Romance Novel Sluts

So, obviously I like to read romance. Well, I like to read everything. But since right now I’m writing romance, it’s only fair to wonder what my favorite romance books have been, or at least the ones that put me on my path.

First of all, I should make a confession. I never read The Flame and the Flower. In fact, I’ve never read Kathleen Woodiwiss at all. It wasn’t a matter of distaste or prejudice. I was just a mystery reader back then. In fact, it wasn’t until 1981 that I read my first modern romance. My friend Katie Wilson, who worked with me in the ER, kept trying to get me to read romance. Finally, just to shut her up, I accepted a grocery bag full and said I’d try it. And that bag changed my life.

Still no Woodiwiss. Not even Rosemary Rogers or Karen Robards. Instead the bag held books by Nora Roberts, Jayne Krentz, Rebecca Brandywine, Jude Devereaux, Lisa Gregory. A wide range of stories and writing styles, but all the books had one thing in common: the heroines were all strong women. The endings were happy. Hey, I thought. I could get into this.

Obviously I did. But which was my favorite? Oh, good heavens. I have no idea. I’ve read way too many. In fact, and I’m not boasting, I think I’ve read every sweet Regency romance ever written(it had been a bad year). There are so many brilliant romance authors, that it’s too hard for me to single out one author or one book as my definitive favorite. I can say that there are some that stand out. Laura Leone’s Fever Dreams, Loretta Chase’s Lord of Scoundrels, Mary Jo Putney’s One Perfect Rose. Morning Glory by Lavryle Spencer and….you see what I mean? I can’t limit them.
Or maybe I can. Well, I can at least point to the author who probably did more than anybody else to get me where I am now.

It’s all my friend Sally Hawkes’s fault. Sally is the one who really guided my feet through Regency England. And she knew that I loved nothing more than a cracking adventure. So she said, “Have you read Patricia Veryan?”
Now Patricia isn’t for everyone. Her language is what I call High Regency. Patrick O’Brien’s characters speak much the same way. Not only that, she has a habit in her books of utilizing a quaint plot device I like to call Gypsy Ex Machina. But I’m telling you here and now, nobody does what I call historical adventure better. You think Scarlet Pimpernel was great (actually, the book was awful. The heroine spent the whole book sitting in a cottage waiting while the hero had adventures)? Well, it had nothing on the Patricia Veryan books.

She had three series, The Golden Chronicles and the Tales of the Jeweled Men, which were set right after Culloden and followed the purported Jacobite treasure, and then, later, in 1815, the Sanguinet Series. I’ll tell you how good those books are. I read them in order. Golden, Jeweled and then Sanguinet. But when I opened the first book of the Sanguinet series, I realized that strangers were living in the home of one of my favorite characters from the earlier series, Muffin. Suddenly I realized that the Sanguinet series began sixty years after the end of the Jeweled Man series. Which meant…..which meant…..Muffin was dead!! Not only that, everybody in the first two series was dead! This may sound stupid, but I had to put that book down for a good couple of weeks so I could grieve for characters who never existed. Only then could I read about their fictional descendents.

I admit I also love a good wounded hero. Well, Sally and I nicknamed Veryan’s books “The Gimp of the Month Club”. There was LOTS of action. And then, to cap it off, Veryan wrote one of the great romance books ever, A Dedicated Villain. The hero, Roland Otton, has been the quasi-villain of the first four books, taking advantage of the political turmoil in England after Culloden to feather his own nest. As one of the other characters says about him, “the nice thing about this particular friend was that there’s no doubting his reprehensible qualities. He makes no bones of the fact that he’s a rascal, which simplified matters.”

And even though you see him do fairly despicable things, you can’t help but like him. In fact, by the time you read Dedicated Villain, in which he is the hero, you want to see him redeemed.

Like the good magpie I am, I stole a couple of bright, shiny things from Veryan, like the idea that historicals can have action and adventure and suspense along with emotion and sex(well, okay, I added the sex. Veryan was a bit too proper). And one more thing. In a completely different series of books, I made the villain of the first two books the heroine of the third. I did that in my Daughters of Mabh series I did for Nocturne as Kathleen Korbel. And I have to tell you: it’s particularly satisfying.

So while I refuse to name my favorite book among the hundreds I’ve read, I will tell you who impacted me the most. I think it’s Patricia Veryan.

What book or author impacted you the most? Not necessarily the most popular, or the one you reread the most? The one that changed the direction of either your reading or writing. The one that opened your eyes to a completely new genre or time period or character?

Eileen Dreyer is a multiple Rita award winning author who has been previously published in series romance, paranormal romance, and mystery, who just entered the historical romance genre with the first book in the Drake’s Rakes series, Barely a Lady – out now!

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