Mills & Boon: Love between the covers

Mar 20 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

This year marks 100 years of Mills and Boon. Emma Pinch meets one of the women harnessing the pastel power of romance

WHAT goes on behind the respectable frontages of the moneyed Cheshire commuter belt?

The goings on down this leafy driveway in Nantwich, are as racy as red top tabloid editors have long hoped.

Steamy billiard games happen often and property millionaires and clothing tycoons regularly seduce inexperienced young beauties there.

This is where 37–year–old yummy mummy India Grey, lives with her accountant husband John and their three young daughters.

As one of the new generation of writers bringing Mills and Boon bang up to date, she has many more juicy scenes in the pipeline.

She writes in between negotiating the school run, cleaning out rabbit hutches and pounding the aisles of Sainsbury’s, and is a long way from the powdery scented grand dames with teased coiffeurs and a lap dog you associate with the brand.

“Barbara Cartland has a lot to answer for and she didn’t even write for Mills & Boon,” groans India.

“Everybody thinks there’s no sex and the only readers are little old ladies in libraries.”

India used to be an advertising copy writer specialising in brands like luxury cars and at university studied the literary greats.

But Mills & Boon was her first love and the one she returned to in her early 30s.

Her genre, Modern Romance, weaves romance around characters who board private jets where we would clamber aboard the number 30, and crumbling stately piles replace three bed semis. For her too over the top romance is an escape from the mundane.

“I was wandering round a supermarket with young children in tow, when the idea for a novel just came to me – an ex RAF fighter pilot hero and a pianist,” she says.

“She’s about to marry someone else and runs away from her own wedding and he ends up reluctantly having to look after her.

“It was snowing at the time and I had the dramatic vision of the opening scene in a snowy graveyard.

“By the time I got to the checkout I couldn’t wait to write the plot line down.”

The two Mills & Boon novels she has written contribute towards the 50 or so released every month, one of which is sold by a UK bookshop every six seconds.

Although some titles sound like top shelf men’s DVDs – they currently include the splendidly titled Virgin Slave, Barbarian King – Mills & Boon have tapped into women’s very specific fantasies like no other brand.