What is romantic suspense?

When you write a novel, you’re always hearing about “conflict.” Although that doesn’t mean a knock-down fight, that’s what it often amounts to. Start your book with a bang, hook ‘em in.

But conflict doesn’t always mean fighting. It means the inner struggle and the outer. One of the biggest challenges is to balance all the conflicts, because too much and the reader will get breathless—not in a good way.

Although I haven’t written any “romantic suspense” recently, I do tend to write books where there are things that belong in romantic suspense. I really don’t know where the line is drawn, I mean, I won a major romantic suspense award for “Harley Street,” a historical story featuring Richard and Rose. True, there was a murder in chapter one, and the couple spend the book discovering the murderer, and thus, other things about Richard’s past, but it’s never to my knowledge been shelved in that section.

In "Brutally Beautiful," my hero is an ex-gang leader, and he has some serious things to accomplish before he can save his princess and have his happy ending. Definitely erotic, but the suspense element is high. The villain is fairly obvious, but will they catch him or her in time?

My newest release, coming next month, is “Sixth Sense,” and again, I’m not sure where it belongs. Romance, I guess. It’s part of the Symbiotics series, but can be read alone and it starts with a real life experience. Yes, I did lie in an isolation room in a hospital once, wondering if I was about to lose my leg. It seems strange to anyone who doesn’t write, but I can almost see the authors reading this saying, “Yep, it all goes in to the writing pot.”

I never forgot the experience, and the memories remained vivid. The emergency didn’t last long and I still have two legs, thanks to the doctors at my local hospital, whose prompt action and careful diagnosis made sure I got better. But for the two days of the emergency, I was scared, and then resigned. Because, after all, what could I do? If it happened, it happened, and I was in the best place.

In the room next to me was a sailor, in quarantine after suffering a tropical disease. He was perfectly well, but he had to stay there until they said he wasn’t infectious any more. I couldn’t talk to him, we just exchanged a couple of sympathetic smiles.

So I put my heroine, Poppy, in the same situation. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? Her conflict is an internal one—how does she cope with this unexpected and terrifying thing? It happened to her as suddenly as it happened to me. Not an accident, an unexplained swelling of the leg, so much that it threatened to burst. Blood clot? Septic arthritis? I had no idea and neither did she.

Instead of a middle-aged sailor, I gave her a hot, wealthy geek to play with. One who has inner tensions of his own. He’s in the hospital recovering from cholera, contracted during an exotic holiday.

Oh, yes, and by chapter two, the plot has thickened. The external conflict appears. Her condition isn’t, like mine was, an unexplained occurrence. She’s being poisoned.

So there you have it. Is it romantic suspense? Some of the story is certainly spent hunting the perpetrator, but the majority is the love story between two unlikely people who meet by chance. Both are sexually naïve, being too busy and too shy to explore. They have satisfactory sex lives, but finally, together, they can play with the basket of toys that have been lying in Jim’s closet since he left his job in England.

So which is it, romantic suspense or erotic romance?

Richard and Rose and Romantic Suspense.

 A few years ago, I won the EPPIE for Romantic Suspense. I was proud and thrilled and shocked as all get-out.
Why? Because it was for a historical romance. That year I’d had a few releases, and when it came to the awards, I didn’t want to put my books in contention with each other and split the vote. So I decided to put the fourth Richard and Rose book, “Harley Street,” in the Romantic Suspense category. After all, it did have a murder and a mystery in it. But it was the fourth in an ongoing series and the focus of the series was firmly on romance.
I didn’t think I had a chance, especially considering the quality of the entries that year. And I had what I thought was a sitter in another category. After all, who would want part four?
It turned out that they did.
“Harley Street” starts with the central characters, Richard and Rose, Lord and Lady Strang, returning to London after their honeymoon in Venice. Rose makes a courtesy visit to her godmother who lives in Harley Street, which was then a new street of houses for the middling and well-to-do. But her visit is interrupted when they find a body of a maid in the attic. She’s been stabbed. Rose sends for Richard, who recognizes the dead maid as someone he had an affair with when he was fourteen.
In those days, the 1750’s, it was often a maid who introduced a man to the joys of sex, although we might consider the man a mere child. That was what happened here, and the act has consequences that will reach to the end of the series.
When I first thought up Richard and Rose, Richard was a mild-mannered minor aristocrat who solved mysteries in country houses. Then, you had to have the entrée to polite society to know what was going on there. An outsider, even a Bow Street Runner, would most likely be cold-shouldered. Only outcasts like Lord Ferrers, hanged for murdering his valet, would be given up to justice, but Ferrers had exhausted all his favors and all his friends by the time that happened.
But then, when I wrote the first book, “Yorkshire,” Richard appeared out of nowhere, right in the first chapter. I just wrote and wrote and there he was. He was blond, a pink of the ton, a leader of society, and he wasn’t a minor aristocrat, he was the son of a powerful earl, and held the courtesy title of viscount. Rich, arrogant and far from the shrinking violet I wanted to write.
I decided to let it ride, and Richard took over. He just worked in the book. The heroine and narrator, Rose, is a child of the gentry, the county, rather than the country. Although they were often related, county and country had their set places in society and they tended to have their own social circles that rarely mixed. Only at Christmas and other celebrations, and the men might meet in Parliament.
Into this society, the mismatched, but deeply in love Richard and Rose grow, develop and at the end of the series, have a mature, loving relationship. I wanted to show that first.
So the fact that every book has a violent death and Richard and Rose are usually involved in solving the mysteries is incidental! Or maybe not.
The series came to an end last June, with the release of “Lisbon,” the place I always wanted to end the series. I knew how it started, and I knew how it ended, and I knew the main antagonists. The rest just happened. There is a half written Richard and Rose book that I fear will never see the light of day now, but one day, I might be able to slot it in somewhere!

Romantic Suspense?

In 2004, I won an EPPIE (now the EPIC awards) for my book “Harley Street.” I won the Romantic Suspense category. It shocked and delighted me. Delighted is obvious. Shocked? Because I’d always thought of “Harley Street” as a historical romance. But when it came to enter the EPPIEs, I had three books to go in, and I didn’t want them to compete against themselves. So since “Harley Street” involved solving a murder, I decided to try the romantic suspense category.

“Harley Street” is part of my Richard and Rose series. The whole series is about one couple, and follows them through the course of several years, from their meeting in “Yorkshire,” to their final confrontation with their enemy in “Lisbon,” a book that hasn’t yet been published. The series consists of eight books, and while each book has a separate story, it also has an overarching tale, too, when Richard’s past comes back to bite him.

I was a bit tired of historical novels about reformed rakes, as though finding the one true love and reforming negated all that went before. Richard made the cold-blooded decision to become a rake, to run through as many of society’s women as he could and to destroy lives, after society condemns his brother and sends him abroad for what at the time seemed like a lifetime’s exile.

So it was ironic that the event that has consequences that nearly kills Richard and his beloved Rose happened before that career, when he was only fourteen.
I wanted to be true to the age of the story. The events all happen in the 1750’s, a time of turbulence for Britain, a time when constant wars, new inventions and the development of philosophical thought helped to change the way people thought and acted and paved the way for the new world of the French Revolution and industrialisation. I’ve always been drawn to this period, and I decided to concentrate on one aspect of it when I told Richard and Rose’s story – the development of the modern police force, and the changes made to criminal law. Because in the 1750’s, the two Fielding brothers, magistrates at Bow Street, started to campaign for a real police force, something the populace had constantly opposed, as they didn’t want a “police state,” as we might put it.

It all sounds very worthy, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t. Britain, and in particular, London, was a wild place, with several ‘rookeries,’ or no-go areas for the authorities, where criminality ruled. Streets of unbelievable filth, because where the authorities didn’t go, neither did the night-soil men, and the other people who helped keep the city reasonably clean and habitable. There were some criminal masterminds, but wipe the thoughts of the romantic outlaw out of your head. The most famous was Jonathan Wild, who ended on the gallows, but in his time, had informants, informants on informants, whose stock in trade was betrayal. Not a romantic figure at all. So I created a wannabe Jonathan Wild, someone who had more ambition than maturity, and set him against Richard, who wanted reform, but also wanted a few years of tranquillity when he could make his peace with the world and spend some time with his beloved Rose.

He first becomes aware of the identity of the person out to get him in “Harley Street,” when he and Rose return from their honeymoon in Venice. The three previous books hold hints of what is to come, but in “Harley Street” it comes to fruition. Rose finds a dead maid in the house of her great aunt, and when Richard arrives, he recognises the dead person as an ex-lover from long ago. It soon becomes obvious that coincidence has little part in this tragedy, and if he and Rose aren’t to end up dead, then they have to solve this one.

So what is romantic suspense? Blowed if I know.

I recently started to write a story aimed at Harlequin Presents set in New York and Naples, Italy. But from the start it seemed a little too edgy for the line. For a start, the heroine is an ex drug addict, trying to reinvent her life. But I continued to write the book, about her reconciliation with a man from her past, but what draws them together is his search for the body of his brother. So they find him. Then the firebombs start to arrive. Then I stopped writing and realised I had more on my hands than a simple romance. I did some research. Then I did some more, and I found that a casual remark by my hero had led to a firestorm of revenge and violence. Until I started to write, I hadn’t realised that the gangs in Naples used the port as a place to distribute knock-off goods over Europe and the United States. I knew the gangs of Naples had morphed from the mafia of old to something different and even more threatening and dangerous. I never thought I’d write a book about that.

But I rewrote the book, giving up all thoughts of the Presents line, replotting and rewriting. It was huge fun to write, and I kept my central couple well into the action. It became “Learning to Trust” which comes out from Carina this November. Then at the end I had a character who had fascinating possibilities. Was I planning to write his story? my editor wanted to know. You bet.
So I meet another character in this book who deserves a story. I can’t believe a trilogy has come out of this book, and I’m so pleased the Carina people are so enthusiastic about it.

I still don’t know what Romantic Suspense is, I only know that I write it.




Lynne Connolly http://lynneconnolly.com