Wanted: A Gentleman, by K.J. Charles

[Ulysses]

Wanted, a Gentleman
By K.J. Charles
Riptide Publishing, 2017
Five stars

“You’ve the world before you. It’s quite a big place, once you can raise your head and see it.”

Oh, how good it feels to give five stars to a book after having just read two books back-to-back that were so bad I couldn’t even publish the harsh notes I wrote about them. K.J. Charles has saved me again, and indeed she has accomplished this with what I think of as the most difficult of all m/m genres to pull off: Regency Romance.

I’m one of those odd men who adored Georgette Heyer as a youth. I devoured her historical romances, set in the Regency period, when I was a fretful teenager in the 1960s, retreating into romance as a happy place where I could forget my troubles. As an adult I read all of Jane Austen, marveling at the emotional restraint with which she expressed such powerful feelings. This is a period I know.

Ms. Charles is a very gifted writer, and this book proves it. The Regency setting is hardly new to the gay romance world, and yet she has managed to take it and turn it on its head with one twist: Martin St. Vincent, the main character, featured in period dress on the cover, is black. And a former slave.

But Charles doesn’t sensationalize this, not in the least. No embarrassing shadows of “Mandingo” here. She creates a story that is deeply rooted in the social history of its period, but also sends shivers of recognition into the world where we all sit right now, with its strained conversations about topics that we, today, would call white privilege and male privilege. The fact that both Martin and his catalyst in the story, the novelist-cum-marriage-advertiser Theodore Swann, are gay is both central and sidelined in the story. Being gay is what they are, its impact on the plot has only to do with the connection between the two men. That is the unseen romance in the story—the one that only we are allowed to witness.

A very young heiress runs off with a man who has wooed her through Theo’s advertising bulletin. Martin must find her and save her. Theo is the only one who can help him. Seems pretty obvious, and yet…the action gets all mixed up with the plots that Theo fabricates for his successful romances, written under the nom de plume of Dorothea Swann (which in itself has modern echoes in the world of m/m romance). Theo’s emotions are no less complicated than Martin’s, whose skin color and history are a lens through which he can’t help but see the world. Martin and Theo are so at odds with each other, so completely different, that their being thrown into complicity with each other comes off—quite marvelously—like a Dickensian version of a 1930s road trip movie. It is all so carefully thought out, so beautifully pitched to pluck every emotional heartstring in the reader, that it just swept me along, even as my modern rational mind tried to figure out where the author was going to take us.

Now, I am of that small group of gay romance readers who has decided I could do without the sex bits. But I have to credit Charles that, even there, she does a fine job, keeping up the period tone as she writes things that nobody in Regency times ever thought of putting to paper.

My hat is off to K.J. Charles. It is not only as good as I was told it would be, but better.