Yes I do. I once wrote an article on Guilty Pleasures and it was all about Mills & Boon and yet I now think this was a misnomer and I don't feel any guilt at all about curling up on the sofa and passing an hour or two with a M&B. The popularity of these books and their sheer volume of titles never fails to amaze. Very easy to sneer at these stories (I have done so in the past) but their phenomenal success over the last 60 years and the continuing sales figures must be the 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. Goes without saying, naturally, that they hated each other on first sight as well. This storyline is timeless, think Jane Eyre, think Pride and Prejudice which surely must be THE original Mills & Boon with its alpha male hero and feisty heroine.
There are certain criteria to be borne in mind when reading an M&B. Never, but never, trust a red haired man, he is usually weak and ineffective. Should the hero have red hair, it will be russet with gold streaks, never plain red. On the whole my impression is that fair haired men seem to suffer pretty badly too, being weak and usually treacherous. And beware if they are called Derek, he is always to be avoided.
The hero is tall and dark. 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 names is short and strong - Jed or Brett, never Keith or Kevin. He is successful in what he does and over the last two years Mills & Boon have become obsessed with millionaires and are now producing titles along the lines of The Greek Millionaire's Mistress and The Tycoon's Virgin Wife which I think are really rather clumsy and unappealing.
Nowadays, most heroines are strong willed woman who hold down good jobs in a male environment. They are always glamorous, slim and elegant, but whether they run a team or a hedge fund are always happy to abandon this when they meet Alpha Male and sink quivering into his arms by the final page. In M&B feminism only goes so far....
Sex now plays a very graphic part in these novels. Some of the descriptions could easily win the Bad Sex Award every year for some of the more lurid passages. When I first started reading them some thirty years ago now, Women's Lib was still very much in its early stages, women knew their place and were virgins until they married (only in these pages I hasten to add). If there was any sex at all it was hinted at and the old fashioned row of *********** was employed at the end of a chapter so you could guess what was going on.
It is still easy to scoff at M&B and look down upon their stable of authors, yet how many writers could produce a book every two months as regular as clockwork? Not many I would think. One of their writers, Betty Neels, was producing a book every twelve weeks or so right 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 their who will probably never be taken seriously and remain categoriesed as Writers of Romantic Fiction and despised by the glitterati for the rest of their days.
I mentioned the latest trend in having Billionaire of Tycoon or Millionaire in most of the titles we see now. I find these very off putting but apparently they sell in droves and are hugely popular so what do I know? They have also jumped onto the Twilight bandwagon and now have Vampire romances as well, to sit alongside their Medical section (handsome doctors marry pretty nurses), their Regency romances and many other genres that they now produce. When I first started reading these back in the 1970s, picked one up in a charity shop and have never looked back, they were so pure and so naive and the attitude towards women would make your hair curl. I recently read one such vintage book by Kay Thorpe called Not Wanted on Voyage which has been doing the rounds of my reading group and it recently arrived through my letter box all the way from the States. I make it quite clear now that we are reading this book in a spirit of total hilarity as the story line is really unbelievable.
We start off with a young woman doctor who has left her last job (she has fallen in love with a married man and is fleeing temptation) and takes the post of a ship's doctor on board a cruise ship. Please bear in mind that this doctor has presumably studied in medicine for several years, is not a teenager and one assumes is intelligent. So what does she do? She turns up late at night to take up her post, it is dark and foggy when she arrives at the docks and can only catch a glimpse of part of the name of the ship and on board she goes. It appears a doctor is expected but the crew are surprised to see a woman as the captain is a woman hater. Ok I can see you sniggering already and saying I know what is going to happen and you would be right. BUT there is a twist. No surprise to find out next morning that she has boarded the wrong ship and this is not discovered until she is out at sea. And here is the twist - she is not aboard a cruise ship, she is on board a whaling ship. Yep that's right - a whaling ship. OK, now you would have thought when boarding such a vessel that the lack of amenities, the lack of lights, bars, dancing and merriment, let alone sailors in uniform would have made her stop and think. I don't suppose a whaling ship has much in the way of ship board entertainment and, last but not least, surely the SMELL would have given it away?
This book is quite quite wonderful but also so politically incorrect is is hard to believe. We are given a pretty detailed account of actually catching a whale which I cannot imagine would pass muster in 2010 and everyone, including our heroine, seem to light up a fag at the drop of a, well, match. In the end of course she is clasped to the captain's manly chest after she has demonstrated how wonderful and courageous she is by being swung across to another ship to aid an injured member of the crew and all the time a storm is raging and the seas are churning away beneath her.
The whole thing is simply GLORIOUS.
But we must not forget that when Mills & Boon started out they published school text books and other learned tomes for many years and were the publishers of Jack London (Call of the Wild) before turning to romance when they discovered they were onto a winner.
Not many people know that............
