Did you enjoy Wolfe Island? Go ahead and read it, if you haven’t already. And then read its sequel: Swan Bay. (Also available in paperback.)

Simon Low is a rake. His name travels across New York on whispers and titters. Owner of a luxury department store in Manhattan, it’s his job to create desire. He makes women want things. At least, that’s what Chloe Swann’s brothers tell her. But her brothers must have the wrong man.

Simon is the most awkward man Chloe has ever met. When Simon visits his brother’s grave at the cemetery managed by Chloe’s family, he refuses to touch her. He can barely look at her, let alone seduce her. What in the world could he make her want?

But Simon has a secret. He and his twin shared an extraordinary connection, one that was lost when the two were separated during a storm. He’d always felt that connection. And then, with the single gulp of the river that had swallowed his twin, had not. Until he meets Chloe.

Now, Simon has the devil of a time telling her the truth…that he can feel her from the inside out. But he’d better tell Chloe soon, because, with the job of writing epitaphs for headstones, and a reputation as the Angel of Death, she’s used to telling people good-bye.

Set against the lush and gilded American landscapes of rural Northern New York and Manhattan in 1893, Swan Bay continues the story begun with Wolfe Island.

I couldn’t pass this one by when I saw it in our local used book store.

Yes, the Main Street in my town still has a used book store. Aren’t you jealous? Good. Hold onto that feeling. Because jealousy is the quixotic principle that drives The Wife Sharers. 

The story opens with Howard in his next door neighbor’s pool with his next door neighbor’s wife, Serena, while he hears his own wife’s laughter over the redwood fence separating them from his own house party next door. The opening scene of this pulp novel is its best.

Swimming noiselessly as a pair of otters in the darkened pool, Serena and Howard could hear the drowsy chatter of the Lowes’ barbecue party…Howard Lowe could hear Enid’s shrill laughter on the other side of the fence…Most of the party hounds were trying to drink themselves cool this oppressive California night. That bearded goat, Mal Wenk, or some other tipsy oaf, had probably pinched Enid where she liked it. At the moment, Howard could not have cared less.

It’s California in the early sixties. There’s a lot of drinking. A ton of it. So much you worry about the characters’ health and safety. Especially Howard, who with his size, is really putting a strain on his heart.

The cover headline promises, “They agreed to share wives.” In point of fact, they didn’t agree on anything. It’s all a big con. A heretofore committed couple is convinced that their respective spouse wants what’s on the other side of the fence, and each is persuaded to let it happen.

Howard is smart (he’s a technical writer for an aerospace firm). He’s well-built. He’s chided as a “big ape,” a “caveman,” a “big brute,” but his stomach is flat (in spite of a lot of pancakes and steak), and he’s handsome. He’s rich and drives a jag. He’s the hero, I guess. At least the reader is led to believe he’s the preferred protagonist.

I’m like Enid and Serena. I adore big men. In spite of it, this is the most depressing HEA I’ve ever read. Of course, it’s not an HEA. It’s a work of pulp fiction, written by a man in 1963. So an HEA is not the point. I’m wondering, really, what was the point. The cover might give it away – a work of commercial fiction, the point was to sell books. Something this cover would have done in spades. Hell, I bought it, and for ten bucks.

Serena is the woman next door who problematizes the neighborhood barbecue by finding Howard more attractive than her common law husband, Mal Wenk. She is “the kind of girl a man dreamed about – too terrific to be true…sex ultrapersonified.”

Does the author really believe that women walk around naked and play with their nipples while waiting for a man like Howard to show up?

Mal is described as a ponytail poet with a beard like Maynard G. Krebs and a pot belly. A beatnick Pan. Mal sleeps each night on a straw mat on the floor of of the dining room. He is irredeemable. In the end, Mal’s beard is removed with scissors by Howard’s lithe and loving wife, Enid, while he’s asleep.

His shearing is a punishment for his writing a book about Enid. He is using their swap as a way to see into the life of a mousy housewife. Her removal of Mal’s beard is Enid’s symbolic “other side,” the finale of her character’s arc.

Husband Howard on the other hand doesn’t get through to anywhere. He spins in place. Howard loves Enid, from beginning to end. That’s a point in his favor. But he sleeps around, almost addictively, and collects phone numbers from waitresses across the city. His cheating is childish: his logic is flawed, and his lovemaking half-hearted. He ends up in bed with Enid’s best friend, falling drunkenly to sleep after fighting off her advances, until he wakes up at dawn inside her.

When he and Enid reunite in the end, there’s no triumph; it’s only a matter of course that he will continue cheating, continue to love her, and that they will both continue to be carried along on a current of booze and California swimming pools.

At least Adlon gets it. He knows his characters are depressing. That the lovemaking he describes isn’t really loving. That the sex he offers readers is sad, short-lived and unthrilling. This book isn’t meant to arouse readers like a woman’s HEA. This book was written for a man, a reader who believes in the addictive perseverance of marriage and the grotesque disappointment of what lies on the other side of that fence.

Folks, I’m not that reader. There’s still oodles of joy in the swims and the pinches.

Arctic Enemy by Linda Harrel (1981) puts journalist Sarah Grey on supertanker Arctic Enterprise during its the maiden voyage through the Northwest Passage, and earns my esteem by spelling ‘grey’ the right way.

The trip is perilous indeed. The Enterprise is designed to load up on liquid gas then nose its way through the ice of the ocean with its highly combustible cargo. Unfortunately, the book’s anti-hero has built the Enterprise with substandard materials, something breaks in the middle of the ocean, and our true hero – Captain Guy Court – must save the day. Which he does. But not before he and Sarah snowmobile out into the arctic countryside, get caught in a storm, and almost make love in an igloo.

It’s a standard hate-at-first-sight / he-thinks-she’s-sleeping-with-the-bad-guy plot line, seasoned with interesting arctic trivia. Did you know that icebergs “calf”?

But enough about global warming.

I’m developing book three of my Diamonds on the Water series, titled The Hard Dock. Yes, I’m really going to title a historical romance that I actually hope to sell The Hard Dock. Because docking can be hard, as anyone who’s ever tried it knows.

The Hard Dock‘s hero – Michael Low – is captain of a tugboat. The heroine – Dorrie Tremont – is a stowaway who gets herself into more trouble than Mick can manage alone. Together, they make a great team. In spite of his angry-man reserve and her counter-phobic pluck.

An actual hard dock is my preferred corner of the Thousand Island Region of Upstate NY, where this series is set in 1893. It’s a concrete dock in a busy spot of the river channel, from where I can swim, watch large freighters pass, and spy on hard-bodied youth as they hurl themselves, heads foaming with shampoo, from the adjacent wooden pavilion dock. The hard dock is less populated, more to my liking.

The point of this summer-nostalgic mawk is that I selected Arctic Enemy because I thought it would be valuable research for The Hard Dock.

Anyone who’s ever written a romance knows there’s no better introduction to scientific and historical fact than another romance author.

Alas, the sexiest moment in Arctic Enemy is when Harrel somehow channels Jean-Luc Picard six years before Next Generation launches its version of the Enterprise.

‘Come!’

I wish.

artist, Robert McGinnis

Did you know they stopped counting?

The last time anyone counted the number of romance readers in America was 2005, when marketing research group Corona Insights conducted a nationwide telephone survey for the Romance Writers Association (RWA).

The conclusion was that in that year 64.6 million Americans read at least one romance novel. In 2002, it was estimated at 51.1 million romance readers in America. In 1998, 41 million readers.

Ten years later, I predict that number has increased, based on the rise of self-publishing, the advent of the eBook, and the explosion of the erotica market. It’s been a big decade for reading in general, and romance has been a principal in the revolution.

Corona’s figures at the time were extrapolated by a definition of romance that adapted to readers. According to Kevin Raines, the CEO and founder of Corona who worked on the 2005 survey, although RWA had a strict definition of ‘romance’, survey respondents were allowed to self-identify the genre.

This still makes sense to me. What’s triumphant and pleasurable to some is not to others. If romance readers have learned one thing from their reading experience, it’s this.

So how do we extrapolate new numbers without cold-calling 1,200 Americans?

From 1998 to 2005, according to Corona’ s figures, the US population of romance readers saw an average annual 8% growth, a number too large to apply going forward at liberty.

In fact, based on revenue alone, RWA claimed in 2005 that romance fiction generated $1.4 billion in sales. However, that reported number has since dipped, with RWA reporting $1.08 billion in revenue in 2013, a 22.8% drop.

Robert Maguire, artist, I Prefer Girls

But it’s likewise not feasible to calculate the number of readers from the amount of money spent.

Perhaps this could have been possible when Harlequin dominated the market with paperbacks at 60 cents a copy. But, with the rise of both digital publishing and indie romance writers, and the birth of 99 cent and free marketing, any new calculation of the number of romance readers must take into account the format of the books we read — print, digital, or audio — and by extension, how much we spend.

RWA now also reports the frequency of consumption. In the first quarter of 2014, according to the Nielsen Romance Buyer Survey, 25.5% of readers read more than one book a week. The algorithm designed to extrapolate the number of romance readers with all these variables would be muddy indeed.

Statisticians counting gun owners seem more inclined to make a reckoning.

artist, Robert McGinnis

Guns are a lot like romance novels. People advocate on their behalf. Collect them. Buy them with variable frequency. Sometimes lie about the number they own. And, like romance novels, most guns don’t need to be registered.

Somehow, in spite of these vagaries, credible numbers are reported.

According to University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, the number of people who reported having a gun in their home in the 1970s averaged about 50 percent, the 1980s averaged 48 percent, the 1990s at 43 percent and 35 percent in the 2000s. Now, numbers are being reported at an all-time low of 30%. By my count, that’s 72.8 million American adults.

(I removed all minors from the calculation, because until they’re 18, they can’t vote, drink, or complete a Gallup poll. Yes, I know. They’re gun-owners. But they also read romance novels at as fast a clip as adults, so the populations cancel each other out.)

Based on the most recent numbers we have, and the arguable trend upwards in romance consumption and the reported trend downward in gun ownership, romance readers by now may actually outnumber gun owners.

That’s good news.

For centuries, moralists have cautioned women against reading too many romance novels for fear that we’ll all begin to love one another a little too freely.

Titillated by reading. Artist unknown.

If you haven’t read Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, try it as an example. And then the preface or front matter of any of the “seduction novels” of the 18th century. For something more contemporary, try this New Republic article, which suggests that romance readers are “bathetic and bromidic and brain dead”. The free love described is not the ruin of virgins by rakes, rogues and scoundrels. Ironically, it’s the plight of men this author now laments, and their “ninety minutes of torture” by female, middle-class (oh?) partners titillated by smut.

I’m on board with both logic statements. Romance leads to sex; guns lead to violence.

I advise therefore that all of us bathetic, bromidic and brain dead Americans keep reading until we can say with certainty the number of romance readers surpasses the number of gun owners.

Americans now choked by violence will breathe more easily, albeit with a little hitch and gasp of pleasure.