C is also for covers . . .

Yesterday I spent a lot of time scanning past covers and writing up the back blurbs so that more titles could be added to my backlist pages on my web site by the wonderfully efficient Heather of We Write Romance. That was a real trip down memory lane – looking at older books and reading snippets here and there. Reminding myself of stories I’d partly forgotten. Characters I hadn’t revisited in way too long. And like meeting up with old friends, as soon as I glanced at a page or two I was deep in ‘Oh I remember . . .’

The covers were fascinating too – the styles that changed and developed over the years. The look so similar and yet so very different from the covers we see now. There were the covers I hated – like the one for The Golden Thief where I had described the hero as looking like Robert Redford (the human one – not the cat!) at his glorious, golden best. And instead I got Robert Redford’s older, fatter rather lecherous cousin.

Or there was the cover to Man of Shadows which I loved because for once in their lives (and believe me it wasn’t all that common in 1987) the people then responsible for selecting the artwork actually read my descriptions of my hero and heroine and came up with some thing that looked like the way I'd described them.

Here's my hero - Jordan Sumner – “. . . this man’s face had character, rather than the superficial veneer of handsomeness. . . The touch of steel was there all right; it showed in the tightness of the muscles of his jaw and was emphasised by the way that the thick brows were drawn slightly together as if his habitual expression was a frown rather than a smile. Under the straight nose, the firm mouth looked as if it rarely curled into anything other than the hard line that made it look as if his lips were clamped shut against some biting comment. . .

In spite of his thinness, he was broad at his shoulders and chest under a heavy sweater and he held himself with a sort of easy, well knit power that spoke of trained muscles and, before illness had taken its toll, a perfect physical fitness. Crisp hair of the shade that would bleach gold-blond in the sun, but was now the rich colour of liquid honey, was cut close against his well shaped head, the no-nonsense severity of its style clearly meant to impose some order on a rebellious tendency to wave if it grew and inch or so longer."

And, even more unexpectedly, my heroine Madeleine, who describes herself as “average height, average build, with perhaps a little too much curve at breasts and hips for the current fashion” actually has those curves rather than appearing as a stick insect, no matter how she’s described inside the book.

I loved this cover when it appeared – it fitted my characters and the setting of the book perfectly. I even tried to find out who the cover artist had been – I would have loved to have a copy of the cover as a print on my wall – but even though I asked, the search drew a blank.

But looking at it again yesterday reminded me of a long ago trip to Toronto (my sister lived there at the time) and a visit to Harlequin offices at Don Mills where I talked to the head of the design team – I remember telling them how much I loved the Man of Shadows cover. And how much the cover to Jester’s Girl – with a hero in a flat cap and a tweedy jacket – with a yellow handkerchief in the breast pocket! – had made me laugh. I couldn’t help wondering why some Canadian artist had really believed this was just what a young man – a man who was in fact a satirical comedian – would wear to walk on the Yorkshire moors with his girlfriend. That girlfriend too looked old enough to be his mother . . .

Some of these covers are now like historical documents, detailing the style and the images that appealed (more or less!) in the past decades of my writing career. So it’s rather appropriate that my 50th title which is coming out next month in June should also be one of the first titles to appear in the freshly launched ‘new look’ covers – which are not so much a total new look as a reworking of the same theme. I’ll talk more about these tomorrow but I will say that with the cover to The Sicilian’s Red-Hot Revenge, I have very definitely struck lucky – as lucky as I did with Man of Shadows – not a flat cap or a handkerchief in sight! Not all that much clothing in sight really!

And Vito Corsentino is very definitely just the way I imagined him.
Perhaps I might stand a better chance of hunting down a copy of this cover . . .