I've been Manga'd!

I have had Japanese translations of some of my books in the past, but they have all been in ordinary print form so I was surprised, and apprehensive, when four volumes in manga - comic book - versions arrived.

Although my Japanese is nil it was immediately obvious, as soon as I opened them, that these were two books - The Dangerous Mr Ryder and The Marriage Debt - each in a two voume set.

Here is Mr Ryder with the blonde heroine above. (The scene on the orange bedspread is not as sinister as it looks, by the way - Jack Ryder is trying to prevent the infuriated Grand Duchess knifing him in the back!) This is the first of my Those Scandalous Ravenhursts series, so I'm hoping this one does well and they print all 6!

Below is The Marriage Debt with my hero, Nicholas, in Newgate, about to hang as Black Jack Standon, notorious highwayman. I love the way the artist has captured Katherine's fierce determination to save him from the gallows.

I had no idea what to expect inside - would the story be cut, changed - how could I tell? But it was soon very clear that the manga version was incredibly true to the original book: I could follow it easily from the pictures and it all seems to be there.

I'm not sure that I entirely like the heroines with their huge eyes, but the heroes are to die for! Sexy, smouldering men of action who are also accomplished, tender lovers - definitely swoon-making.

Here's an example of the inside at the beginning of The Marriage Debt. I think it is vivid and really carries you through the story. This scene is from the extract below - see what you think. The hero looks just as I imagined him.

What was particularly interesting, from the point of view of image, was that The Marriage Debt is being reprinted this month in the UK in the first volume of The Regency Collection 2011. Regency Pleasures also contains The Model Debutante - I'm not sure what the Manga artist would have made of the nude modelling scenes in that!

The very different cover for that volume is shown at the bottom of the page.

The beginning of The Marriage Debt -

The tall man in the frieze coat sat cross-legged on the hard bench, put his elbows on his knees, his chin on his clasped hands and thought. It required some concentration to ignore the shackles on his legs, the cold that seeped out of the damp walls, the rustles and squeaking in the rotten straw that covered the floor and the constant noise that echoed through the long dark corridors.
A few cells away a man was screaming an incoherent flood of obscenities that seemed to have gone on for hours. More distantly someone was dragging a stick across the bars of one of the great rooms, a monotonous music which fretted at the nerves. A boy was sobbing somewhere close. Footsteps on the flags outside and the clank and jingle of keys heralded the passing of a pair of turnkeys.
Long ago his father had said he was born to be hanged. At the time he had laughed: nothing had seemed more improbable. Now the words spoken in anger had been proven right: in eight days he would step outside Newgate gaol to the gallows platform and the hangman’s noose.
One small mercy was that they had put him in a cell by himself, not thrown him into one of the common yards where pickpockets and murderers, petty thieves and rapists crowded together, sleeping in great filthy chambers as best they might, fighting amongst themselves and preying on the weakest amongst them if they could.
Apparently his notoriety as Black Jack Standon was worth enough in tips to the turnkeys for them to keep him apart where he could be better shown off to the languid gentlemen and over-excited ladies who found an afternoon’s slumming a stimulating entertainment. The sight of an infamous highwayman who had made the Oxford road through Hertfordshire his hunting ground was the climax of the visit to one of London’s most feared prisons.
He had hurled his bowl at the group who had clustered around the narrow barred opening an hour or two ago and smiled grimly at the shrieks and curses when the foul liquid which passed as stew splattered the fine clothes on the other side of the grill. He doubted they’d feed him again today after that. It was no loss, he seemed to have passed beyond hunger after the trial - if such it could be called.

What do you think of the manga version? Attractive or off-putting? I love them, but I like the elegant lady on the Pleasures cover as well.

Louise

Love Story of the Year Shortlist

The shortlist for the Romantic Novelists’ Association Love Story of the Year has been announced and I’m thrilled that my Ravenhurst novel The Notorious Mr Hurst (Harlequin Mills & Boon) is included. Full details about the shortlist are on the RNA’s website http://www.romanticnovelistsassociation.org/

This year two Regency novels are among the six on the list – Notorious and Jan Jones’s Fair Deception (Robert Hale) - and both of them, although in very different settings, have a theatrical background.

The Pure Passion Awards 2010 in conjunction with the RNA will be presented at the Awards Luncheon on 16th March, so there’s plenty of time for butterflies in the stomach to develop, especially as this is a very special Luncheon to celebrate the RNA’s fiftieth anniversary year.

Here’s the cover of Jan’s book.

Secrets and scandal in Regency Newmarket: When Kit Kydd rescues actress Susanna Fair from disreputable Rafe Warwick, he proposes a feigned engagement to suit them both. But problems multiply when Susanna’s past beckons, her theatre company needs her, and Rafe reappears. Not a good time to fall in love, really.
Read more on Jan’s website www.jan-jones.co.uk/fair-deception.html

And here is The Notorious Mr Hurst.
Wealthy, eligible, beautiful - Lady Maude Templeton can have any man in Society. But she wants to marry for love - and the man of her dreams is sexy, talented, intelligent - and impossibly ineligible. What is more, he doesn’t believe in love.
Making theatre owner Eden Hurst realise he needs love, and her, seems hopeless - but when she puts her mind to it Lady Maude can be quite as shocking as any of her Ravenhurst friends.
Read more at http://www.louiseallenregency.co.uk/

Louise Allen

Retail therapy

It constantly surprises me, walking around London today, how many relics of the retail world of the Regency still survive and strolling down Haymarket you can find two within minutes of each other.

At the northern end of the street is the oldest surviving shop-front in London dating from 1751. Until the 1970s it was the premises of Fribourg & Treyer, tobacconists, and inside, behind the counter are the original shelves.

Cross the road and walk down to Charles II Street and turn immediately left into The Royal Opera Arcade and you are in the oldest shopping arcade in Britain, built between 1816-18 and pre-dating the much more famous Burlington Arcade by a year. It takes little imagination to fill the windows with bonnets and reticules, waistcoats and walking sticks and imagine the delight of shoppers able to browse in this elegant row.

No-one who was anyone paid cash, of course, and the unfortunate shopkeepers often had to wait years for settlement of their accounts. Perhaps that was why so many of them had striking illustrated billheads so their final demand stood out from everyone else's. I have started collecting them and thought this one, from an Edinburgh linen draper, was particularly attractive. Mr Henderson was lucky - the receipt on the back shows his bill for table linen worth £29 was paid by return.

I satisfy my own need for retail therapy by taking my characters shopping. Virtually the first thing that Clemence Ravenhurst (The Piratical Miss Ravenhurst. September) does when she arrives back in England after a long sea voyage is to hit the shops of Weymouth - just what one needs after being on board a pirate vessel where one cannot obtain a good pair of stays for love nor money.

Louise Allen

This month sees the publication of the fifth in my Ravenhurst series - The Notorious Mr Hurst, the story of the Ravenhursts’ friend Lady Maude Templeton who has already put in an appearance in The Shocking Lord Standon and Disrobed & Dishonored.
Maude has fallen for the most unsuitable of men - theatre manager Eden Hurst. He doesn’t believe in love and he is completely ineligible but Maude is determined and sets out to get her man behind the scenes at Eden’s Unicorn Theatre.

All the old London theatres have been burned down (often several times) or remodelled out of existence, so it was hard to find one to soak up the atmosphere. The oldest theatre building in London is the Theatre Royal Haymarket designed by John Nash which reopened in July 1821 and this view of it down the newly extended King Charles II Street is from Ackermann’s Repository of the following year.

For an authentic late Georgian theatre interior I went to the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds where the 1819 interior has been carefully restored along with the boxes where servants were sent to keep the places for their masters during the “boring” early parts of the performance.

I also had some luck finding original theatre programmes which give the flavour of the type of theatre Eden was running - without a “patent” from the Lord Chamberlain they were forbidden to perform straight dramas so music, dancers and farce were all staged, much to the appreciation of the audience.

Here is the opening from The Notorious Mr Hurst set at the end of just such a performance -

‘And so, my false love – I die!’ The maiden sank to the ground, a dagger in her bosom, her white arm outflung.
The audience went wild. They applauded, whistled, stamped and, those members of it who were not weeping into their handkerchiefs, leapt to their feet with cries of ‘More! More!’
The dark-haired lady in the expensive box close to the stage gripped the velvet upholstered rim and held her breath. For the audience who had flocked to see the final performance of The Sicilian Seducer, or Innocence Betrayed, the tension was over and they could relax into their appreciation of the melodrama. For Lady Maude Templeton the climax of the evening was about to occur and, she was determined, it would change her life for ever.
‘You would never guess it, but she must be forty if she’s a day,’ Lady Standon remarked, lowering her opera glass from a careful study of the corpse who was just being helped to her feet by her leading man.
‘One is given to understand that La Belle Marguerite never mentions anything so sordid as age, Jessica.’ Her husband turned from making an observation to Lord Pangbourne.
‘Fine figure of a woman,’ the earl grunted. He was still applauding enthusiastically. ‘Not surprising that she was such a sensation on the Continent.’
‘And so much of that figure on display,’ Jessica murmured to Maude who broke her concentration on the shadowy wings long enough to smile at her friend’s sly remark. The loss of focus lasted only a moment. Tonight was the night, she knew it. With the excitement that surrounded a last night at the Unicorn she had her best opportunity to slip backstage. And once she was there, to make what she could of the situation.
Then her breath caught in her throat and her heart beat harder, just as it always did when she glimpsed him. Eden Hurst, proprietor of the Unicorn theatre, strode onto the stage and held up both hands for silence. And by some miracle - or sheer charisma - he got it, the tumult subsiding enough that his powerful voice could be heard.
‘My lords, ladies, gentlemen. We thank you. On behalf of Madame Marguerite and the Company of the Unicorn, I thank you. Tonight was the last performance of The Sicilian Seducer for this, our first full Season.’ He paused while exaggerated groans and shouts of Shame! resounded through the stalls and up into the gods. ‘But we are already looking forward to Her Precious Honour to open in six weeks’ time and I can assure her many admirers that Madame Marguerite will take the leading role in this dramatic tale of love triumphant over adversity. Goodnight to you all and I hope to welcome you next week for our revival of that old favourite, How to Tease and How To Please, with the celebrated Mrs Furlow in the leading role.’
‘Damn good comedy that,’ Lord Pangbourne pronounced, getting to his feet. ‘I recall it when it first came out. In ’09 was it? Or the year after?’
Maude did not hear her father. Down below in the glare of the new gas lights stood the man she desired, the man she knew she could love, the man she had wanted ever since she had first seen him a year before.
Since then she had existed on the glimpses she caught of him. In his theatre she sat imprisoned, in a box so close she could have almost reached down and touched him. On the rare occasions he had attended a social function where she had been present he been frustratingly aloof from the unmarried ladies, disappearing into the card rooms to talk to male acquaintances or flirting with the fast young widows and matrons. And even she, bold as she was, could not hunt down a man to whom she had not been introduced and accost him. Not in the midst of a society ball and not a man of shady origins who had arrived in England trailing a tantalising reputation for ruthless business dealing and shocking amours.
And last Season he had closed the Unicorn for renovations and returned to the Continent for a tour with his leading lady only months after they had arrived in England.
Standing there he dominated the stage by sheer presence. Tall, broad-shouldered, with an intense masculine elegance in his dark coat and tight pantaloons, yet somehow flamboyant and dramatic. Maude caught the sharp glitter of diamonds at his throat and from the heavy ring on his left hand and recognised that his clothes had been cut with an edge of exaggeration that would be out of place in a polite drawing room. He was a showman, demanding and receiving attention just as much as the most histrionic actor.
‘Maude,’ Jessica nudged her. ‘One of these evenings your papa is going to notice that you dream through the performances and only wake up when Mr Hurst is on stage.’
‘I don’t dream,’ she contradicted, finally getting to her feet as Eden Hurst walked off stage to loud applause. ‘I am watching and I am listening. I have to learn how this place works.’

The Disgraceful Mr Ravenhurst

This month sees the fourth of my Those Scandalous Ravenhurst titles released in the UK - The Disgraceful Mr Ravenhurst. Black sheep of the family Theo is pursuing a career on the margins of the law chasing works of art and antiquities around Europe. His mother, the Bishop’s wife, tries to pretend he’s on the Grand Tour, but far from a solemn inspection of the great artistic sites of Europe, Theo is in hot pursuit of a frankly shocking piece of erotic antique silver - and so are a number of ruthless rivals.

His cousin Elinor, bluestocking, dowd and confirmed spinster, literally bumps into Theo in the basilica of Vezelay in Burgundy and finds her world turned upside down when she becomes entangled in Theo’s quest with almost murderous results.

If you have read the three previous Ravenhursts you will meet again the redoubtable Lady James, the Grand Duchess Eva, her son Freddie and last, but never least, her gorgeous husband Sebastian.

And an entire houseparty of Ravenhursts are required to sort out the quite disgraceful pickle their friends Sarah Tatton and Jonathan, the Earl of Redcliffe have got themselves into. Disrobed and Dishonoured is in May in the Historical Undone e-book series. (Be warned, this is a sizzler!)

Jane Austen Magic

After a fantastic weekend at the RNA Conference in Chichester we stayed down in Hampshire for a week in a cottage. Faced with a Monday of pouring rain we realised how close we were to Chawton, Jane Austen’s home from 1809 until a few days before her death in 1817 – it seemed the obvious destination.
As we arrived in the village the rain stopped, the sun came out and the garden was filled with the scent of roses – magic.

And it got better. Surprised to see the admission prices had been covered by a notice saying ‘Free’, we discovered that we had arrived on the 199th anniversary of Jane’s arrival at the house with her mother and sister Cassandra on 7th June.

The interior is fascinating and evocative, laid out in a way that displays family relics yet preserves the feel of the house at the time the Austen’s lived there. Particularly moving is Jane and Cassandra’s bedroom with their niece Caroline’s description of the last time she saw Jane, sitting by the fireside in that room, just before she died.

More cheerful is Jane’s little donkey carriage, the patchwork coverlet the Austen ladies made and the pretty Gothic window that her brother had put into the drawing room so the ladies could sit and look out onto the garden.

And, of course, irresistible to an author, is Jane’s tiny writing table in the dining parlour. I stood there hoping some of the genius would rub off!

Also in the dining parlour is part of the dinner service that Jane, her brother Edward and her niece Fanny went to buy for Edward at the Wedgwood showrooms in London – exactly as she describes it in a letter to Cassandra.

It was a slightly eerie feeling, exploring the house exactly to the day that Jane would have come here for the first time, looking at it with unfamiliar eyes. I’m looking forward to visiting in June 2009 when major celebrations are promised!

Louise Allen

Regency Delights at the V and A

The V&A held a Regency evening on 13th June and I went along, notebook at the ready - but not, alas, in full costume as some of the visitors did.






There was drama and violence with experts from the Royal Armouries at Leeds reconstructing duels and demonstrating the use of the single stick and quarter staff, using the space of the central courtyard to great effect. Having learned all about "Angelo's deception", a lethally effective move, I'm now looking for an opportunity to incorporate it into a fight scene in The Piratical Miss Ravenhurst. Afterwards we were able to handle genuine small swords and everyone was amazed at how light they were.






As a little refined relief from all this aggression we repaired to an elegant drawing room for parlour games. I can now play hazard and loo and have mastered the rules of teetotum, a game of such mind-numbing simplicity that it was a favourite amongst ladies who needed all their attention for gossip and watching the passing scene.



Rather more challenging was the dancing lesson. An elegant couple demonstrated the minuet, using an amazing amount of space in the process, then taught the entire audience - over 100 people - a round dance called La Pistole which involved pretending to shoot one's partner at regular intervals. I suspect that is going to make an appearance in the work in progress as well.
















And finally, still fanning ourselves, we were taken on a guided tour of some of the Regency collections. I will certainly be making a return visit to the V&A to spend more time gazing at gorgeous gowns and completely over the top Classical ornamentation on everything from tea cups to bookcases.






Louise Allen