Well, it has to be Mills & Boon. The popularity of these books and the sheer volume of titles never fails to amaze. It is so easy to sneer at these stories and yet their phenomenal success over the last 60 years and the continuing sales figures must be a source of envy to many a publishing house.
The joy of these books is their inevitability. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, misunderstanding occurs, boy and girl separate, misunderstanding cleared up after period of heartbreak and all ends happily. The story is timeless, think Jane Eyre, think Pride and Prejudice, surely THE original Mills & Boon with its alpha male hero and feisty heroine.
There are certain criteria to be borne in mind when reading a Mills & Boon. Never, but never, trust a red haired man. He is usually weak and ineffective. If the main hero has red hair, it is usually russet with gold streaks, never plain red. Fair haired men seem to suffer pretty badly too being fairly weak and, usually, treacherous (If they are called Derek then so much the worse!)
The hero is always tall and dark. Perhaps not conventionally handsome, but fascinating and sexy with a hawk like nose and high cheekbones. He is slim hipped and wears his clothes with a rangy grace and is particularly attractive in chinos and a linen jacket. His name is short and strong, Jed or Brett. Never Keith or Kevin. He is successful in what he does, be it something in the City or a property developer but he always has a soft side and nurses his girlfriend when she is sick.
With heroines, it is clear that most Mills & Boon authors are fans of Lizzy Bennett in Pride and 
Prejudice as nearly all their heroines are strong willed women who hold down good jobs in a male environment, or run their own small business. However, they are always happy to abandon this when they meet Alpha Male and sink quivering into his arms at the end of the story.
Nowadays, sex plays a very graphic part in the novels, some of which could quite easily win the Bad Sex Award every year for some of the more lurid purple passages. When I first started reading these, some thirty years ago, Women’s Lib was still in its early stages and women knew their place and were virgins until they married. If there was any sex at all, it was hinted at and the old fashioned row of *********** was employed at the end of a paragraph so you were left to guess at what was going on.
People scoff at Mills & Boon and sneer at their stable of authors, yet how many writers could produce a book every two months regular as clockwork? One of their writers, Betty Neels, was producing a book every two months up to her death a couple of years ago at the age of 90+! Formulaic they most definitely are, but there are some pretty good writers lurking in there who will probably never be taken seriously and remain categorised as Writers of Romance for the rest of their days.
I was going to say one of my guilty pleasures (except that I feel no guilt whatsoever) is to run a bath, fill it up with foamy bubbles, lock myself in the bathroom with cup of tea and Mills & Boon and lie back in the hot water and read the novel straight through. Totally relaxing and total bliss..
A final note to all this is that Mills & Boon used to publish school text books and other learned tomes for many years and were the publishers of Jack (Call of the Wild) London before turning to romance.
Not many people know that…..
