Q&A with Mary Jo Putney

Every now and then, something I read raises a question in my mind that continues to niggle away until I need to find out more about it.  In my review of Nowhere Near Respectable, when speculating on the "believability" (for lack of a better word) of Kiri and Adam's acceptance into the British ton, my first thought was, "that would never really fly," thinking more of 19th century American attitudes toward race.  My second thought was, "well huh, Britain is much less racist than America, so maybe?" thinking of early 20th century examples of famous African Americans like Josephine Baker.  My third thought? "I have no idea whatsoever." Thus, the niggle.

A little superficial googling will bring up articles on immigration and racism in Britain, and Anglo/Indian politics and tensions, but nothing much is readily available about the aristocracy.  So I decided to go to the source, and emailed Mary Jo Putney directly.  I was properly thrilled to receive a gracious, in-depth reply, along with permission to post our conversation.

Nicola: Hi Ms. Putney!  I'm a longstanding fan of yours and recently read and reviewed Nowhere Near Respectable on my blog.  I really enjoyed the story very much (as well as the first Lost Lord book) but I was wondering a little about the biracial heroine, and if you would be interested in a little interview or follow-up on the topic?

MJP: I'm happy to discuss this topic because it interests me.  I've had a number of mixed race protagonists.  Partly that is because it's easier to have such a character in a Regency historical if one of the parents is English and well-born.  Partly it's because the world's great diversity fascinates me.  Lastly, being caught between two worlds is a good metaphor for the feeling of not belonging that most of us experience as some times in our lives. (Especially but not exclusively in adolescence.)

Nicola: I'm convinced that the not-belongingness is the root of the paranormal popularity, especially the typical arc where the main character, like Harry Potter, spends a good chunk of their life not belonging, and then experiences the joy of realizing that no, it's not their imagination, they really ARE different, and furthermore, finding their "tribe" where they DO belong.  It's a pet theory of mine. :-)

MJP: VERY interesting, Nicola! I hadn't thought of it, but I'm sure you're right, especially with the many YA paranormals.

That said, Lady Kiri was confident as a golden retriever. She was raised with wealth, position, and a loving family, and had no self esteem issues to speak of.  That was a deliberate contrast with her brother Adam, hero of Loving a Lost Lord, who was raised in very different circumstances and felt the need to bury the non-English side of his nature.  (Much of his character arc in that book is accepting that side of him.)

Nicola: I loved that about Kiri!  no victim-ness or self-pity about her.

Nicola: First I want to say that I don't mean to put you on the spot or try to play "spot the historical error" - I am no historian at all and if the answer to all the questions is "I made it up because it makes a great story," I think that's fantastic!

MJP: I'm capable of shameless invention {g}, but I try to work from facts where I can, and invent within a plausible framework.

Nicola: Mainly, I am curious to know whether there is historical precedent for bi-racial persons being accepted into the British ton, and if you had any interesting anecdotes that you might have come across in your research.

MJP: The best example I can think of is Lord Liverpool, who was Prime Minister of Britain in the tumultuous period from the late Napoleon wars up until 1827. He was part Indian, though I'm not sure the percentage.  A quarter, I think, but I won't swear to it.  He was the most powerful man in Britain for 14 years and while there might have been some racial sneers behind his back, it certainly didn't dent his career.

In the earlier days of the British occupation of England, there were very few English women, so it was common for Britons to take Indian wives.  Naturally, the result was Anglo-Indian children.  This shifted during the Victorian period when transportation improved dramatically and the "memsahibs" came out to India.  With them came racism, unfortunately.  To quote from the introduction to my Indian set historical, Veils of Silk (advert: now available in e-book form {g} ):

A paradigm of the racial situation was the elite Indian Army cavalry unit known as Skinner’s Horse. It was founded by James Skinner, the son of a British officer and his Rajput wife. By the end of the nineteenth century, James Skinner’s mixed blood would have prevented him from serving in the regiment he had founded.

Nicola: I remember Veils of Silk and the other Silk books, featuring the Khyber pass -- I often think of that when the extreme geography of Afghanistan is referred to in respect to the current war.  One thing I miss about older romances -- say, 20th century publications {g} -- is characters who travel.

MJP: A friend of mine calls them the "globe trotting books" because she misses them, too.  So do I, but page counts have dropped drastically over the years, and there isn't as much room for plot or exotic setting since first and foremost, the story has to be a romance.  I think this is one reason why e-pubbed versions of backlist historicals are selling well.  Some readers really miss them.

[Back to real-life examples...] Field Marshall Lord Roberts is another mixed race historical figure.  He was a great Victorian military hero who was born in India and had Indian blood.  (Again, I'm not sure how much.)

Nicola: It certainly seems inevitable that there would be a couple of generations of Indian/British offspring of all classes; but I have to admit I really had no idea how much acceptance they would have had in society and whether the laws of primogeniture applied.  I thought it was believable in Adam's story, which then logically meant Kiri's acceptance had to be believable too, because it wouldn't do to snub the sister of a duke {g}. 

MJP: Plus, she's a gurrrl, and hence less threatening to the status quo.  Aristocratic men were always willing to bed exotic sexy females, and occasionally even marry them (though preferably as a second wife.)  An actual peer like Adam, a duke, is much more threatening and unnerving.  Hence his belief as a boy that he had to be as English as possible, or else.

Nicola: I've seen a few critiques of your use of the word "Hindu" to represent race rather than religion -- I assumed that it was a contextual usage? any comment?

MJP: You're correct.  I'll do my best to avoid offensive language that will jerk readers out of stories, but I prefer not to use terminology that is correct now but wouldn't necessarily have been used in the historical period the story is in.  So I'll often use the historical term if it's clear in context what it means even if it's different from current usage. (Actually, in the Regency, Hindoo was a common spelling, but I avoided that here except for the epilogue.

[Nicola's edit: to clarify, the wikipedia article on the word "Hindu" states: "Originally, "Hindu" was a secular term which was used to describe all inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent (or "Hindustan") irrespective of their religious affiliation." ]

Nicola: Finally, since Kiri's mixed heritage is such a key element of the character and story, a reader might have expected to see a darker-complected model on the cover.  Cover "whitewashing" is becoming a bit of pet cause on romance blogs, so I was wondering if you might have any comments on that?

MJP: Sigh.  I could point out that her Indian relatives are from North India, which tends to be lighter complected than South Indians, but it has more to do with the fact that authors have limited control over covers.  Kiri is a shade or two darker than the heroine on the previous book, for what it's worth.  But after all my years in the business, I'm happy when a cover is pretty and eye catching.  (A purist would point out that the gowns on my last two historicals are a lot fuller than typical Regency wear.  But as I said, I'm a pragmatist.)

Nicola: To be honest, covers so rarely have any relation at all to the characters inside, I barely notice them.  I know most authors don't get much say in their covers but I thought with your position you might be an exception.  I assume that the more selling-power the author has, the more say-so they get.  Every now and then one catches my eye enough to give it a look, and once in a while they are so bad that I am repelled {g}, but mostly I look for author names that I know or have been recommended.  I do think that diversity in cover models is becoming -- ever so slowly-- less of an anathema to publishers.

MJP: I hope you're right!  My publisher does listen some about covers, but that doesn't give an author leave to mess around too much.  One must pick one's battles.

Nicola: Thank you so much for your time and thoughtful responses!

MJP: As I said, the topic is one that interests me and that I've returned to again and again in my books. And it's always much more fun to chat then to keep hammering away on my overdue book.

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Seriously, this kind of interaction is one of the best things about the internet, in my opinion.  Mary Jo Putney has been publishing wonderful romances since 1987.  I discovered her Fallen Angels series in the late 90s and she has been a total favorite of mine ever since.  If you have never read her books and you love historicals, you are really missing out. 

Nowhere Near Respectable, by Mary Jo Putney - Review

I am such a fan of Mary Jo Putney.  While I didn't like her foray into historical paranormal, her non-paranormals are almost always among my favorites.

Nowhere Near Respectable is no exception -- another winner in Putney's impressive catalog.  I think my favorite thing about this story is that it has so many of the things I love about "old skool" romance-- the things that made me fall in love with the genre-- AND all the best elements of "modern-day" historicals.

Old-Skool: exotic traditions, royalty, bi-racial heroine, brutal bad guys, split-second heart-pounding rescues, manacles, smugglers, high stakes adventure, heroine in detective mode side-by-side with the hero.

New-Skool: mutual seduction, inverted power imbalance (she is well-born but he is not), cleaner pacing, no "victims" in the relationship.

If you love historical romance with a bit of smuggling, Napoleonic intrigue, assassination plots, and class commentary, this is one you should pick up.  Some of Putney's books have less of a center-stage plot, and I love those too, those quieter, character-focused stories, but this one has a non-stop page-turning mystery plot speeding along next to the characters falling in love.

When the story opens, Kiri makes a classic old-skool impetuous hair-tossing mistake.  Grievously insulted by any standard, she rides out on her own on a too-far, too-late journey and falls victim to the afore-mentioned brutal bad guys.  In the process, she becomes entangled in a far-reaching plot of kings and traitors.

One of the key plot points here is Kiri's nose.  Although I'm sure it's a very pretty nose, since Kiri is beautiful in the way of romance heroines, I'm referring to a talent rather than appearance.  Like musicians with perfect pitch, there is similar olfactory talent, which makes that person a nose or a perfumer.  Kiri is able to isolate specific notes of scent and can even identify individuals once she's given them a good sniff.

Did that make you snicker?  I have to admit, I didn't find that premise to be all that believable, but hey, it certainly makes for a bit of a change of pace in the usual "find the spy" plot.  I know, actually, that this is a real "thing," that there are famous noses who are in great demand in the fragrance business.  I've even seen them once or twice in romance before (I want to say Judith Ivory had one?).  Using the talent to sniff out (heh) a criminal is a bit over the top, but hey, if you can't be over the top in a romance, when can you?

Like the first Lost Lord book, NNR features a bi-racial protagonist -- this time it's the heroine rather than the hero.  My first reaction is that it's pretty unrealistic to have these characters accepted by the ton, but then I remember that England was more liberal about race than the US.  To be honest, I don't really know.  Surely with all the military and economic activity of the British in India this sort of thing must have happened sometimes, so I decided to just go with it.  I would be very interested to see an article about historical examples of English/Indian mixed-race individuals in the aristocracy.

I have to say, I'm a sucker for a couple who knows/believes that they cannot make a marriage but decides to go for it anyway (maybe my hedonist roots are showing).  I've run into this sort of thing a couple of times lately, where one or the other or both of the couple explicitly thinks or says, "even if I can't have this forever, I will seize this day, this moment."  And that just appeals to me.


Around the Blogosphere
Love Letters to a Library
Fiction Vixen
My Book Addiction
In the Hammock

As always, if you've reviewed this book and would like a link, just let me know by email or comments and I'll edit it in!

Loving a Lost Lord, by Mary Jo Putney - Review

Short answer: Best Historical This Year! (well, so far anyway!)

The Premise
A terrible steamship accident causes Our Hero to wash up onshore at the feet of Our Heroine, who just happens to need a husband. Since he also conveniently has amnesia, she tells him one big whopper: "Can you have forgotten that I'm your wife, Mariah Clarke?" from which many subsequent whoppers follow. If Mariah had had Pinocchio's curse, her proboscis would have been prodigious indeed.

The Good Stuff
It's a little puzzling as to why this story works. There are a fair number of tired elements -- I mean, really, amnesia?? And in some ways, Mariah resembled one of Putney's recent heroines that I found really boring: she's relentlessly pragmatic in a similar way to Abigail from Marriage Spell. It's been awhile since I read that one, so this point is no doubt debatable, but I found this heroine to be more real. Putney did a better job of showing me the internal struggle it cost Mariah to maintain her outward serenity, while Abigail just seemed phlegmatic.

Adam is a wonderfully fresh hero. If you're tired of the cold, aloof rake whose glacial heart must be melted by the spunky heroine, pick this up immediately. Putney uses the amnesia device to provide Adam with a tabula rasa; he literally leaves all his cares behind and puts his well-being in Mariah's hands. Beneath the worry about his memories, he's trusting, playful, and loving. As his memories gradually return, you can vividly see the weight they apply, bit by bit, to his ducal shoulders. And of course the reader sees the looming Revelation of Truth along with Mariah, which adds to the tension.

I think one reason that Putney manages this constellation of elements that could SO easily go SO wrong, and pulls off a truly fabulous story instead, is that in spite of the rather preposterous circumstances, both characters behave in truly believable ways (at least, I thought so). Discounting that first lie, there are no TSTL decisions. Mariah understands the consequences of The Lie and is constantly weighing Adam's best interests in the timing of her reveal -- at no time does she really think she's going to get away with never coming clean. But Adam arrives at her doorstep utterly helpless -- it's far more mortifying to him to think he's at the mercy of total strangers than to feel that he's where he's supposed to be, even if he doesn't remember. And when he does learn the truth, he understandably loses trust, but he doesn't leap to wild conclusions like "she must be a gold-digging slut! I shall hate her forever and ship her off to Barbados!" Big points in that respect -- two grown-ups, acting like grown-ups, in spite of the pain it causes them. Go figure.

Another is simply that these characters sparkle with each other. Chemistry, zing, whatever you want to call it. From the fact that Mariah accidentally hits on Adam's true given name, to the way Adam feels perfectly at home with her, Putney builds an implacable rightness between these two. It is marvelous and impossible to analyze. Here, Adam has asked Mariah if she will sleep with him-- not for sex, as he's still injured, but for comfort and intimacy:

Shyly she took off her robe, then climbed into the bed. He recognized that he was still something of a stranger to her. But she was not a stranger to him. Odd, since he was the one who'd lost his memory.

Oh, le sigh....

An interesting theme that Putney plays with here is a duality of nature. There is the obvious: Adam with and without his memories. Once he regains them-- integrates those two men-- he realizes that the foreign side of himself, one he has repressed since inheriting the dukedom can also be acknowledged, at least among friends.

Mariah gets a flip side too. She's had a lonely existence, and an imaginary friend or alter ego named Sarah has been with her since childhood. Sarah helps her remember how to be proper, which is a bit double-edged for Mariah. Sometimes those reminders are helpful, but sometimes they only make Mariah feel inferior or like a poseur. At first this seemed a little odd to me for a grown woman, but hey, you sometimes just go with things. And I like where Putney took it in the end.

The Plot
Besides the amnesia and secret-marriage-that-isn't-really, there seems to be a plot afoot to harm the Duke. While there weren't any big surprises here, the plotting and pacing are meticulous and serve as a perfectly adequate foil for the emotional story.

The Series
I don't know if Putney was the first, but if not, she was certainly a very early adopter of the setup of a group of men, linked from childhood, as the glue for a series of full-length romances. And good lord, she's good at it. I really loved how she shows us bits of the Duke's friends: through his troubled memory-dreams, and Mariah's interactions with them, we learn a lot in a way that whets the appetite without being too obvious. As an example:

She wondered if any of his friends would be as willing to admit vulnerability. Masterson possibly. Kirkland... she wasn't sure. Randall would probably rather be torn apart by wild horses than admit weakness.

And then Mariah is back into dialog with Adam. Just a small aside, not heavy-handed. An amuse-bouche. (And, any guesses as to who the next Lost Lord might be? Heh.)

The Happily Ever After
Putney goes completely wild on this, into real fairy-tale territory. Obviously, I can't say more without spoilering, but I enjoyed it, even if it took an extra dollop of suspension of disbelief-- it was worth it.

Hot Summer Historicals

THREE of my favorite authors released new books yesterday! Scheduling a trip to Borders' ASAP...

In no particular order:


What Happens in London, by Julia Quinn

Don't you love the title? Truthfully, the Vegas slogan is wearing a bit thin for me, but somehow Quinn's twist makes me smile. I do enjoy the occasional camera-asides, where books or movies or tv shows acknowledge that that's exactly what they are, and sort of bring the audience right into the joke. If that makes any sense at all. Anyway, it says classic Quinn sly humor to me.











Don't Tempt Me, by Loretta Chase.

I don't know what I can say about Chase that I haven't already: Auto-buy. Can't wait!

















Loving A Lost Lord, by Mary Jo Putney

It's weird. I love MJP, and I love paranormal romance, but I really, really did not love her paranormal historicals. In fact I sort of hated the one I read and ignored the others. So I'm EXTREMELY HAPPY to see that she's returning to straight historicals with this series. Yay!












Head On Over
to Romance Vagabonds for really good interviews with Quinn and Putney. Then head to your local bookseller and indulge

Is It Me? I Don't Think It's Me.

I said in my intro that I might be soft on my favorite authors. But then again, maybe not. Because when they disappoint me, I get *really* disappointed.

Take for example Cross My Heart, from Carly Phillips. Now, I really liked her first few stand-alones (a mis-nomer, since they were trilogies). The Hot Zone trio and the Chandler Brothers delivered the pacing, personality and humor that made her hugely successful, with a little boost from Kelly Ripa's short-lived reading club. But this latest one? The only way I can explain it is if Phillips found it in the bottom of a box of notebooks from her high school sophomore year handwritten on spiral paper with all of the i's dotted with little hearts, and her publisher was holding her dog hostage for a finished manuscript. Seriously, it's pretty bad; like a case study on the old creative writing saw "show, don't tell." These characters are flat and boring; they passively await the plot to happen around them while everything you ever wanted to know about them (and much, much more) is explicated in narrative like this:

Ty was as complex as the things surrounding him were simple. He was a deep man who kept his feelings inside but who gave of himself just by being there. He seemed to sense and show up when she needed him, and he knew when to give her space. Ten years apart and he knew her better than she even knew herself.

And there is more of the same before and after. Blah, blah cliche´ blah cliche´ blah blah.

Then there's the latest from Stephanie Laurens, whom I usually love. I mean, she is absolutely A-list in my book. But A Taste of Innocence really disappointed me. The hero, Charlie, is just too dumb to live: his father had gambled away the family fortune trying to support them, out of his crazy love for his wife. Therefore, Charlie decides to avoid true love at all costs because love=reckless + bad judgement. Yeah, too dumb to live. Meanwhile, the heroine had decided that she would only marry for love. Because that makes tons of sense for the era.

For some reason I also found the rhythm of the prose to be really repetitive, particularly in the love scenes: "paragraph paragraph subject verb supporting clause. Very repeat supporting clause. Supporting clause some more, paragraph paragraph paragraph." Over and over. I'm honestly not one to harp on things like sentence fragments but this happened so many times it was really noticeable and distracting.

I suspect that part of the problem is that the Cynster franchise is just getting old. In the last several books, I had a lot of trouble remembering the Malcom Sinclair thread from book to book, especially since Laurens was alternating Cynsters and Bastion Club books, which never seemed all that distinct from each other anyway, other than the shadowy spymaster of the Bastion books. However, I will say that the big redeemer for this book was in fact, the Malcom Sinclair twist at the end, which I won't spoil but I liked very much.

Lastly, a word about Mary Jo Putney's Marriage Spell. What the heck happened here? It was like Harry Potter meets Lifetime Television For Women. I like paranormals just fine, but I have to believe it just isn't MJP's forte. The magic element was forced and unimaginative, and the heroine was about as exciting as magical oatmeal. The only hook was with the hero's internal struggle-- Putney's signature theme and done far better in the Fallen Angels books.

I'm not giving up on any of these authors, because I know they can write great books. I just hope they get back to it. Soon.