Through The Haze of Time

Today and tomorrow I’m REALLY trying to get A Fatal Stain to the editor, either before she leaves for the holiday break, or so she can get to it as soon as she gets back. Besides, the guys come on vacation at the end of the week and I’d like to be able to hang out and be silly with them, as opposed to working through it as normally happens.

However as you know — or possibly not — I’ve been reading OLD regency romances (no, not Heyer. I’ve read those. These are from the seventies and eighties) while exercising in the morning. Several reasons: First, I don’t want my kindle balanced up on the treadmill as I use it, because I’m afraid it will fall and crack. Second, I don’t want to read something so riveting that I can’t put it down and work the rest of the day. Third, I don’t want to read anything with such a powerful voice it will influence my final of AFS.

I want to say a couple of times I’ve been shocked — not that way. Most of them have less sex than just about anything now — with the quality of the book, in a good way. Or perhaps bad, as sometimes I have to take another hour to finish the book, since it engaged me.

Also, for those like me who grew up as “other genre fiction snobs” who didn’t read romance, it’s enlightening to see most of these books — from imprints that were written “by the yard” and usually under flat fee contracts — are eminently readable and a few are actually very, very good. (As I said, good enough to make me sit down and read them.)

On the other hand, sometimes you hit the appallingly bad. I don’t care how rushed a novel is, or what terms the contract let me say this — there is NO excuse — none — for not doing minimal research. Particularly not when writing regencies, where you can practically do your research (except for fine details) by reading Georgette Heyer.

This novel started out rubbing me wrong, in subtle ways. For starters there was the feeling that this was a parallel world regency, where “the Carlton house set” was a safe place for a young matron and in fact, something society wives aspired to. Also, that dancing with the Prince Regent was THE way to launch an innocent young debutante into society.

Then, there were the subtle ways that the language was wrong and the — not just regency — confusion of capital with capitol. (Hint, when you ride through the Capitol in a phaeton, DC police get REALLY upset.

And there was the whole “the main character is an American heiress” which to me had more of the feel of the late nineteenth century, not early. Let’s face it, if she were an American heiress, early in the century, her parents probably owned tobacco plantations in Virginia or were wealthy Boston blue bloods, likely cousins of British aristocracy in either case or the like not “she comes from the middle of the country, where she grew up in a cabin and her father was a cobbler.” (WHAT? How MUCH did shoes cost in the early-settled Midwest? I mean, I heard the streets were paved with gold, maybe the cobbler just scraped the soles before replacing them?)

Then there is the way that the character thinks of adultery as A Scarlet Letter sin — yes, capitalized, because she obviously knows it’s a literary work in the future, and wants to be properly respectful — because the author is apparently under a kindergarten sort of hazy impression that everyone at that time in America were puritans and very strict. (Sorry, several very hazy impressions. And wrong ones. Strict puritans were a limited group amid settlers, and — if the hazy impressions of my own reading are true — by that point they had started becoming more main-stream protestant than the theocrat-like early settlers.)

But then came the crowning time-space disorientation. The prospective mother in law hates Americans, ever since those Californians bought her ancestral estate.

Ladies, Gentleman, Children, puppies and carrots — California at the time was part of Mexico. Even granting you some Mexican grandees might have bought the woman’s estate (wouldn’t they have bought one in Spain, instead? Never mind) why would this make her resent an American from New York City?

California did not in fact become a part of the US until 1848, following the Mexican American war, by the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. And I don’t think — even though I’m not going to look now — “rich Californians” were much in evidence until the Gold Rush in 49 and even then there weren’t many of those who decided to buy English estates. Certainly not to qualify as a “Stampede” which the author calls it. At the end of the nineteenth century, California was still largely agricultural and rural. In 1811-20 I doubt there was even a stampede of ONE Californian buying a British estate.

I went back and checked, to make sure I hadn’t got the time period of the book wrong because the feel of it, from dialogue to the character history reminded me more of the situation in Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Cracked. Nope. References to the Prince Regent, the Carlton House Set and Rotten Row all present and still largely unaccounted for.

The characters are middling to interesting. The story is not bad by the standards of “something I can read while working up a sweat” but I don’t think I CAN read anymore because now — to me — the background is all weird and I keep looking for more tells that it’s a parallel world or perhaps that time is melting or something, and have to keep reminding myself it is NOT Science Fiction. Way too much work.

What’s frustrating about this is that I think the book is only ten years old, so they COULD have done an internet search. But even barring that, there’s the fact that they COULD have read a book. And by they I mean — the author, the editor, the copyeditor, the assistant editor, the mail room tea-bringer at the publishing house.

Oh, yeah, that’s the other thing I forgot to mention: This book was not one of the written-by-the-yard, oh, no. It was published by a reputable house… and it was a bestseller.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, dragons and germs, is — depending on how you look at it — a hopeful or a dispiriting thought to take with me into a day of writing.

I choose to see it as hopeful :)