, Charlotte Lamb notes:

Went to Romford to shop. Got some good books at the market bookstall.

After lunch, I thought about writing another novel but came up against a brick wall. I cannot decide on direction. What sort of book do I want to write? Do I want to write another fictional historical novel? Or a biography? Or a biographical novel?

I go round in circles. And in the meantime I write nothing.

Although lately the words have begun to bubble up in my mind again as they do when I am ready to write. So far I have used them to write poetry. What I want is to find a subject which makes my sense of excitement come into play.

That image she uses, 'lately the words have begun to bubble up in my mind again as they do when I am ready to write', is a striking description of the drive to create narrative, to tell a story, which is rarely some idyllic moment of inspiration from the Muse, but more often experienced as a cruel pressure, or at the very least a restlessness, a desire to kick the world away and concentrate solely on the work.

Here, Lamb is searching for a subject. Something that will bring her 'sense of excitement ... into play'. She found it three days later, making notes on a long historical novel about Mary Fitton, one of the candidates for the unnamed 'Dark Lady' of Shakespeare's sonnets.

That novel, not to be published until 1979, under the pseudonym Sheila Lancaster, was eventually entitled Dark Sweet Wanton and was - in many people's opinion - one of her finest works.

Diary of a Novelist: June 1980

2010-09-14T02:54:00.000-07:00

June 3rd 1980:
Suddenly it happened. I got up at 9.30 and I knew. C. had really begun to shape in my head. I started to write and it just fell out of me in easy torrents. I did 36 pages today. At last, at last. I was so happy and relieved and ecstatic.

[Received] the S&S [Simon & Schuster] contract from L. and a letter from Caradoc [literary agent].

The new book is set in Greece to begin with, and is very different to anything I've ever done before.

June 4th 1980:
I revised the work I did yesterday, improving it, then I wrote Ch 3. I got to p. 61. I'm very pleased with it. It feels good. The last two pages need revision, though.

I expected a call from F. [editor] but no call came. I was bubbling with euphoria all day about the book. That does worry me. Have I lost my touch? I rang her later to tell her not to tell me what she thought of J. [previous ms]. It might put me off C. ...

She said kind things about my poetry and I said it was all derivative. She didn't disagree. How could she? It is true, alas. She said she wondered what poems I'd torn off the 2 sheets: self-combusting ones?

June 5th 1980:
Today I largely revised the 3 chaps I'd already done. My extreme excitement went, though this time I am determined to finish it. It was rainy, misty, grey and clammy. Thunderstorms all over England. I booked my hotel and air flight to London.

June 6th 1980:
A beautiful day; not as warm as it has been, but sunny and slightly hazy. Sent carbon of C. to F. (1st 3 chaps). I wrote C. but it was all revision of what I'd done before. Sharpening impact, glossing up, tightening. I only did part of the revision needed but at least it got done. I was working on the book all day.

Felt restless, irritable, on edge, but oddly excited about C. I feel sure now that it is going to be a great book. What I have to do is strike the right note.

I feel myself moving into the frame of mind which I can only call shaping or forging. The book has now taken hold and I am like a man heating iron and forging it to make a sharp spear. My old way of writing won't do any more. I have got to get used to writing, rewriting, writing. I must be more patient. Tenacity is a great virtue for a writer.

These edited extracts are taken from Charlotte Lamb's personal diaries, which cover most years of her writing career. The book above, 'C', was begun on May 30th, following this entry: 'Later in the evening I began to think about writing [an] M&B. Jane was reading Obsession and I suddenly felt like doing another book.' She finished this ms on June 29th - her fifth novel in 6 months.'

I haven't definitely pinned down which of her books these extracts describe, though I have a few key suspects. More extracts on writing to follow.

Festival Summer: 'every woman adores a Fascist'

2010-08-04T18:40:00.000-07:00

Festival Summer was first published by Mills & Boon in 1977.

The Magnificent Milfords are one of England's great theatrical families - brilliant, beautiful and witty. All except Katrine, who prefers to stay at home and has no yearnings for the limelight. But this summer, at the Cantwich Festical, she falls under the spell of the brooding, enigmatic actor-director Max Neilson, who soon co-opts her as his PA. But Max has other plans for Katrine beside fetching and carrying ...

This is a very early contemporary Lamb title, written just as she is emerging from several years of writing historicals, and it flags up territory she will revisit in later novels about the stage or actors in general.

Charlotte Lamb had little or no contact with the professional theatre, despite the number of novels where her hero or heroine are actors. Before becoming a writer, she worked for a spell at the BBC, where she came into contact with a number of acting folk, and of course she was a great theatregoer herself while still living in the London area. Lamb's knowledge of Shakespeare was exemplary, and she knew much modern drama too, reading plays even once her many children made it difficult for her to visit the theatre in person. Yet she never showed any personal inclination to write for the stage or to act herself, preferring the solitude of the novelist's life.

In Festival Summer, Max Neilson shows all the hallmarks of a typical Lamb hero: worldly-wise, cynical, brooding, charismatic, even domineering. The sample text in the inside front cover sums up that kind of hero's bleak outlook on life, and his reliance on the idea of a woman's destiny - which usually turns out to be a place in his bed:

He looked into her upturned face with a menacing smile. "Cowards have to learn that it's easier to fight than to run away because no matter how fast you run fate can run faster."

Katrine provides the pattern for Lamb's younger heroines, the ones who have yet to taste life and whose primary objective is to keep a low profile and hence avoid trouble. They are the emotional 'cowards' Max Neilson refers to above.

Where Festival Summer differs from some of the later Lamb titles following this same model is that Katrine has been suppressing her talent as an actress in order not to compete with her actor father and older siblings, all of whom are depicted as shallow, demanding, egotistical and self-serving - while Katrine herself is humble, modest, patient and a domestic slave. But she's not a doormat. There's an early scene in which she brushes her father aside and sorts out his clothes for him in a slightly brusque manner, making it clear that while she isn't keen on the limelight her siblings enjoy, she does need to feel in control of the household - and of them.

The first kiss appears to come over halfway through the book - too early yet for the infamous Lamb bedroom scenes - and again, sets the pattern for later sexual contact in Lamb novels of this period. Goaded beyond endurance by her stubborn refusal to admit any talent, the hero Max grabs Katrine and kisses her:

Max laughed. "Ordinary? You're as ordinary as dynamite!" He caught her by the shoulders, his fingers biting into her flesh, so that she raised her head, gasping.

'Max! You're hurt ..." The words were smothered beneath his lips as he bent his head and kissed her with violent intensity, so hard that it forced her head back and stretched her throat until it was painful.

Sounds harsh, yes? Yet one sentence later, we get this: 'A sensation of intolerable bliss burst upon her.'

Max Neilson is by no means the brutal, domineering hero of later Lamb novels, who comes along to wake the sleeping princess with a kiss - and likes to make damn sure she's aware of what's going on - but he does appear to be a prototype for that man. Indeed, these archetypal Lamb heroes are disturbingly reminiscent of Sylvia Plath's "Daddy", a visceral proto-feminist poem written about fifteen years earlier than Festival Summer:

Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

Here, the modest Katrine gets her reward. Max, who sees through her good-girl disguise to the star material beneath, tricks her into displaying her talent for all the world - but particularly her own family - to see. Because of this, she is cast in a major role, acting alongside her father and sister in the play festival of the title, and gains everyone's admiration. 'You could be a great actress,' Max tells her, near the end of the book.

In the final chapter, we see that Katrine's talent is undeniable, a shining future in theatre absolutely guaranteed. So does she pursue a career in the theatre, and outshine her talented father and siblings? No, because Max asks her to marry him immediately after the festival and she readily agrees, insisting that she wants to have children, not a career.

Those five minutes of fame are all Katrine wants - swiftly reverting to good-girl type before any of her readers can throw the book across the room. She will be quite happy to return to ironing shirts and cleaning up after other people, now she has a man in her life. Here the heroine validates the domestic drudgery of the typical late seventies romance reader by giving up her own dreams too and choosing marriage instead of a career.

Max resists for a few lines, 'incredulous' at this unthinking sacrifice: 'You mean you would give up the theatre, despite having made such a hit, just to have babies?' and then rapidly capitulates. But Katrine has earned the good virgin's reward with her sacrifice. His brooding violence is gone. She has tamed the beast, and now finds 'passion' in his eyes instead of anger and impatience.

It's hard to read these earlier Lamb novels now without being aware of how much British society has changed since the mid-late seventies. Yet these main characters are drawn in a complex way, with deeply contradictory impulses and hang-ups Freud would have recognised, something which is not always true of today's more politically correct short romances. Even the secondary characters here, the rest of the Magnificent Milfords - the flamboyant and emotionally flawed father, in particular - are masterpieces of psychological understanding.

Nor is Katrine's decision to abandon a career in acting irrelevant to today's readers, despite the three decades that have elapsed since it was written. Most women these days still face the same choice that Katrina faces here (even if she doesn't see it as a dilemma) once children arrive. Now, however, women are expected to 'have it all' - which, in real terms, means we are expected to cope with both the responsibility of raising children and the demands of an ongoing career - where that possibility would not have been open to the vast majority of women in post-war Britain, when my own mother was having her first children.

The irony of all this, of course, is that the writer herself was managing to do both, whilst tacitly condoning her heroine's decision to throw away her chance of a glittering career and be a 'stay at home mum' instead.

Open letter from Wayne Jordan, romance novelist

2010-06-13T05:26:00.000-07:00

One of top author Wayne Jordan's Harlequin Kimani novels:

Dear Jane
I read my first romance novel in the mid-1970 and fell in love with the work of authors like Anne Mather and Anne Hampson who were my favorites at that time. This is, until the day I picked up a book by Charlotte Lamb and I fell in love. I’ve read every Mills and Boon your mother wrote and when I discovered she wrote for Silhouette as Laura Hardy, I added those books to my automatic buys. I cannot express my sadness when your mother died in 2000. She’d brought hours of joy and love into my life.
Your mother inspired me to write, and in 2005, I published my first book with Harlequin. My sixth book comes out in October 2010. So your mother’s memory lives on. Each day I write another page of my current manuscript I remember your mother and her wonderfully lyrical way of writing. Unfortunately, over the years the copies of your mother’s books that I own have disappeared after lending them out. Hopefully, Harlequin will reissue some of your mother’s work in digital format as they have been doing recently with other authors. I’ve definitely made my request.

Two of the best places to find a list of all your mother’s novels and the cover art are:

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/l/charlotte-lamb/

www.fictiondb.com

Thank you, thank you for sharing your mother with us. I’m now a published author, but at heart, I’m still that teenager who picked up a Charlotte Lamb book and fell in love.

Wayne Jordan

***

Thank you too, Wayne, for allowing me to share your thoughts and memories of Charlotte Lamb with my blog-readers. She truly was a great romantic writer and a wonderful ambassador for the genre.
I wish you all the best with your own writing career. May you be as blessed as my mother was!
Jane Holland

Romantic Novelists Association Summer Party 2010

2010-05-14T04:56:00.002-07:00

I went to the 2010 Romantic Novelists Association Summer Party in Westminster last night. It was such a lovely setting, in a high-ceilinged, old-fashioned library, not two blocks from Big Ben and the River Thames. Quite magical to walk back to the tube with night falling and look up at that famous, shining clockface high above our heads.

My mother would have loved the event as well as the setting, having been a staunch supporter of the RNA most of her writing life. Indeed, Charlotte Lamb was the founder of AMBA, an organisation specifically intended to represent the interests of Mills and Boon Authors. (No stranger to political activism, my mother!)

I turned up early for the AGM, which was on the fourth floor of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers - though I'm sure those engineers must be far from mechanical, if they can manage all those stairs every day - and made a bit of an entrance by nearly keeling over out of breath in the doorway.

Luckily, tea and a comfy chair were on hand to restore me to my usual ebullient self. I even dared to ask a question in the Any Other Business part of the meeting. Or maybe two questions. I contributed, at any rate.

The party that followed was lovely. Very elegant and tasty canapés were served, along with glasses of wine and champagne. Halfway through our relentless networking and chinwagging, the old Netta Muskett Award, as was - gosh, showing my age now! - which is now the Joan Hessayon Award for new writers, was awarded to Lucy King for her HMB Modern Heat category romance, Bought: Damsel in Distress.

Many congratulations to Lucy King, and well done to Melanie Hilton for all her hard work in running the RNA New Writers scheme and administering the award!

I didn't take a camera, alas, but photos of people's stylish heels seemed to be the order of the day. My heels were a bit too stylish, and my poor feet now throb horribly. Definitely not a good day to visit the gym!

But the highlight of the evening for me personally were all those lovely comments from people who had either known Charlotte Lamb, or been influenced by her books, or been taught by her at a romance seminar. I even managed to touch base with an old friend of hers at last, the novelist Sara Craven; we've lived in the same town for years, ironically enough, and yet never bumped into each other!

Anyway, my mother would have loved to have been there herself, enjoying the gossip and the canapés, and I'm sure she was, in spirit. Though in much more sensible shoes.

New Lamb Fanblog

2010-04-16T02:41:00.000-07:00

Found a marvellous Lamb fanblog today on hubpages.com, featuring many, many titles by Charlotte Lamb. Lovely to see there are still such dedicated fans out there, keeping her memory alive. You will not only find a selection of titles and short descriptions of the plots of vintage Lamb titles there, but also some US covers which I have never before seen!

Most of the editions I have in my own collection are either European translations or British first hardback editions. The covers on the Charlotte Lamb hubpages blog are mostly unfamiliar to me, being what look like US first paperback editions, though I do own a few of them. Anyone who has other US or foreign editions and can send me the scanned cover image, I would be ever so grateful.

Enjoy!

Click below for the link to see more vintage Lamb titles:

Charlotte Lamb harlequin vintage romance ( harlequin Presents romance ) page 1 of 2

Sarah Holland, aka 'Mouton Cadet'

2010-02-20T12:32:00.001-08:00

A few people visiting this blog have enquired about my older sister, Sarah Holland, who followed Charlotte Lamb into the Mills and Boon empire at one stage, publishing some 22 romances with them during the 80s and 90s.

I'm unsure what my sister is up to these days but you can follow her US and UK careers in acting, singing, and journalism here, on her Wikipedia page, where you can also enjoy other photographs of Sarah Holland, most notably with a gigantic plastic sheep in San Angelo, Texas:

'Because of the speed of her writing and the success of her books, Holland was nicknamed Mouton Cadet, a wordplay on Lamb's Daughter, by publishing brothers Alan Boon and John Boon, who then ran Mills & Boon. This industry nickname was later reported in the non-fiction book The Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance by Paul Grescoe (1998).'

Whatever did we do before Wikipedia existed?! Here are the titles of Sarah's M&B novels, also taken from that source.

* Too Hot To Handle (1982)
* Tomorrow Began Yesterday (1982)
* The Devil's Mistress (1982)
* Deadly Angel (1982)
* Fever Pitch (1983)
* Bluebeard's Bride (1985)
* Outcast Lovers (1985)
* The Heat Is On (1988)
* Adult Love (1990)
* Desert Destiny (1991)
* Forbidden Passion (1991)
* Last Of The Great French Lovers (1992)
* Ruthless Lover (1992)
* Confrontation (1992)
* Extreme Provocation (1993)
* Ungoverned Passion (1993)
* Dangerous Desire (1994
* Blue Fire (1994)
* Master of Seduction (1995)
* An Obsessive Love (1995)
* The Dominant Male (1996)
* Red Hot Lover (1998)

The Boss's Virgin:''Cracktastic''?

2010-01-29T15:30:00.000-08:00

Found this review of The Boss's Virgin, from February 2008 on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books the other day. Odd how these things keep cropping up. If you spot any other Lamb-related stuff out there on the net, do please drop me a line with the link.

The Boss's Virgin was the last category romance my mother wrote. It was published the year after she died, in May 2001. This is the UK edition cover ...

and this is the US Harlequin Presents edition (sorry it's so much smaller) ...

And here is a teensy extract from what 'Sarah' of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books had to say about this final Mills & Boon romance offering from Charlotte Lamb, likening it to Roofies and crack cocaine!

It’s cracktastic, sudzy, over the top, silly and utterly insane fizzy candy, and I cannot put it the hell down. It’s a horrible turn-the-page omg-what-next experience, reading this book. What is IN this book? The utterly frothy insanity is just too absurdedly entertaining to put down, and even though my ability to suspend belief deflated by page 3, I am still reading at a crackalicious pace simply because I cannot stop myself from wanting to know what crazy ass car will be loaded next onto the holy crap locomotion. Seriously.

Read more of that review, and the lively comments that follow it, here!

Lamb continues to intrigue and outrage readers

2010-01-18T18:32:00.000-08:00

Tonight, somewhat belatedly, I found yet more interesting, angry, intrigued and dismissive comments on one of my mother's classic dark novels - is it a romance, or a novel about two people compulsively and dangerously in love? - Dark Dominion.

Read them here at Racy Romance Reviews.

The review of Dark Dominion is a few months old, but worth pursuing if you're interested in Charlotte Lamb and her legacy.

Happy Birthday, Charlotte Lamb!

2009-12-22T09:01:00.001-08:00

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'

2009-12-15T09:11:00.000-08:00

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.
.

Liz Fielding on Charlotte Lamb on Donna Alward's blog

2009-12-14T15:29:00.000-08:00

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.

Modern/Modern Heat Presents Competition

2009-12-13T09:10:00.000-08:00

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

2009-07-06T03:34:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-05-04T11:32:00.000-07:00

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"

2009-04-21T01:57:00.000-07:00

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

2008-11-03T01:57:00.000-08:00

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"

2008-10-27T07:51:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-06T04:52:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-12-22T15:21:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-15T15:01:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-10T15:30:00.000-08:00

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.

Gone, But Not Forgotten

2007-08-02T08:46:00.000-07:00

I was on a writing course last week for writers of teen fiction, one of my own favourite areas of novel writing. During conversation one evening, I mentioned to the group my mother and her lifelong commitment to writing.

To my surprise, quite a number of the women there - including one of the tutors - had been avid Mills & Boon readers as teenagers and could still remember reading my mother's novels with great pleasure. One was quite upset when she learnt that my mother was dead, as she frequently re-reads her favourite Charlotte Lamb novels and still thought of her as a contemporary writer.

As her best books are re-issued in various formats and editions around the world, including the exciting new Manga versions, I think a whole new generation of Charlotte Lamb fans will be created. If you are one of them, do please drop me an email or comment below this blog post and let us know your experience of Charlotte Lamb romances, thrillers and historicals.

Readers' Postbag: 'The Devil's Arms'

2007-07-11T02:58:00.000-07:00

Dear Jane,

Hello. I am writing in regards to a post written by C. (Australia) concerning the title of one of your mother's books about a woman who had lost her memory and found herself engaged to a man, an artist, who hates her, and she also has a twin sister.

The book is The Devil's Arms and the main characters are Linda and Jake. It was the first book I ever read of your mother's when I was 12, and she became one of my favorite authors then and still is today.

She was an amazingly talented writer. My personal favorite Harlequin of hers was called Forbidden Fire, with the characters Louise and Daniel.

I'm so glad I stumbled onto this blog as I am a big fan of Charlotte Lamb. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Susy
(USA)

Emails from Lamb Readers Around the World

2007-06-28T10:59:00.000-07:00

This is a small selection from the many emails I receive on a regular basis from Charlotte Lamb fans around the world. Here, only initials of readers are given, plus - when known - their country of origin.

If you would like to send an email, letting me know your favourite Lamb novels or how her romantic novels have affected you, I would be very glad to hear from you. Though if you don't want your email to be published on this blog, please state that in your email and your wishes will be respected.

If you can help with any of the queries below, please leave a Comment after this post or email me with your answers.

Please send your emails to charlottelamb @ poetrycornwall.demon.co.uk

*

Hi Jane, I wanted to drop you a line to let you know what a huge fan I am of your mum's work. I especially loved her books from the late 70's. I just reread Dark Dominion and am now rereading for the umpteenth time, the Silken Trap. So fabulous and I'm so glad that you have that tribute website in her honour.

I have copies of all her early books starting where Oriel is the heroine and a Heathcliffe type her match. My favourites include: Long Surrender (can't believe she did that in a weekend), Pagan Encounter, Dark Dominion, the Silken Trap and Temptation.

Again, thanks for having that website.

I've always wondered as to what happened with other Mills & Boon authors. ie. Sally Wentworth, Lillian Peake, Roberta Leigh/Rachel Lindsay. Did your mum know them?

Thanks,
G. (Canada)

REPLY: I don't know if my mother knew those particular authors, but she certainly knew others from the M&B stable. Some of them were close friends. Anne Weale, for instance, and Carole Mortimer - who lived half an hour's drive away from us. The novel mentioned above, with Oriel and Devil Haggard, is the magnificent Call Back Yesterday (1978) - one of my own all-time favourites, too!

*

Dear Jane

Your mother was my favorite romance author as well as the author of my favorite book ever. I wish I could remember which title I wanted, but I sure remember the story line. I read several of hers back to back in 1980, so you can see my confusion.

The one I am looking for is the one where the heroine is vacationing in Greece, falls in love with Julian (I think that's his name) and goes back home to prepare for the wedding. When she re-arrives in Greece, she is greeted by the man's father who tells her that his son has jilted her and insists that she marry him instead to save the family honor. After reluctantly marrying him, they fall in love.

I would really like to get a hold of this book again. Can you help me?

Thanks!

M. T.
A HUGE LAMB FAN

REPLY: I'm still trying to work this one out! If anyone can help, please Comment below. There are several set in Greece which I have available, but none of the story lines seem to match.

*

I so enjoyed the new look of the blog, Jane! and thank you for all the older titles you mentioned - many I had not know about - especially the three historicals. I'll have to make it a point to search those out.

I too enjoyed her Desert Barbarian - it's interesting that the book starts out in the desert but ends in India (or somewhere like that when Stonor saves her from a tiger). Your Mum was such a good writer. I have a box of her books alone that I would not part from. I used to buy her books just from her name alone and was never disappointed.

I've also wondered about books by Sarah Holland - were these by a sister of yours? I'll look around for a copy of your book. I've been searching for some of your mother's earlier works and hope to get some before the mail rates change over here.

You asked about favorites: of the many I have four:
1. Frustration
2. The Devil's Arms
3. Temptation
4. Abduction

Regards,
A. - who looks forward to your entry when you have time!

REPLY: Sarah Holland is my elder sister. She wrote about a dozen M&Bs in the nineties.

*

Jane, I really loved all of Charlotte Lamb's books back when I discovered them in the 70's. There was one that stuck in my mind but I can't remember the title. It was about a woman who lost her memory but was told that she was married to this artist who seemed to hate her. Later it was discovered that he was married to her twin instead of her. Please could you tell me the name of the book as I would love to get it again to read.

I can give you more of the plot if that will help. The hero lived with his mother in the country and when the heroine came to stay with them, she showed that she could cook (made stuffed apples) and couldn't swim when the hero said that she could swim like a fish and didn't cook. She later regained her memory and confronted her sister who said that she left her luggage behind when she fled after hearing bad news.

Thank you heaps

C. (Australia)

REPLY: This search went on for several emails. I don't think it was ever resolved, so if anyone out there recognises this plot ... I was sure I knew this one, but then couldn't seem to pinpoint it. If only my mother had written fewer books; over 150 romances is a large number of plots to hold in your head all at once!

*

My wife Usha is a great fan of your mother and has read all her novels till date. The Barbary Wharf series of 5 books is her most favourite of all the romantic novels. She has read those novels during her college days in 1994-5.

However they are not available in India now. I have been trying to buy these 5 novels published in 1992 on the internet for almost 2 years now as I want to gift it to my wife as a surprise. However I have not yet been successful.

Today, your blogspot has rekindled hope in me that I may be able to buy it for her. Can you please help me in this regard. I will be very grateful to you if you can. Please let me know.

Thanking you,

A. (India)

REPLY: This one was easily resolved by pointing the gentleman in the direction of ABE books, later receiving this reply from him:

Dear Jane. Thanks a million for the prompt reply and advice. I had searched earlier on Ebay but did not find the full set of 5 books. However, I was not aware of the other site ABE. I just surfed through that site and am glad that all the 5 books are available, though with different bookstores. Looks like I finally will get the full Barbary Wharf collection for my wife.

Thanking you,

A. (India)

*

Jane, thanks for your reply. I was able to get hold of The Tilthammer through an online book dealer I often use. I'm reading it now and really enjoying it. I had no idea your mother had written so many long historical novels or used so many other pen-names. Thanks again for putting your time into the website, I'll try and check it as often as possible and look out for news of other Lamb novels I've never read!

Thanks!

J.F. (Texas)

*

Dear Jane

I was so sorry to hear about your mother's death when The Boss's Virgin came out, and I've often wanted to write to your family to express this, but did not know how.

A new Charlotte Lamb book was my reading highlight, and I've collected all of your mum's books since I was 13, and living in Mauritius. I learned a lot from her - grammar, phrasing, new vocab and how to become more assertive, confident and independent as a female going thru her teen years in a male-dominated country.

I'm a mum of 1 aged 37, and I now have every one of her books, except for one called Starcrossed, which I've never managed to come across in English. Mills and Boon could not confirm or deny that they put it out, neither could Harlequin, and this is one that I'm still after, and I would pay a considerable amount for it. I keep posting requests on ebay, to no avail! I do have the French version, but so much is lost in the translation that it's as if it was written by a different author. I've also repeatedly asked M&B if they are likely to publish a tribute to your mum, but apparently they have no plans to do so. Why not, if they've managed to do it for other authors?

I don't have a favourite author any more, as no-one has lived up to your mum for me. I'm glad I found your site - thank you.

Regards

R.R. (London)

REPLY: This desire for a tribute has been a common theme in many emails from Lamb fans. If you too would like to see Harlequin publish a tribute to Charlotte Lamb, or re-issue any of your favourite Lamb novels, please contact them via their eHarlequin website http://www.eharlequin.com/ or via M&B here in the UK at Mills & Boon.co.uk.

Heart of Fire goes Manga!

2007-05-28T04:07:00.000-07:00

Heart on Fire: a manga version under Harlequin's Ginger Blossom imprint

Romance publisher Harlequin is beginning to respond to a worldwide liking for manga (Japanese comic-book style) versions of their most popular romantic novels. Earlier this year they reissued yet another of Charlotte Lamb's novels - this time, well-known classic HEART OF FIRE - under their Ginger Blossom line. Same Lamb romance, new and rather beautiful visual twist. Delightful!

Heart of Fire
Claudia's new boss, Ellis, was considered to be a troublemaker—but that was okay because Claudia liked a job that was a challenge. Now they're working together and it's Claudia's feelings that are a challenge and her heart that's in trouble.

You can buy this fascinating new manga version of Heart of Fire by visiting the Harlequin Store, and while you're at it, don't forget to check out their Author page for Charlotte Lamb, where you can read more about her life and follow links to Discussions about Charlotte Lamb on the Harlequin message boards.

The Extended Family of Charlotte Lamb

2007-05-05T14:46:00.000-07:00

Sweet Compulsion and a Dickensian vision of London

2007-04-13T04:21:00.000-07:00

An Early Childhood as an Evacuee
Some readers of Charlotte Lamb novels may be aware that she was caught up, as a young child, in the evacuation process that took place during the Second World War. Being from a family based in the East End of London, a very dangerous place to be living at that time, she was separated from her immediate family on numerous occasions, and passed much of the war amongst various relations. Like many people, she coped with the sense of displacement this brought in later years, particularly in her teens, by turning to fiction, where she soon made friends with many of the classics of English Literature. This was something which often got her into serious trouble at her convent school, where the nuns took a dim view of any child obsessed with reading works of fiction - considered dangerous and unhealthy for a young mind!

The Influence of Charles Dickens
Here is a rather touching account by my father, the classical biographer Richard Holland, of my mother’s abiding love for the work of Charles Dickens, and how this may have coloured both her experience of childhood and her later aspirations as a writer:

‘She was fond of telling me that her first readings of Oliver Twist and Our Mutual Friend took place when she was still young enough to suppose that the London of Lizzie and Gaffer Hexham and the Golden Dustman was contemporaneous, or nearly so, and that if only someone would take her a few miles upstream of the Isle of Dogs (where she knew her absent father had been born) she would find a river bank and a city overflowing with Dickensian life in all its colour and variety and its raw emotions.’

In Charlotte Lamb’s richly detailed novels, with their fast-moving, multi-layered plots and deftly drawn characters - particularly in her penchant for the eccentric or memorable minor character who nevertheless influences the hero/heroine in some subtle and unexpected way - we can see that early love for Dickens working its way into her own writing.

Sweet Compulsion
One of the most telling examples of this, perhaps significantly based in a sprawling, multicultural dockland area of London, is her one-off romantic novel written under the pen-name Victoria Woolf, Sweet Compulsion, which was published by Mills and Boon in 1979.

Sweet Compulsion is a beautifully written and playful novel, full of joie de vivre, with a mischievous tomboy heroine called Marcy Campion and the ‘forceful Randal Saxton’ as the hero, a ruthless property developer she’s fighting to prevent a house she has inherited and its surrounding area being destroyed in the name of progressive development. It’s also a novel which draws deeply on that self-constructed ‘memory’ of Lamb’s own childhood in a run-down Dickensian London, with a rather gawky eighteen-year-old Marcy inspecting her deceased aunt Thomasina’s house for the first time and sadly noting the disparity between its elegant decaying beauty and the shabbiness of the streets around it.

Yet in Sweet Compulsion, and in other Charlotte Lamb novels set against the background of inner city life, there’s also a sense of regeneration happening alongside the inevitable decay, a triumph of human determination over a lack of public funding - perhaps even something of the ‘spirit of the Blitz’ and its aftermath in the gradual rebuilding of London, which my mother would have witnessed at first hand as a child:

*

When she first saw it, she thought that there had been a mistake, but then she looked again at the name on the corner of the road. Paradise Street.

The house stood in a vista of corrugated iron fences, broken pavements and dirty wisps of paper blowing desultorily along the filthy road. There were no buildings apart from the house itself.

All around rose high flats, like concrete mountains looking down upon a grimy valley.

At the other end of Paradise Street a narrow alley intersected, choked with workmen’s cottages and shabby shops with peeling paint, cracked wood and uneven roofs.

A fence had been erected around the site of the old house and she could not find an opening. She saw the upper storey over the top of the fence - a flat Georgian facade with a stark elegance born of functional lines and generosity of proportion. The dusty windows seemed to appeal to her mournfully against the dull sky ...

‘Change and decay in all around I see,’ murmured Marcy to herself.

‘Gloomy, ain’t it,’ Wesley agreed, shuddering dramatically.

When they emerged into daylight they found a work party busy building an obstacle course with old tyres, planks of rotten wood and piles of bricks - the tyres swung from the trees, the planks were raised on heaps of rubble and brick. The whole garden was filled with children, playing and working with vigour and noisy enthusiasm.

A little crowd of women were standing at the opening in the fence. Marcy took a deep breath and walked over to them.

They looked at her suspiciously.

She smiled and began to talk. Soon she was sitting on an orange box, a mug of tea in her hand, listening as the women talked about the new development.

(From Sweet Compulsion, Mills & Boon, 1979)

Desert Barbarian (M&B, 1978)

2007-03-02T12:18:00.000-08:00

Recently, whilst trying to block a vast incoming email which was messing with my tiny computer, I accidentally wiped out 1,500 saved email messages from my mailboxes! Amongst various other problems, this has meant that I no longer have the name or email address of a lady who wrote to me a few weeks ago, asking whether my mother had ever used an Arab hero in her novels. I have been racking my brain for the answer since then and have finally came up with Desert Barbarian.

Desert Barbarian is a quirky Charlotte Lamb romance from 1978, which was just edging into the Wonder Years where my mother's production level was concerned, so a book that may have been eclipsed by the torrent of her later titles, Lamb producing as many as twelve books a year around that time.

This M&B romance features a mysterious and brooding half-Arab hero who literally sweeps jaded tourist Marie Brinton off her feet and rides away with her into the desert for a spine-tingling adventure of dangerous kisses beside a camp fire. The hero calls himself Khalid in that romantic setting, but his real name turns out to be Stonor Grey, a ruthless business tycoon with a penchant for beautiful women and a healthy respect for his cultural background. In some respects a trickster figure, straight out of myth and fable, but a sexy and unforgettable one as Marie Brinton is uncomfortably aware.

Here's a slightly edited excerpt from the book, where 'Khalid' has snatched Marie from the grounds of her hotel and carried her to a house near the bazaar, from where he intends to take her into the desert. She tries to escape but is quickly recaptured, finding no help from curious onlookers in the bazaar.

*

'I told them you were my woman who had run away from me. They advised me to beat you and then make violent love to you. They assured me that such treatment would be certain to make you more malleable in the future.' He gave her a taunting glance. 'I've followed one half of the advice. Perhaps I should now follow the other?'

'If you touch me I shall scream!'

He laughed. 'Empty threats, Miss Brinton.'

'How long are you going to keep me here?' she asked, trying to distract him. 'There'll be a reward. Someone will inform the police ...'

'By then we will be safely miles from here in the heart of the desert,' he said coolly.

Her heart sank. 'In the desert?'

'I thought you longed to see the desert. Aren't you eager to ride across the empty sands with me, lie beneath the stars, wrapped in my burnous, with only the wind for company? I will show you the great wastes of sand and sky, teach you to appreciate the beauty of the emptiness ...'

'Oh, shut up!' she said bitterly, seeing that his smile was full of wry mockery.

*

So, if the lady who asked about an Arab hero is ever back on this site, I do apologise for not replying to you individually but I have accidentally deleted your address. Hopefully this little snippet about Desert Barbarian will make up for the long delay in replying.

Any other books along those lines that fans can remember? Perhaps by other romantic novelists whose books you have been hoarding? I seem to recall my sister Sarah writing a similar novel for M&B at one point, possibly also with an Arab hero, but can't remember the title.

The Tilthammer (Hodder & Stoughton, 1980)

2007-02-11T02:23:00.000-08:00

Although best known for her short romantic novels written under the name Charlotte Lamb, my mother also wrote three long historical novels under the pseudonym Sheila Lancaster. The Tilthammer was a gritty northern romance, set against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution. Another Lancaster novel, Dark Sweet Wanton was a more sophisticated and lyrical story about the supposed 'Dark Lady' mentioned in Shakespeare's sonnets. Mistress of Fortune was her last novel under that pseudonym; I don't have a copy of it, unfortunately, but I believe it to be her epic historical novel based on Josephine, the notorious mistress of Napoleon Bonaparte.

A 'tilthammer' is a mechanical industrial hammer which pounds rhythmically as it works; such was the startling and brutal image behind the title of this romance, and its narrative drive is equally brutal and determined. This is reinforced during one scene where the heroine Hannah inadvertently witnesses the hero Joss having sex with another woman and is horrified but fascinated by his strength and forcefulness as a lover, describing him as a 'tilthammer'. And that scene is typical of this novel in terms of its shocking but compulsive engagement of the reader.

But The Tilthammer is an unusual historical romance throughout. Instead of moonlit love and flights from ballrooms, this story deals with the extremes of rape, murder, execution, adultery, pregnancy outside marriage, sickness, prostitution and death. But eventually, love forces these two proud and bitterly opposed survivors, Hannah Noble and Joss Colby, together in spite of themselves.

Joss Colby is the manager of the ironworks. Hannah Noble is the illegitimate daughter of the ironmaster's brother. He needs to marry well and initially refuses to give in to the strong sexual attraction between them. For Hannah's part, she loathes the man's ruthlessness, the way he pushes and uses people to achieve his business ambitions. But in the true tradition of the romantic novel, even she can't deny the chemistry between them, which eventually takes both of them over.

It's a strangely internal book, and one which deliberately keeps love at arm's length until the last possible moment. The small cluster of characters with a narrative point of view rarely communicate with each other directly or honestly; irony and lies form their usual verbal exchanges. Indeed, much of the book's dynamic happens within the characters' minds as they observe others and react internally with disgust, boredom, anger, lust.

Love is not something which comes to light in The Tilthammer until late in the book. Then it's an emotion to be hated and resisted, more of a torment than a delight. Hannah feels it will reduce her to a mere vessel for Joss Colby's lust, as sex has done for many of the other women around her. Joss feels trapped by it too, but in a man's terms; he wants to be free to choose his own destiny, to marry for status, but his love for Hannah seems set to ruin that ambition.

Echoing the confusion and emotional dislocation of these characters, the quiet rural lifestyle of northern England at that time was rapidly changing into a more decadent and outward-looking society, driven by the constant industrial concerns of supply and demand rather than the predictable cycle of the seasons.

The rapid change in society during the Industrial Revolution is a perfect backdrop for this romance, focussing as it does on the increasing issue of social mismatch - the young aristocratic Andrew who falls in love with the illegitimate Hannah, the various infidelities of Lady Arandall with a succession of valets and stable-boys, and finally Joss Colby, son of a blacksmith, who sets his eyes high on financial success as manager of the ironworks. The intricate twists and turns of this story were, I'm sure, at least partly inspired by my mother's love of Thomas Hardy's work and vision, another writer who explored increasing social changes through the troubled lives of those people most affected by them.

The 1985 Fontana Books edition changes the book's title to A Woman Of Iron, which I find equally effective as an image, and is perhaps more woman-friendly than The Tilthammer as a title. But of the two, I prefer The Tilthammer as a more daring choice for a romantic novel.

Pagan Encounter (1978)

2007-01-21T08:51:00.000-08:00

I was twelve years old in 1978 when 'Pagan Encounter', one of my favourite Charlotte Lamb romances, was published in the UK, just as I was settling into my new school on the Isle of Man after our move from the East London suburbs.

Other Lamb titles advertised in the first paperback edition were 'The Devil's Arms', 'The Cruel Flame', 'Duel of Desire' and, most notorious of all her novels from that era, 'The Long Surrender'.

Well-known authors in the Mills & Boon stable publishing new novels that quarter in 1978 included Janet Dailey with 'Strange Bedfellow', Violet Winspear with 'Desire Has No Mercy', Mary Wibberley with 'Love's Sweet Revenge' and Sally Wentworth with her feistily entitled 'Liberated Lady'.

Forthcoming classic reprints (February 1979) included 'Monkshood' from the glorious Anne Mather, 'Black Douglas' from Violet Winspear and 'Man of Granite' from Lilian Peake.

Golden Era

The late 70s was a golden era for Charlotte Lamb; she was working at full stretch during those years, her writing at its most confident and flamboyant, the tireless author regularly producing more than ten novels a year, some of them 100,000 + word romances and historicals for mainstream publishers.

Why was this? Perhaps because, as mentioned above, in 1978 she had moved with her family to settle in the Isle of Man, exchanging the crowds of suburban London for rolling green hills and a restless seascape. This radical move certainly seems to have inspired some of the best writing of her career, with spirited independent heroines falling in love against their will with rugged demanding heroes, often in settings of great beauty and scenic intensity. This was also the time when some of her settings became far-flung and tropical - a row of palm trees grew outside Lamb's sea-facing study in the temperate Isle of Man - while other novels still nestled cosily in rural areas of England or drew on the familiar backdrop of London's cosmopolitan bustle.

Pagan Encounter

In 'Pagan Encounter', Leigh is a cool and unflustered secretary at a solicitors' firm in Leicester, engaged to be married to Philip but secretly concerned about the lack of passion between them. Is she really frigid, as other men had suggested in the past? This bloodless marriage is poised to go ahead until she suddenly meets a man who's able to awaken a sexual response where her fiance has failed. Stuck in a lift with this predatory-looking stranger, Leigh shocks herself by responding to his taunts and kisses with unexpected desire.

But her suspicions about newspaper tycoon Matt Hume - the man in the lift - are later confirmed when she discovers him to be the casual seducer of her naive young cousin. So her motivation for later accepting a job as his personal secretary at World Gazette is clear enough within the romance genre's 'why she got involved when she dislikes him' rule book; Leigh, whose fiance has now broken off their engagement after discovering her with Matt on another occasion, intends to punish Matt Hume for his arrogance by tempting him sexually, then spurning him once it gets serious.

Seems like a reasonable plan. But this is Mills & Boon, so we know it's going to go badly wrong!

After all, Matt Hume, the hero of Pagan Encounter, is not only rich, powerful and devastatingly attractive, he is also an expert at love-making. And what woman in her right mind could resist such a combination? Sure enough, within a few chapters, Matt shows exactly how determined he is to get his cold but beautiful new secretary into bed, and Leigh's unruffled facade begins to crack.

'Storming the Citadel'

I love the electric sizzle between Leigh and Matt, increased by the wry humour of this book, as both protagonists know from the very first spark where they're going to end up, in spite of Leigh's insistence that she loathes men like Matt Hume. The characters are so well and deeply drawn, they feel like good friends by the time you reach the end of the story, so you never want to close the book and say goodbye to them.

My mother consulted my father - then a Fleet Street journalist - closely about the setting of this book; drawing on his knowledge of the newspaper business, her scenes at World Gazette - in particular a serious strike by the printers' union - possess an edge of verisimilitude which heightens tension in the final chapters and makes their relationship all the more believable.

A few readers have commented that some of the Lamb novels from this era seem quite violent in terms of the sexual attraction between hero and heroine. It's true that sex in contemporary romances, whilst more explicit than in most romances of the seventies and eighties, seems to have been made politically correct by removing the more violent emotions stirred up between men and women in love. Charlotte Lamb wrote visceral romances, it can't be denied, and Pagan Encounter is one of her most passionate and uncompromising novels. However, I don't think the raw intensity of emotion between hero and heroine detracts from the sexual tension. Rather it serves to increase it. Politically incorrect, yes. But a realistic depiction of what happens between two people when intense passion is suppressed.

In Pagan Encounter, Matt Hume talks of 'storming the citadel' instead of making love, and of 'leaving an army of occupation' when he and Leigh discuss pregnancy; more the language of a military campaign than of love. Indeed, one foreign edition artfully rendered the title of Pagan Encounter as 'E le Mura Caddero' (i.e. the walls came tumbling down, or the walls fell to them, as in the walls of Jericho).

Strange territory for a romance, maybe. Yet while Matt's behaviour is sometimes cruel and his lovemaking not exactly tender, the reader is left in no doubt by his possessiveness and tenacity that his intentions are serious. Leigh herself may not realise this until the closing chapters, but no man goes to such extraordinary lengths just for a one-night-stand ...

'Why don't you leave me alone?' she asked in angry desperation.

'Because you amuse me,' he said, and his head pulled back so that he could smile into her bitter blue eyes. 'I enjoy seeing that frustrated rage in your eyes. It makes you look almost as human as you did when I stopped kissing you in the lift.' The grey eyes ran over her angry face. 'When I saw you in the dining-room you looked like the empress of ice and snow, haughtily untouchable, so I had a bet with myself about how long it would take to thaw a woman out of the block of ice you live inside.'

Breathing stiffly, her body tense with impotent rage, she asked him coldly, 'And did you win?'

The grey eyes focussed on her mouth, making her dance stiffly in his arms, deeply conscious of their gaze. 'You know I did,' he said softly.

Leigh wanted so badly to hit him that her whole body shook with the desire. He grinned lazily at her, watching her expression.

'Not in public, Leigh,' he advised in mock gravity. 'Your fiance would be shocked and it would cause a scandal.'

Supernatural Storytelling?

The title 'Pagan Encounter' is also something that has always interested me. To my mind, it echoes other Lamb titles in a similar vein, titles which prompt comparisons between modern romance and the pre-Christian tradition of supernatural heroes seducing human women. That tradition perhaps represented a storyteller's attempt to reconcile differences between everyday reality and the heightened emotions and dramatic changes in behaviour that belong to sexual passion, just as modern romance does for readers today.

Latching onto that supernatural, other-worldly element of romance are many other evocative Lamb titles you might like to explore, such as The Devil's Arms, Dark Master, Circle of Fate, Spellbinding, Forbidden Fruit, Hawk in a Blue Sky, The Girl from Nowhere, Vampire Lover, Twist of Fate, A Wild Affair, Dark Dominion, and Illusion.

In Love with a Lamb Romance

Would you like to discuss your own favourite Charlotte Lamb novel or suggest one for discussion? Please feel welcome to leave your comments below, at any length.

Merry Christmas!

2006-12-20T10:36:00.000-08:00

So much for managing to post something in November! Here we are, moving at speed towards the end of December, and still nothing new on the blog ... Perhaps the New Year will bring fresh enthusiasms or ideas. Once again, if you'd like to discuss a particular Lamb title, do please leave a comment below or get in touch via my email or personal website. See my Profile for contact details.

Meanwhile, I wish all the readers of this Charlotte Lamb romance blog a Merry Christmastide and a peaceful New Year, whatever you believe and wherever you are in the world.

Now I'm off to tuck myself under a duvet for the festive season, with a large box of chocolates and a pile of old romances and other books I didn't manage to get around to reading or re-reading this year. (Anything to avoid the kids and the turkey.) And if he's lucky, I may even let my husband join me!

See you all again in 2007.

Jane x

New Blogger Look

2006-11-24T03:08:00.000-08:00

I shall be swopping over to the new Beta Blogger soon, which should not change the look of this site too much but is entirely for my convenience, as it makes posting messages and moving things about easier for me.

I apologise for not having made many posts to this blog in recent months. Other things holding my attention, unfortunately! But I do promise to post something up here before the end of November. I have an idea for a post entry, but am still researching it, as it's a little complicated and time-consuming.

Meanwhile, if anyone has any requests for particular Charlotte Lamb topics, do please leave a comment below.

Jane

Secrets To Keep

2006-09-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

Secrets to Keep, Sheila Holland, 1980

Secrets To Keep was published in 1980 by Playboy Press under Charlotte Lamb's real name of Sheila Holland. This was yet another annus mirabilis for my mother, in which she published about 12 books all told, as I recall, an almost unbelievable feat of stamina and creativity. This particular novel, a 100,000 word Victorian romantic saga, follows the story of Sophia, wealthy heiress, and the two men embroiled in a deadly rivalry for her affections - Stonor and Wolfe.

Stonor is a man of business, cold and practical, but determined to cement their relationship in a marriage that will guarantee the survival of his inheritance, Queen's Stonor, one of the great houses of England, elegant but decaying. Wolfe is his illegitimate brother, charming but always involved in some disreputable scheme, furious that he will not inherit Queen's Stonor himself. The two young men have always loathed each other and Sophia's entrance into their world provides them with an excuse for their silent enmity to break into open hostility.

Sophia herself falls head over heels in love with Wolfe, but she knows the relationship is doomed; her father wishes her to marry Stonor and she will not hurt him by refusing. But this being one of my mother's books, the story does not end there but escalates into a passionate epic of love, jealousy and revenge.

*

Extracts from Secrets To Keep (Playboy Press 1980)

'She stood beside the bed, washing her hot face with water from the ivy-patterned basin which stood on a marble washstand, trying to restore herself to some semblance of calm. Drying her hands and face, she blew out her candle and slid into bed.

Out in the park, an owl hooted, a slow, melancholy sound which sent a shiver down her back. Wolfe was out there, waiting for her. She heard the distant row of feathered wings, the tiny shriek of a mouse or vole caught in the inexorable talons, and her heart closed with dread. When Stonor looked at her, she felt like that - a helpless creature trapped and waiting for him to consume her.

...

Wolfe did not see the slender figure flit from patch to patch of shadow. On the smooth turf her feet made no sound. She halted a foot away in the darkness, and Wolfe, suddenly sensing her presence, swung around. She walked slowly forward, dignity in her slender body. The wind blew back her cloak, showing him the white nightgown underneath.

Her dark hair streamed loose, blowing softly in the wind. She stood in front of him like a child awaiting punishment, submissive and resigned.

Wolfe slowly lifted his hands and pushed the silken hair from her face. His long fingers trailed down the side of her face to lift her chin. He looked at her for a moment. 'You came.' It was all he could think of to say, all he needed to say.

'Wolfe!' She said his name as if it explained everything, as if his very existence were enough to make heaven and earth solid realities for her, and if he were removed the world would become a shadow for the rest of her life.

*

Victorian Sexualities
This saga-romance is quite a hot read by today's standards, in spite of the fact that the historical backdrop to the story is the Victorian era; repressed sexuality and its accompanying passions and jealousies were clearly fertile material for my mother's imagination. She wrote it under her married name of Sheila Holland, of course, so along with the other 'longer' books written under that name, the sex between hero and heroine - or heroes and heroine, in this story! - is highly passionate and makes compelling reading even when it isn't as explicit as it was to become in some of her later Charlotte Lamb novels.

My mother was also to develop this idea of the heroine's apparent helplessness in the face of sexual attraction in her later novels, though her contemporary treatment of this theme was always careful to explore the very real tensions a modern woman feels when, in control of her own career and destiny, she finds herself uncontrollably attracted by a man who epitomises everything she dislikes about male authority. Indeed, this particular issue may turn out to be, par excellence, the theme of the modern short romance.

Fascinatingly, the list of 'other books by this author' at the front of Secrets To Keep includes these titles: Maiden Castle, Dancing Hill, Shadows at Dawn, and The Notorious Gentleman. This last is completely unknown to me, and sounds almost like a Regency romance. If anyone out there happens to own this book, The Notorious Gentleman, please do get in touch!

Please note, 'Secrets to Keep' is not only out of print but almost impossible to find at online stores. So if you ever come across a copy, treasure it as an extremely rare Holland/Lamb title indeed. However, if you enjoyed what you've read here about Charlotte Lamb's work, there are still nearly 150 of her books available to buy secondhand, online or in bookstores around the world.

Taboos & Sequels

2006-09-23T02:55:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting email today from a reader in Brazil, asking for information on Charlotte Lamb's bestselling novel A VIOLATION, published by Fontana Paperbacks in 1983.

A VIOLATION is about Clare Forrester, a woman who is attacked and raped in her own home, and who is subsequently unable to feel comfortable being intimate with a man. When Larry is insistent in his pursuit of Clare, his proximity tests her ability to feel again and to let a man get close without flashing back to the rape.

Rape, of course, is a difficult subject for any writer to tackle, but for a romantic novelist to take on this controversial topic in the eighties and produce such a fascinating and successful book is an astonishing and laudable achievement.

The lady who emailed me wanted to know if there was a sequel to A VIOLATION and also complained about the general lack of helpful blurbs and other information on sites such as Amazon. There was no sequel to A VIOLATION; indeed, apart from specially commissioned sequences of books such as the Barbary Wharf novels, I can't think of any Charlotte Lamb romances that were sequels. Except once perhaps, when she wrote a novel called DARK DOMINION which featured a second male lead; later, she wrote another romance featuring the same character.

DARK DOMINION was one of her best romances, in my opinion, with sparky, realistic and memorable characters, and a strong vibrant plot that kept you guessing to the last few pages. It was first published by Mills & Boon in 1979, though it's been reprinted in various formats and by other publishers since, and involves Caroline Fox having to decide between James, the forbidding but darkly charismatic barrister she has 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.

The novel is written with humour and sensitivity, and a wry understanding of the temptations for married women when things start going wrong at home. Although written in a different idiom from A VIOLATION, this was quite a daring plot for its time, stepping away from the one-hero, one-heroine format more common in romances of the 70s and early 80s, and coming close to suggesting adultery. More taboos being explored and broken!

If you're interested in reading it, DARK DOMINION is available to buy at Abe Books.

I can't find the sequel among my collection of Charlotte Lambs, but I have a sneaking suspicion it was called SAVAGE SURRENDER. Unfortunately, I can't check that on the net, because although it's available in various places online, none of them describe the plot and I shall not be in a position to buy a copy until next month. So if anyone out there owns a copy of SAVAGE SURRENDER and can tell me whether or not the hero's name is Jake, that should clear it up!

Resurrection

2006-09-06T16:57:00.000-07:00

I've had some emails from fans of my mother's work, asking for more 'flashbacks' to old favourites, with excerpts and plot details. So having failed to get much blogging done over the summer, I am now aiming to get something of that kind on the Charlotte Lamb blog within the next week or so. It's been crazy here, with my youngest starting nursery school for the first time, my second eldest starting 'A' Levels at a new school, and my four year old twins being educated at home this year, as a trial to see how that goes. So do forgive me if the blog seems a little quiet. September is always a busy time when you have so many kids!

To honour my youngest's uncanny resemblance to my late mother, and also to shamelessly plug my new poetry collection, Boudicca & Co. due out next month, here is one of my poems entitled 'Resurrection' followed by a photograph of my youngest daughter on her first day at nursery school this week:

RESURRECTION

When my young daughter clasps
chubby hands
in the small of her back
and parades
from the vegetable patch
to the red shed

I see my mother
at sixty
back from the dead.

My mother would have approved of this poem's title, I'm sure, having shared with me an obsession with pithy one-worders, which include:

Obsession
Retribution
Scandalous
Besieged
Surrender
Fever
Temptation
Possession
Frustration
Sensation
Compulsion
Crescendo
Abduction
Dangerous
Desire
Desperation
Whirlwind
Infatuation
Haunted
Betrayal
Illusion
Heartbreaker
Dreaming
Spellbinding
Duet
Lovestruck

all still available to buy, needless to say, via the Fantastic Fiction website!

Holidays on the Isle of Man

2006-08-30T19:12:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy summer for me, preparing for an OU final examination in Classical Greek, continuing with the novel I've been writing, plus putting together my new poetry collection, BOUDICCA & CO., to be published by Salt Publishing this autumn. So I haven't had much time to think about the Lamb blog - or indeed to follow up various queries about plots in some of my mother's earlier books which have been emailed to me by readers.

As a gesture of contrition, here is a photograph taken last year in the Isle of Man, where my mother made her home from 1977 to the end of her life. This is my husband and my three youngest children (I have five altogether, as my mother did too) making sandcastles on the Ayres beach at the northernmost tip of the island. I've been browsing old holiday snaps recently and chose to post one similar to this on my own writing and personal blog, Raw Light, so I thought I'd post this photograph - a particular favourite of mine - on my mother's blog, since she was so very fond of her grandchildren and would have loved to know these younger ones, sadly born after her death.

Still, I'm sure she would have had something to say about my decision to name my youngest daughter Indigo!

thought for Monday

2006-08-21T02:33:00.000-07:00

"The race belongs not to the swift but to those who keep on going ..."

Who said that?

Heatwave!

2006-07-18T10:40:00.000-07:00

Apologies for not posting before now. I can only plead this incredible heat which is making me lethargic and unwilling to spend too long at the keyboard. Which is difficult, of course, since I'm partway through a novel. This must be the first time I've ever regretted getting myself a leather swivel chair for my desk ...

Yet here I am, with the help of several fans and open windows, just to say that I seem to have inherited my mother's dislike of excessive heat. Although she did love to holiday in the South of France, with its deep intense colours and dramatic scenery, she loathed the heat and would spend most afternoons indoors with a fan constantly on the go, retiring to bed quite early in the evening. I think an hour in the pool each evening might have helped her, but one of her great regrets was never having learnt to swim. I think she did try adult lessons once or twice, but being quite a private person disliked having to wander about in public in her swimming costume!

Since my parents often hired villas with swimming pools during our summer holidays, we took advantage of the privacy there and tried to teach her to swim on numerous occasions. But my mother was not an easy woman to teach and we gave up trying in the end. She preferred to stay in the shallows with her grandchildren, sometimes walking towards the deep end with one hand on the wall or experimenting with a float! So she never learnt to drive and never learnt to swim. But one thing she could do really well was type! And due to excellent training as a young woman, her technique was faultless; however many words she typed per day, she never seemed to suffer from RSI - as I do, unfortunately, being an incorrigible two-fingered typist.

My mother would have hated this heatwave. Not least because of the damage it's doing to the garden ...

RNA Conference in Penrith

2006-07-09T04:17:00.000-07:00

I was meant to be heading up to Penrith yesterday for the annual Romantic Novelists' Association conference, but alas my car let me down at the last minute. It just about managed to chuff me over to Ledbury for the Poetry Festival instead, and although I met many old friends there and some interesting new ones, it was still a disappointment not to be able to attend the RNA Conference in all that beautiful wild countryside up towards the Scottish borders.

More on the RNA hopefully in a future post. But next year, I believe the Conference is to be held at Leicester again, which is much closer to me and so I should be able to pop along there for at least one day. I attended the last conference which was held in Leicester and had an absolutely marvellous time, having the good fortune to be placed opposite Katie Fforde at the main Conference dinner and being able to chat with her and many other successful romantic novelists in the bar afterwards ...

I do heartily recommend the RNA Conference for anyone who is interested in writing a romantic novel or has already done so but is not yet a member of the RNA. The workshops are extremely helpful and the social element of the conference is certainly well worth the cost of the trip. There's little better than being able to chat to so many other writers about writing and life over a dry white wine when you've been stuck behind a desk the rest of the year, sometimes enjoying the solitude, sometimes wondering why you bother!

"If you love your books, let them go" - The New York Times on the new global phenomenon of BookCrossing

2006-07-02T16:49:00.000-07:00

Thought some of the browsers of this Charlotte Lamb blog might be interested in the link below, which is to another of my blogs, the Raw Light blog attached to my website, where I've been discussing Bookcrossing. To find out what this is and how to get involved in catching books in the wild or releasing them yourself, visit my BookCrossing blog entry.

If anyone out there has ever 'found' a Charlotte Lamb novel, either via the official BookCrossing system or simply one that's been left behind, maybe by a holidaymaker with too much luggage or by an absentminded reader on a train or bus, do please let me know which one and how that came about.

I think it's a fascinating idea, deliberately leaving books lying around for complete strangers to take home for free, enjoy and pass on ...

'Instant karma!' (USA Today)

A Day in the Life of a Romantic Novelist

2006-06-24T03:05:00.000-07:00

CHARLOTTE LAMB: A DAY IN THE LIFE

Back in the late seventies and throughout the eighties, writing at full tilt, my mother spent nearly every hour possible at the typewriter, in between looking after her five children and husband. On becoming an established author, she moved in 1977 from the outskirts of London to the Isle of Man - an independently governed tax haven in the Irish Sea - and bought a hilltop property above the quiet fishing village of Port St Mary, where her writing routine became - over time - more predictable.

There, she had her 'study' area installed in her bedroom, which afforded wonderful views of Port St Mary Bay with all its yachts and fishing boats - though she sat several feet back from the window, as though to prevent herself from being distracted by this glorious view. A heavy smoker at that time, she used the cigarettes to fuel and sustain her writing stamina, often not leaving her desk for hours on end. She also knocked back strong coffee while she wrote, making a flask early in the day and keeping it by her desk, habitually drinking it with Coffeemate, which kept it hot for longer and meant she didn't have to go downstairs to the kitchen for milk.

During the nineties, the last decade of her life, she gave up smoking, turned to decaffeinated coffee, and her writing pace slowed somewhat! The family moved to Crogga in 1989, another hilltop property, this time a white turreted mansion with extensive grounds and distant views of the sea, near the town of Douglas, the busy hub of the Island. Since it was a much larger house, about eighteen rooms, my mother had one of the smaller bedrooms converted to a personal office. The wages of romance had allowed her a room of her own, at last ...

Her new study was on a mezzanine level, just off the imposing main staircase and near the front door, which suited my mother, as she liked to see people coming and going while she worked, often leaving her study door open as though to encourage her children - and now grandchildren! - to drop by and 'disturb' her. Her window was heavily curtained with nets, which let the light in but did not distract her with the attractive view over fields towards the sea.

At Crogga, she generally worked a set number of hours per day, unlike her earlier more punishing routine of writing and writing until the book was finished. She rose at about 8am most days and was at her desk within half an hour, rarely bothering with any breakfast, just a coffee to get the blood pumping!

She would write steadily on her computer until noon or half past, pausing only to exchange the odd fax with an editor, agent or an old friend like Jay (fellow author Anne Weale), then would clock off for the rest of the day. As I recall, she usually aimed for a thousand words per session; once that figure was reached, she stopped work.

Lunch was either something simple at home like a salad or a more elaborate meal out at one of her favourite Island restaurants. In the afternoons, she either went out for a long drive or to the shops - garden centres were among her frequent haunts during the summer months. During these long drives - with my mother in the passenger seat, never having managed to pass her driving test! - she would often be turning over in her mind the plot of her most recent novel or working on some new idea not yet fully formed. Sometimes, if the weather was bad, she would stay home and recline on the sofa with her two obsequious spaniels, Rosie and Pippa, watching daytime television, often drama repeats on UK Gold.

The Bill was one of her favourite programmes, closely followed by television detective shows like Morse, Miss Marple and Poirot. A keen amateur cook, especially of the armchair variety, she loved cookery shows, programmes about food and was always amused by the more outrageous celebrity chefs. She was also keenly interested in shows like Oprah, finding them not only fun to watch but a useful source of psychological insights into how modern women view men.

In the evenings, she regularly went to bed early, around ten o'clock, but would spend several hours reading or watching a film in her bedroom before turning out the light. A voracious reader since her childhood, every week she would devour dozens of library books and secondhand paperbacks from charity shops, not to mention a handful of the latest bestsellers.

On holiday - usually in France, one of her favourite destinations - that number rose steeply. My mother knew all the English bookshops on the Riviera, buying copious supplies of novels in the first few days of each holiday. Once she had read them, she either took them back or left piles of paperbacks behind in holiday villas and hotels to save on the weight of her luggage. She nearly always managed to write on holiday too, often taking a typewriter with her - in later years a laptop - when she travelled by car.

Self-educated, she had read most of the classics over the years, her shelves packed with books and novels of every description. In terms of contemporary writing, she loved thrillers, crime novels in particular, romances and family sagas. Cookery books, especially historical or regional ones, or those with glossy and exotic photographs of beautifully prepared dishes, were everywhere in the house, even the downstairs toilet! She also regularly read biographies, most often those of her favourite writers; there was nearly always a biography or two 'on the go' next to her bed, with a little shred of paper sticking out to mark her place ...

The Gold of Apollo: a retrospective

2006-06-18T12:29:00.000-07:00

In the first of what I hope will be many retrospectives, here is an extract from one of my mother's earliest contemporary novels, The Gold of Apollo (Robert Hale, 1976). Written under her married name of Sheila Holland, this was a thriller romance in similar vein to the sort of 'big' thriller romances to which she returned in the last decade of her life.

The Gold of Apollo was also published in this Woman's Weekly Library Edition (No. 1453), a pamphlet on sale in 1976 for just 10p!

Abigail Smith is a young holiday rep. working in Athens. Max Elliot, a typically brusque, arrogant and devastatingly attractive Lamb hero, is a renowned archaeologist. Later, it becomes clear that he's also obsessed with investigating what he suspects to be a ring of international smugglers of Greek antiquities. When Abigail stumbles across their illegal activities, she naturally assumes Max Elliot to be in league with the smugglers because of his constant proximity to the suspects.

Below is a brief extract from the book, taken from the very last page. Since the smugglers who kidnapped Abigail have been apprehended, and her suspicions about him have been cleared up by the police, she is at last able to face her conflicted feelings for the 'maddening' Max Elliot. The style here is almost a prototype for many classic Lamb endings in her Mills and Boon romances; the feisty heroine still fighting to the last for independence, the hero calm but determined, intent on winning his prize.

THE GOLD OF APOLLO (Robert Hale: February 26, 1976)

'I've seen him and settled everything,' Max said. 'You've lost your job, all right.'

She put down her cup and leapt to her feet. 'Oh no! What did you say to him?'

Max rose too. The grey eyes looked coolly down into hers, a sardonic light in them. 'What do you think I said?'

... Furiously she glared at him. 'I must go down and see him, try to get my job back. You must have put his back up. I know how maddening you can be!'

'You're pretty maddening yourself,' he said, clamping her arms to her side. 'Will you stay still and be quiet just long enough for me to kiss you?'

The air left her lungs in a rush that left her gasping like a landed fish. She stared up at him incredulously.

'I know I did it once before,' he said, as coolly as if he were discussing the weather. 'I found it an extremely enjoyable experience and I decided then that when I had time to pursue the matter I would find out how I like a repeat dose.'

She took a backward step, involuntarily, as he bent towards her, but his hands hauled her close to him again, and the firm mouth descended on hers, sending her brain whirling in dizzy circles and her blood pumping furiously through her veins. Her hands clutched at his shoulders. She clung in order that she would not fall down.

When Max drew back they were both pale and breathing heavily. He looked down into her face with a possessive intentness.

'Before I am driven out of my mind, Miss Smith, will you marry me?'

'I detest you,' Abigail sighed. 'Max, are you sure? I'm sure to irritate you.'

He kissed her softly beneath her ear, then moved his lips along the line of her throat. 'From the first moment I set eyes on you, Abigail, I knew I found you distractingly attractive. We were both antagonists. I had to get that other business out of the way before I could get round to you, and I've been as frustrated as I've ever been in my life. If I've snapped, that is the reason. It wasn't easy to keep a rein on my instincts. I'm not a patient man. Or a simple one. But I do love you.'

She yielded to his hands with a long sigh, and lifted her mouth for his kiss. Vaguely, as she submerged beneath a wave of desire, she wondered what her father would say when he heard that she was to marry an archaeologist. Well, at least she had had a lifetime's training in coping with such obsessed, haunted, irritating creatures.

Bewitched by the Boss!

2006-06-16T03:40:00.000-07:00

Bewitched by the Boss!

Product Details from Amazon
# Paperback February 3, 2006
# Publisher: Harlequin Mills & Boon
# Language: English
# ISBN: 0263846571

This is a trio of classic M&B novels reprinted By Special Request this year, including one by my mother, The Boss's Virgin, which happens to be the very last Mills & Boon she wrote before she died.

The Boss’s Virgin – Charlotte Lamb
He is unforgettable, but her ex-boss Randal Harding does not fit into Pippa’s neatly planned life. She refused to get involved with him, and yet no other man has ever matched up to him. And now he’s determined to prove that Pippa wants him, too!

The Corporate Wife – Leigh Michaels
Her boss had asked her to marry him! Gorgeous, wealthy Slater Livingstone had proposed, and she, plain Erin Reynolds, had said no! As Slater’s PA she already organised his life… So why did Erin wish she’d said yes?

The Boss’s Secret Mistress – Alison Fraser
An affair simply isn’t on her agenda. But Tory Lloyd’s new boss, Lucas Ryecart, is determined to make her his mistress. Working with him all the time, her body betrays her attraction… What comes after seduction?

Has courtship given way to seduction?

2006-06-13T15:18:00.000-07:00

'Whatever happened to Charlotte Lamb, Janet Daley, Lillian Peake, Anne Hampson and Flora Kidd?' asks PANKAJA SRINIVASAN in The Hindu today, the online edition of India's national newspaper, in a short nostalgic piece questioning the modern ethos of the romance genre.

'And the romantic Mills & Boon novels we grew up with — M&Bs as we affectionately called them? ... Delightful euphemisms have yielded to startlingly explicit prose. More than just smouldering looks are exchanged and more than just inhibitions shed. Courtship has given way to seduction and sadly, romance has lost its flavour.'

Srinivasan goes on to discuss the work of Georgette Heyer in the light of today's Harlequin and M&B romances, clearly preferring old-fashioned tales of polite society to the streamlined prose and explicit bedroom scenes of today's writers.

So has romance lost its tension by going beyond the bedroom doors? Personally, I'm not sure if the explicit nature of the sex in these novels is the problem. Charlotte Lamb's novels were both well-written and startlingly sexy, and although the actual physical contact was often hinted at rather than described in the sort of detail you find in today's romantic fiction, she is celebrated as having been the first M&B writer to fully describe the female orgasm in her ground-breaking novel of 1978, The Long Surrender. Taking romance beyond that last page kiss did nothing but good for the genre back in the seventies. But is the current gradual shift towards erotica what this genre needs to stay progressive and relevant to contemporary women, or is it a case of one kiss too many?

You can read the article in full at The Hindu online.

IDOL DREAMS - brand-new from Charlotte Lamb!

2006-06-09T17:42:00.000-07:00

Click here to view IDOL DREAMS (2006) - a brand-new graphic novel, published by Harlequin Pink and based on an original story by Charlotte Lamb (A Wild Affair).

Dark Horse Manga and Harlequin Books are delighted to present a shining new line of books that marry two of the most successful phenomena to hit bookstores --- best-selling Harlequin romance fiction and female-friendly Japanese manga!

IDOL DREAMS by CHARLOTTE LAMB, with graphic artist Yoko Hanabusa

"Quincy wouldn't have seen this coming in her wildest dreams. What ordinary girl-next-door would? One minute you're sitting down to tea in your kitchen, talking with a friend, and the next - the man of your dreams comes knocking at your door, and he's looking for YOU. Quincy never expected to be swept off her feet by a gorgeous, world-famous pop star, but now that it's happening, she's not sure she's the right one for him.

Swept up in the glamorous thrill of it all, Quincy is worried that it's all happening a little too fast, not to mention her concerns that she's really not the right girl to call a sexy superstar her boyfriend. It's a good thing for Joe that his desire to be with her is as strong as his star appeal!"

Pub. Date: March 08, 2006
Format: Soft cover, 160 pages, b&w
Price: $9.95
ISBN: 1-59307-460-3

Published by Dark Horse Comics, Inc

Would You Like to See Inside This Book?
To see 'inside' this fantastic graphic love story, you can also click here to view IDOL DREAMS on the amazon uk site.

Fantastic Fiction

2006-06-09T12:56:00.000-07:00

This brand-new blog is dedicated to the late British romantic novelist Charlotte Lamb, who died in 2000.

Try the link below to Fantastic Fiction and search through just a few of the many bestselling novels she wrote over her long and prolific career!

www.fantasticfiction.co.uk