Mills & Boon: 'I Read These, So You Don't Have To'

In a somewhat over-generous application of the ‘don’t knock it until you’ve tried it’ principle, I chose three readily available books from my local library and set to work reading them. And it was work all right. The first of these texts was called The Cowboy and the Princess, in which Princess Delfyne goes to stay on the (gigantic) ranch owned by one of her brother’s college friends, Owen Michaels. Based on the three books I loaned, this ‘traditional name meets weird name’ principle would seem to be used quite often. The unrealistic job situation, which usually serves to make money a non-issue, also applies regularly, or at least the characters will do jobs that are so vaguely defined that no one can pick up the details. You can make up your own stupid plots easily using these rules: Brett and Alicia fall in love in the world of high fashion, Hypatia and Oliver fall for one another while producing a film, or Faith and Antoninio get together while starting a magazine. Y’know, stuff that would never happen.

Anyway, The Cowboy and the Princess proceeds incredibly predictably, as Delfyne and Owen (or was it Chad, or Brad, or Ramon?) are immediately attracted to each other, and feel like they can’t act upon it for most of the book. Meanwhile, there’s the danger of the press discovering that the Princess of (wait for it…) Xenora is on the ranch. This is an old plot, which you can see done well if you rent the film Roman Holiday, with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn. Here it is not done well, which can be proven by reading sections out loud, and trying not to laugh. Try the tagline: ‘To Lasso A Princess’. Or for actual content, try (and this is picked pretty randomly from many, many examples) this line from the end of Chapter 8: “Now was the time to make memories. It was the only time”.

Indeed. I’ve never met anyone who went out with a princess. The only person I can think of that did do so, without themselves being royal, is former PM Gordon Brown, who, in an eventful university career, dated a Romanian Princess, lost vision in one eye playing rugby and was elected Rector while still a student. Or put another way, a Prime Minister often derided as dull had a more interesting young life than any Mills and Boon book. The Cowboy and the Princess ends happily ever after, by the way. Next up was Beauty and The Billionaire, which begins with a beauty called Sinclair Mahoney (and wasn’t that the name of Steve Guttenberg’s character in Police Academy?) waking up in bed with a billionaire, called Hunter Osland. She tactfully leaves before he wakes up, ‘glancing one last time at the opulent cherry furnishings’ before going. But lo and behold she meets him again when he just happens to buy the company she works for! This sort of thing happens all the time in Govan, by the way.

The Beauty and the Billionaire initially promised to be a laugh riot of ridiculous ‘cherry furnishing’ type detail, but no, it didn’t live up to that bizarre start. Where The Cowboy and the Princess relied on notions of duty to separate the leads, here everything could have been solved if Hunter just asked Sinclair out. Instead he makes innuendo-laden comments at every opportunity, and whisks Sinclair off to Paris on a business trip. Works out fine though, because they live happily ever after, blah blah. Here’s the real problem with these books: they’re written to a formula, sure, but more than that, they’re thoroughly bland. Lots of books can transcend a formulaic plot, but here it seems that there’s some rigorous editing keeping the language simple and the phrases clichéd. It’s a corporate problem, and as the company has around 3 million regular readers, it’s in their interests not to play around with their template too much. If the authors can crank out 180ish pages of plot for a Mills and Boon, they’ve at least the seed of a talent that can be better, and more enjoyably, applied writing what they want to write.

Anyway, these reservations aside, I took up the third and last book, somewhat wearily. The Consultant’s Italian Knight is set, oddly enough, in Aberdeen General Infirmary, a place I’ve actually been, but – oddly enough – didn’t recognise here. Lots wrong with this book too, but my main quibble was that the female lead never says "Fit like, Mario?" to the male. Spoiler: here’s the last line: “ ‘And for always, amor mio, I will love you,’ he said huskily as he drew her into his arms and kissed her again”. That really is the end.