RA Crossroads: Romance and Spy Fiction

Featuring Julia Quinn, Lauren Willig & Christopher Hibbert

By Neal Wyatt -- Library Journal, 05/06/2010

As Lewis Carroll’s Alice so aptly points out, "What is the use of a book...without pictures or conversations?"

Welcome to RA Crossroads, where books, movies, music, and other media converge and whole-collection reader’s advisory service goes where it may. In this column, spies and romance lead me down a winding path.

Begin:

Bourne, Joanna. The Spymaster’s Lady. Berkley. 2008. 384p. ISBN 978-0-425-21960-7. pap. $7.99.
Romance fans will have to search high and low to find a better book than this—the lush and lyrical story of Robert Grey, a British spymaster, and Annique Villiers, a French spy. The two meet in a prison cell. Grey and his colleague Adrian have been captured by a French agent who also had need to kill Annique. Engineering their escape, Annique saves the Brits, only to be recaptured by Grey. The two match wits through the rest of the novel, Annique proving to be cleverer than Grey could ever expect and Grey proving to be more stubborn than Annique. Bourne is adept at creating scenes that linger long after reading and in filling her novels with details that help create a lovely sensibility of time and place. The novel was followed in the same year by My Lord and Spymaster and the third book in the series, The Forbidden Rose, will be published this June.

Read-alikes:

Curtis, Sharon & Tom Curtis. The Windflower. Random. 1994. 502p. ISBN 978-0-553-56806-6. pap. $4.99. O.P. but widely available. 
Personally, I think every collection development librarian should buy a copy for $25 off of ABE or Half.com. It is one of those romance novels that changed how readers thought of the genre and certainly what they wanted from romance. Like Bourne, the Curtises focus on creating a sensibility of time and place and have a deft touch when it comes to crafting scene. Also à la Bourne, the characters here are complicated and three-dimensional, people readers want to spend more time with. In fact, when The Windflower came out, there was a great deal of lobbying for a sequel that never materialized. On the surface, this is the story of Devon Crandall and Merry Wilding and their extraordinarily complicated courtship (Devon has a hand in kidnapping Merry and keeping her on board a pirate ship while trying to intimidate her into revealing what he thinks is secrete information). This book is actually about a band of pirate spies led by Captain Rand Morgan, much to the delight of all who read it.

Quinn, Julia. The Viscount Who Loved Me. Avon. (Bridgerton, Bk. 2.) 2006. 384p. ISBN 978-0-380-81557-9. pap. $7.99.
The fun of Bourne’s books lies, in part, in the wit with which the characters take each other on. Quinn is a master of that game, setting her characters at each other with verbal glee. Also like Bourne, Quinn creates characters you are happy to meet again and scenes well worth rereading. It is a toss-up which book to list as a read-alike as nearly all of the Bridgerton books are worth considering. Readers new to the series should start at the beginning with The Duke and I, but for the Pall Mall game and the mallet of death alone, I have to go with Viscount. Kate Sheffield is not the beauty of the season. That would be her half-sister Edwina. Anthony Bridgerton decides since he must marry, he might as well pick the best of the lot and settles on Edwina—to Kate’s great consternation. Trying to keep the two apart puts Kate in front of Anthony too many times, and soon Anthony turns his attentions to Kate.

Willig, Lauren. The Secret History of the Pink Carnation. Penguin. 2005. 449p. ISBN 978-0-451-21742-4. pap. $14.
The entire "Pink Carnation" series is worth considering as a read-alike, but as the entries must be read in order, Bourne fans should start here. Sharing a good eye for detail and a nice evocation of time and place, Willig’s books create an interwoven world of history and the present day. Eloise Kelley is in London doing research for her long-suffering dissertation in history. She wants to find out all she can about the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian. In the process, she discovers another "flower" spy, the Pink Carnation. If she can figure out who this spy was, her dissertation is done. Standing in her way is Colin Selwick, the attractive and obstructionist key to the archives she must access. Woven into Eloise’s story is a finely detailed second story focused on the spy game of Napoleonic France. Amy Balcourt wants to be a spy and journeys to France with the hopes of joining the league of the Purple Gentian. When she meets Lord Richard Selwick, sparks fly, but he is reluctant to reveal that he is indeed the Purple Gentian. (See LJ's original review.)

Howard, Linda. All the Queen’s Men. Pocket Star. 2000. 400p. ISBN 978-0-671-56884-9. pap. $7.99.
Taking Bourne into contemporary times, Howard’s book about CIA spies is full of daily details of the spy game and characters who spark against one another. Howard is not as lush and lyrical a writer as Bourne, but fans of the spy romance will not want to miss this story of John Medina and Niemi Burdock. The two met on a mission, one that ended with Niemi’s husband perishing during the op. Medina made sure she was OK and then disappeared into the game. Now he has returned; he needs Niemi on a mission and will stop at nothing to lure her back into covert ops. When she agrees, he takes her deep undercover and into a terrorist ring, setting her up to infiltrate the money man’s home.

O’Brian, Patrick. Master and Commander. Norton. 2003. 412p. ISBN 978-0-393-32517-1. pap. $13.95.
While not a romance, this work by O’Brian deserves the attention of Bourne fans for its focus on detail, similar setting, and O'Brian's ability to evoke time and place (he is also a fine scene builder). This first book in the Aubrey-Maturin series introduces Commander Jack Aubrey, newly minted master of the brig Sophie, and Stephen Maturin, the ship’s surgeon. Through a series of adventures and training runs, readers learn a great deal about naval history and the characters of both Aubrey and Maturin. Simon Vance reads it beautifully for Blackstone in the audio edition.

Read-Arounds:

Black, Jeremy. The Battle of Waterloo. Random. 2010. 256p. ISBN 978-1-4000-6737-4. $26.
Much of the story of Grey and Annique involves the terrifying possibility that Napoléon would invade England. Images of battles haunt Annique, and she spends much of her time trying to figure out how she can possibly stop the two nations from joint slaughter. Historical fiction fans who want to read about the reality of Napoleonic and British battles should consider this new book on the battle of Waterloo. Particularly appealing is the way Black, a military historian, focuses on the multiple layers of war, from the frontline soldiers and fodder for cannon to the generals planning the battle. Details of the battle are covered, but Black also gives deep attention to the personalities of Wellington and Napoléon, plus a finely argued summation of the import of the battle. (See LJ's original review.)

Hibbert, Christopher. The Days of the French Revolution. HarperPerennial. 1999. 384p. ISBN 978-0-688-16978-7. pap. $16.99.
Annique came of age during the French Terror, and some of that sensibility permeates the story. Readers interested in the history can do no better than this stellar summation of the people and key events of the times. Hibbert is a leading expert of era and manages to lay out the complexities of the French Revolution, provide rich historical context, and keep a strong narrative flow, at times verging on highly narrative nonfiction. Designed to be both scholarly and accessible, this is a key book to suggest to readers wanting to learn more about the history, within a frame of story.