And now for something completely different
 
Last month I wrote about Betty Neels, the prolific writer of medical romances published by Mills & Boon in the closing three decades of the 20th Century. They are so popular that they have been republished as e-books. I caught up with a few available online through my county library service and began to consider what gives these stories their enduring popularity. Do women secretly want to be rescued by a man who has everything and adores her? The stories are predictable (we know he’ll win her in the end and all those misunderstandings will be cleared up and he’ll turn out not to be engaged to that stunning other woman, etc) but still we read them. I’ve spoken to others about reading choices during the C-19 crisis and found some common ground—an easy comfort read for a little diversion from all the stress!
 
So I decided to have a go. Amongst her many stories, in 1980 she published one called Judith. Mine is called Joanne and is set in 1980 in a seaside resort in Devon. Joanne is the eldest daughter of a widowed clergyman and has run his household for years and brought up the rest of the children. Then a handsome Swiss architect arrives in town, bent on acquiring a run-down hotel for his family’s five-star chain. I hope you enjoy my take on the traditional contemporary sweet romance.
 
Available now on Amazon Kindle, KDP Select and in print from Amazon.

I’m just an old-fashioned girl
 
British readers of my generation may have come across the prolific Betty Neels, who retired from nursing in 1969 and then began to write warm-hearted, traditional romances in a medical setting for Mills & Boon. She died aged 91 in 2001, having written over 130 of them.
 
Her stories are traditional and quite chaste—nothing beyond the bedroom door, nothing below the waist and very little below the neck. She confined her protagonists to the occasional kiss. Her heroes often smoked a pipe and her heroines were frequently described as ‘splendid’ girls. Some were beautiful, some were plain, but they were generally dedicated, kind and quite self-effacing.
 
Her first book was called Sister Peters in Amsterdam and subsequent stories followed a similar pattern. The hero was usually a Dutch hospital consultant (Neels’ husband was Dutch), the heroine an English nursing colleague or a Cinderella poor girl figure. He usually drove a Bentley or a Rolls, while she was a nurse or did unskilled work and had family commitments. There were generally a large dog or two around and a cat or kitten also usually featured (often rescued by her).
 
Her stories were mostly set in the age before computers or mobile phones were generally available. The heroines were quite feisty at times, but nevertheless susceptible to the gallant, masterful, honourable, hard-working, RICH knight-in-shining-armour who came to take them away from all this. The heroine couldn’t believe he would fall in love with her, given the sophisticated, beautiful creatures in his social circle. The hero generally had several properties each staffed by loyal longstanding servants who’d known him since childhood and he usually fell in love with the heroine at first sight, before setting out to woo and win her. Nostalgic stuff!
 
So I thought what if…the result is I am currently writing what I call a traditional contemporary romance, incorporating my own version of some of the features that made Neels’ writing so popular, except mine is in a business rather than a medical context. More on this soon. Hoping to publish in August.