Herewith the third of my readings from the Romantic Novel of the Year longlist:  FAIRYTALE OF NEW YORK by Miranda Dickinson.

This is a first novel which Harper Collins UK Avon imprint harvested from their Authonomy website.  This facilitates writers critiquing each other’s work and is supposed to turn into a full service support-group.  This novel, then called Coffee at Kowalski’s, was well received – you can see some of the comments it got still on the site.  The Authonomy community loved Dickinson’s voice and her characters.

We’re close to chick lit country – narrator Rosie Duncan, self professed optimist, is a British florist living in New York, friend of hyper social New York Times columnist Celia and employer of a couple of lovable eccentrics, Ed the serial dater and Marnie the romantic disaster.  They’re all looking for love, with intermittent success, but they want respect in their work too, and they don’t hesitate to involve their friends in their personal schemes.  We’re in the common ground between Friends and Sex in the City, if you will.  

But, for an optimist, Rosie has  a surprising tendency to see the down side risk (even of free publicity for her beloved flower shop).  She is mourning the old man from whom she bought the shop (he boosted her confidence and taught her to take time out when a huge order  stressed her to breaking point).  And she has dreams in which she’s crying and saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’.  As Mr Kowalski, whose gentle shade haunts this book says, ‘Sooner or later the thing you fear most will come to find you.’  

What Rosie fears is not a Bagshawe Assassin or even a Dillon Despairing Dog.  And no, I’m not going to tell you what it is, because the narrator doesn’t tell for ages.  But, believe me, when it comes, it’s wince-making.  

This is another book about a heroine, moving on, standing tall, dealing with her demons.  It is about friendship, and healing, and the delight of small things.  It is also a love letter to New York, its shops, its Sunday brunches, its frenetic, interlocking social scenes, its past.  In Dickinson’s hands, the Big Apple even turns into a kind place.  

A hopeful book.  

DECLARATION OF INTEREST   Miranda Dickinson is another stranger to me – and I’ve only visited the Authonomy site once before, too.

My second book off the Romantic Novel of the Year long list is PASSION by Louise Bagshawe.

Her publishers call it James Bond for girls and, on first finishing it, my question was ‘Why for girls?’   Because the author is a woman?  

This has all the ingredients of a classic action adventure:  devious men with dubious backgrounds;  relentless, professional killers;  power play at the highest levels;  conspicuous consumption; high octane sex; a nerve-wracking chase; mulitple disguises; and a super sexy, highly trained former secret agent hero who is the best of the best.  Doesn’t sound particularly girly, does it?

What it doesn’t have, I suppose, is the Fleming fascination with weaponry and exclusive brands,  nor the snobbery.  The gorgeous hero was a Barnardo’s boy – now a  billionaire banker, he goes to New York Private Views, but not to casinos or gentlemen’s clubs in St James’s.   And the heroine, though plain, ill-dressed and border-line depressed, is a respected academic . . . 

Ah, that’s why this is one for the girls.  The heroine has a brain.

It starts in Oxford with a teenage romance between don’s daughter and boy from the wrong side of the tracks.  It ends badly, scarring both.  But twenty years later, Will has not forgotten Melissa and the memory causes him to make connections between unexplained deaths . . . and to see, long before anyone else does, that his old flame is probably the next target.  He sets out to save her … and the hunt is on.

The action – and by golly there is plenty of it, edge of the seat stuff – moves from Oxford to London, New York to Boston, rural France and Rome , with stops off in Berlin, Caracas and the Gulf to tune into the Opposition.   The hero is rich – but the Opposition is richer.  The hero is shrewd and skilful with good friends still in the spying business who will help him out.  But the Opposition has limitless resources and access to the intelligence of several governments.  No doubt who the underdogs are and, indeed, Will and  Melissa end on their own with nothing to rely on but their courage, intelligence and resourcefulness.  (Their planning, by the way, separately and together, is one of the most rewarding bits of this book.)

A page turner.

DECLARATION OF INTEREST   Nope, don’t know Louise Bagshawe either.

I’m turning the year with a beastly lurgy. (Coughing so hard, my ribs hurt.) So I thought I would give myself afternoons in front of the fire with a comfort read. Fortunately the long list for the UK’s Romantic Novel of the Year is just out.

First off Waterstone’s shelf was LOST DOGS AND LONELY HEARTS by Lucy Dillon.

Lucy Dillon seems to have beaten the Curse of the Second Novel with this gentle, touching story of human rehabilitation by abandoned dogs. Rachel, glamorous PR person and ex-mistress-of-the-boss, is dumped and fired in one go and fetches up in a small Worcestershire town where her aunt has left her a dog sanctuary. Stunned and sad – and believe me, this writer is very good indeed at sadness and what it does to  people and dogs – Rachel pretty much falls into taking over. The first task is to make the kennels pay – which means finding human partners for the canine boat people under her roof, which in turn takes her out into the life of the town, making plans and crossing swords with the cryptic local vet. The second is to unravel the mystery left by her enigmatic aunt.

The characters are skilfully drawn, mostly well intentioned but often mistaken or, quite simply, inarticulate at the wrong time. The silence that grows between an infertile couple is almost too painful to bear at one point. You can see how it happens but equally, you can’t see how they will get out of it. (It takes a Basset-hound-provoked crisis.)

The dogs are as three dimensional as the human characters and just as engaging. The Basset does tend to take over (when don’t they?) but there is an incontinent Labrador pup and a managing sheep dog, which I also treasure. And recognise.

This is a book about reconciliation and kindness and letting go of bad stuff and it has a wonderfully believable and yet romantic ending.

Fab book. Big fat happy sigh

DECLARATION OF INTEREST Since I know several authors on the long list and at least two are seriously good mates, I thought it would be sound practice to state where I’m coming from, after every book I write about. Lucy Dillon is a stranger to me – unless I’ve met her at conferences and things under her real name of Ermyntrude Gutbucket, of course – and I haven’t read her first book. Yet.

I used to think of this end of the year as a steep, narrow crevasse. You hit rock bottom on the shortest day, 23rd December. Then started to climb out of the dark.

I now realise that time, like everything else, is more complicated than you think. Yesterday the evening got dark one minute later. But this morning it still got light later than yesterday.

So for about three weeks, the mornings carry on getting darker while the nights lighten up. Call it the turning circle on the Sea of Time.

Exciting.

RODOMONTADE

When I was but a young thing, my father used to fulminate about Dr Henry Kissinger. Now, my father was a fully paid up socialist, a man of high principle who practised what he preached and might have been thought to have political differences with HK. That was not, however, the point at issue.

It was hopefully. Grinding his teeth, my father would point out that Hopefully never meant ‘with a bit of luck,’ until Henry Kissinger got hold of it, some time in the seventies. (As in ‘Hopefully discussion on Peace in the Middle East will resume tomorrow.’) It meant with hope in your heart and was a really, really nice word.

So, in memory of my father, I am harrumphing over singer Morrissey making over another excellent word, rodomontade.

I first came across it in Georgette Heyer, years ago. It was up there with enacting a Cheltenham Tragedy and meant, I thought, making a boastful song and dance about not very much, usually with a lot of over-cooked emotion thrown in.

Morrissey, however, interviewed on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, thinks it is a Good Thing. Indeed, he says it is the reason he has a great Latino following in the States because they like the passion and rodomontade in his songs.

Well, maybe I was wrong. Heck (low be it spoken) maybe Georgette Heyer was wrong.

I did a bit of digging.

It’s a word Horace Walpole used in his gossipy letters and Memoirs of George II. George Washington, describing a battle, was said to have written, ‘I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound.’ Reported Horace, ‘This rodomontade, reached the ears of George II. “He would not say so,” observed the king, dryly, “if he had been used to hear many.”’

According to Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (1755): to rodomontade is ‘To brag thrasonically; to boast like Rodomonte ‘

Er –

Thrasonical, thanks to Dr Johnson again, is from Thraso ‘a boaster in old comedy’ Actually Terence’s Eunuchus, according to the notes in Jack Lynch’s wondrous selections from The Great Work. Rodomonte is a boastful Saracen who can’t keep a girlfriend.  He pops up in Orlando Innamorato and Orlando Furioso, besieging Paris. Basically, I think we’re talking a Renaissance David Brent. Well, the quality of bragging has declined over the centuries.

So Heyer went with Walpole, Dr Johnson and the Oxford Dictionary. And then the word fell out of favour except with word addicts like me and fellow author Elizabeth Hawksley and my late father.

And then came Morrissey . . .

Actually, I don’t think there is a villain in this story, certainly not Mr Rankin. He had to say something, poor chap. He went for short and funny. And Romantic Novelists Red in Tooth and Claw is number one in the Crime Writers’ Joke Book.
It surfaces again and again – in Harrogate last year, at a local conference this;  in print, in after dinner speeches;  year after year, after year.

Rankin said it himself, a few weeks ago, interviewed by The Independent on Sunday. ‘”Crime writers,” he explained, “are usually very well-balanced, approachable people, because we channel all our crap on to the page. In the crime-writing community we joke about romantic fiction writers and how they’re all evil, backstabbing bitches because they don’t have that outlet …” ‘

As I said yesterday, it would be a great story if it were true – rather like Georgette Heyer in Devil’s Cub, saying that ‘Mr Comyn, for all his prosaic bearing, cherished a love for the romantic which Lord Vidal,a very figure of romance, quite lacked.’

But I have just sat reading the RNA Archives, moved to tears sometimes by the affection, the respect, the support these romantic writers have shown for the last fifty years to the new writers (the ‘pre-published’), authors both struggling and  successful, and sometimes the damn near post published.

For instance, five years after she died, people were still writing of ‘our dear Mary Burchell’, the ebullient, romantic and supremely generous second President. (Heroic, too. With her heart in her mouth, she and her sister helped Jews escaping from Germany and Austria before the War. Read her autobiography, republished last year as Safe Passage by Ida Cook. )

So – I don’t want to demonise Mr Rankin, or any other writer, of crime or otherwise, and I apologise to anyone who thinks I do.  (Really sorry Paula and Eileen, if you think I was carried away.)  I don’t even want to stop them telling the joke, if they enoy it. I just thought that someone, sometime, should say, actually it’s not true.

If not now, when?

If not me, who?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when two or more crime writers are gathered together, one of them will say, ‘But of course, Romantic Novelists are the ones who really plunge the knife between the shoulder blades.’ All laugh.

Last night at the Crime and Thriller Awards, it was Ian Rankin.

Bum. Because Ian Rankin is one of my favourite authors and I wanted him to be – well – not up for a lazy laugh, frankly.

To some extent, I see why he did it. Of course, it ought to be true. Writers live by dramatic irony, after all.  In real life, the gore and cruelty merchants should be stamp-collecting trainers of guide dogs for the blind. The love-conquers-all mob should demean their rivals, dispose of surplus spouses and destroy the universe while they’re at it.

But life isn’t like that.

I’ve just been diving through the Archive of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and, in fifty years, what comes across most strongly is the sheer good heartedness of most of them.  No spite,  no briefing against.  There are disagreements, of course;  even rows.  (Usually when there wasn’t enough tea.  But then that first generation was mainly from a class who Told Cook and hadn’t actually had to provide it themselves before.  They soon adjusted.)  But they liked each other and they had a damn good time – and genuinely rejoiced in fellow writers’ success, especially those who came through the RNA’s unique New Writers’ Scheme.  In fact some, like Sheila Walsh and Elizabeth Harrison, stayed on for life, through chairing the organisation and beyond. 

And they, we, have gone on doing it for fifty years.

I didn’t find the Romantic Novelists’ Association until well into my career, and I can honestly say I’ve never found so many friends and like minds in one place before – though we quite often disagree.  And from those who don’t like me, I receive courtesy and a hearing.  How many organisatons of 700 people can you say that about?  

To be honest, the worst you can say about Romantic Novelists is that we can be just a touch defensive.  Rosie M Banks we can take.  (Well, actually, some of us are enthusiasts.)  George Orwell we have learned to live with  – romantic novels should be read by ‘wistful spinsters and fat wives of tobacconists’.  But when fellow popular novelists call us back-stabbing harridans, it hurts

And it’s not true.

Radio 4 is going to dramatise a neglected classic next year and is asking people to vote on which one to go for. The short list has been proposed by ten contemporary writers, including Joanna Trollope and Ruth Rendell.

And I am in a dilemma – where to start? Apart from two, which I definitely don’t want to read again, they all intrigue me.

So – do I start with Charles Williams, OUP editor and occasional Inkling, and his time-and-space travelling fantasy Many Dimensions, recommended by Ruth Rendell?

Or The Rector’s Daughter, the love story by F M Mayor, published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, which Susan Hill recommends?

Or Rasselas, about which, to my shame, I remember almost nothing? Or an Anthony Trollope I’ve never even read, Miss Mackenzie?

Help!

Radio 4 is going to dramatise a neglected classic next year and is asking people to vote on which one to go for. The short list has been proposed by ten contemporary writers, including Joanna Trollope and Ruth Rendell.

And I am in a dilemma – where to start? Apart from two, which I definitely don’t want to read again, they all intrigue me.

So – do I start with Charles Williams, OUP editor and occasional Inkling, and his time-and-space travelling fantasy Many Dimensions, recommended by Ruth Rendell?

Or The Rector’s Daughter, the love story by F M Mayor, published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, which Susan Hill recommends?

Or Rasselas, about which, to my shame, I remember almost nothing? Or an Anthony Trollope I’ve never even read, Miss Mackenzie?

Help!

More about my great enthusiasm, the Greater and Lesser Spotted Englishman.

2) The Newt Fancier (amicus pleurodelinae)

Primarily, though not exclusively a British species, found widely, but particularly prevalent in places of extreme learning, such as Oxford University, the English Folk Song and Dance Society and Lords. Colouration various but a beady eye and extreme concentration are universal characteristics. Very vocal when interest engaged, otherwise silent. Difficult to spot, but once lured out of the undergrowth, unmistakeable. Lives entirely in its own world. Well worth the effort.

Typical specimens:

Augustus Fink Nottle      Gussie is a long standing chum of Bertie Wooster. Typical of the species, amicus pleurodelinae, he is retiring and inarticulate, except when strongly moved. Unfortunately, the only thing that moves him is the behaviour of newts, which he studies to obsession level and, more important, to the exclusion of all normal social awareness. Indeed, in trying to woo Madeline Basset, the girl of his dreams, Gussie decides to take a hint from the Newt’s Guide to Courting. Thus he explains to Bertie his intention to attend a fancy dress ball in scarlet tights:

‘In a striking costume like Mephistopheles, I might quite easily pull off something pretty impressive. Colour does make a difference. Look at newts. During the courting season the male newt is brilliantly coloured. It helps him a lot.’

‘But you aren’t a male newt.”

‘I wish I were. Do you know how a male newt proposes, Bertie? He just stands in front of the female newt vibrating his tail and bending his body in a semi-circle. I could do that on my head. No, you wouldn’t find me grousing if I were a male newt.’

‘But if you were a male newt, Madeline Bassett wouldn’t look at you. Not with the eye of love, I mean.'”

‘She would, if she were a female newt.’

You see? Surreal, but Gussie, who lives entirely in his own newtified world, is quite unaware of it. The Mephistopheles venture, of course, ends in tears. Does Gussie learn from that and change his behaviour? He does not.

See Right Ho Jeeves by The Master, P G Wodehouse.

Robert Webb      I was not sure about naming a performer, even after Webb’s jaw-dropping performance on Comic Relief as a hair tossing breakdancer. After all, performers pretend. The great truth about the amicus pleurodelinae is that it is without artifice. And it is wholly unaware that its obsessions are not universally shared. However, Marion Lennox directed me to this quite different RW clip, and I am now convinced.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTchxR4suto

The intensity, that lack of self-consciousness, the sheer beady-eyed lunacy certainly qualifies. Any lecturer from the twenty-fifth century, when he prepares study notes with quotations from Jane Austen to guide his class of Little Green Jelly Fish through their mid term exams,  will undoubtedly add ‘a gentleman does not conga’ to the list of Mr Darcy’s bons mots.

He Who Does Not Twitch       Twitchers collect lists of birds they have seen. They want numbers. They want rarity. They are, if you like, the collectors-for-collecting’s sake of the bird world; the one night standers; the flybynights. Your true Birder, by contrast, is one who studies, savours, concentrates and delights.

I was once in a small – very small, it seemed to me – boat on a river in Northern Queensland with a Birder of my acquaintance. There were twelve people in the boat, many of them substantial. It was low in the water. The river was known to contain salt water crocodiles. The Birders (i.e. everyone except me) kept their binoculars glued to the branches of tall trees on the opposite bank, looking for rare species. Indeed, I saw a Papuan Frogmouth myself, and an utterly charming bird it is, too. BUT – but, but, but – there were crocodiles in that thar river and nobody but me was keeping an eye out for them. Floating logs  approached our boat and I nearly fainted with horror; a low hanging branch brushed my back andthere was a moment of quasi heart attack whichs still sends me all of a doo dah, if I think about it.  It went on for hours.  When we got to dry land, I could barely speak.

When I mentioned this some time later, the Birder was surprised and just a little bit disappointed in me.

‘You should have been paying attention,’ he said. ‘We weren’t there to look for crocodiles.’

Yup, the amicus pleurodelinae lives in his own world.

Gentlemen, I do not begin to understand you, I think you are barking mad.  I count myself blessed that I live in the same world as you. Respec’