The Inherent Subversiveness of Romantic Suspense

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I was fourteen when I smuggled home a Regency romance from my high school library. Given how conservative rural East Texas remains, it couldn’t have been anything too racy, and yet it was enough that when my mother discovered it, she lectured me on romance novels being the female equivalent to Playboy and that Jesus was watching. In the late-90s evangelical church obsessed with purity culture, this was a dire threat and I shelved the book. I realized it was safer to browse the mystery aisle, because while what consenting adults did could lead me right down the road to perdition, murder was somehow okay.

The idea of female sexuality and pleasure has been controversial all the way back to man’s fall from grace aided by Eve and whatever metaphorical significance you want to attach to that forbidden fruit, paralleled with the mythology of Lilith. It’s perhaps summed up best by the apocryphal quote attributed to Oscar Wilde that goes something like, “Everything in the world is about sex – except sex. Sex is about power.” Viewed through that lens, it’s no wonder that romance novels have been derided almost from their beginnings, and yet they remain—by far—the best-selling genre in the world.

So from a purely materialistic standpoint, an author who can successfully layer in the necessary plot arc and not just write the components for a steamy love scene but write them well, could broaden the potential target market appeal for their crime fiction nominally centered on a murder. From an artistic point of view, intertwining plots on a murder investigation and a romance somehow complement each other as well as chocolate and peanut butter. When done correctly, they can deepen stakes and layer additional conflict, add vulnerabilities and potentialities for betrayal, offer opportunities to humanize the main characters, and provide opportunities for them to trade wants for needs. Done poorly and – well, we’ve all seen works seemingly stuffed with random subplots in an effort to inflate word count. Only so much flour can go into a roux to stretch it before the taste is ruined. And from a physical point of view, the sensations of lust, fear, and rage (sweaty palms, increased heartrate, dry mouth, hyper-awareness of the other person), are largely similar, differentiating themselves only in how we mentally frame the context.

This isn’t why I mingle steamy romance with my murder plots, however.

Through high school, I sprinkled my love of murder mysteries with the evangelically sanctioned romances featuring low-heat, all white, mostly privileged casts, generally Amish, North American Frontier, or Regency. The usually sheltered women in these stories were often rescued from a bad situation and/or their feelings by a man and marriage. This, in particular, grated on me, that I needed to be saved from my emotions or circumstances by a man whose gender meant that he knew better than I did, and especially once I was in college and then the military. So I put romance aside and reveled happily in murders and gore, unreliable narrators, and twists that kept me binge reading past midnight.

In in the summer of 2020, a new critique partner and I swapped manuscripts. While her pages were high-heat contemporary romance, I didn’t find anyone there waiting for a man to save them, but diverse characters, the concepts of consent and mutual pleasure, and a woman who knew exactly what she wanted. As a researcher by trade, I noted how my friend used the steamy scenes to not only further the plot, but to deepen the interiority and the conflict.

Sure, in the eyes of the evangelical denomination I still attend, those scenes technically described sin, given that it was between unmarried (although thoroughly consenting) adults—but was it anymore of a sin than the murder, blackmail, assault, and machinations in the pages I sent my friend? Yet romances are often disparaged and insulted as fluffy, no-plot reading for bored housewives, while mysteries are legitimized and even tacitly approved within nearly all social circles. As I critically analyzed and reexamined a religion and ideology that has been routinely rocked by sex scandals, the realization grew that perhaps it was the female empowerment now often de rigueur in modern romance which represented such a threat to the men in power and the others who helped maintain the status quo. 

When my friend returned my manuscript to me, she noted that I wasn’t writing the women’s fiction I thought I was, but actually romantic suspense. She pointed out how I could use romance beats and sensory details to heighten the tension and introduced me to more romance writers, who—despite my insistence that I didn’t write in their genre—adopted me and welcomed me with open arms. Through them, I discovered mainstream and historical romances that I could learn from to also enhance craft in mystery and suspense, twisting the knife a little deeper with the relationship between characters a way to not only advance their own arcs, but give them more incentive to survive and succeed in a crime fiction plot. 

There is, of course, no requirement for open door love scenes in crime fiction, not even in romantic suspense or romantic thrillers. But while I hate to use absolutes like always or never, I can almost guarantee that I will never write a suspense novel or thriller without them. Because somewhere out there is someone who might have heard their whole life that those high-heat scenes are bad for them, bad for their marriage, bad for their religion, and when they’re asked what they’re reading, I want them to be able to say, “Oh, just a mystery,” and no one ever be the wiser.

Steamy romance, especially featuring female empowerment and consent, is subversive by its very nature. It’s what makes the femme fatale trope in crime fiction so dangerous—and yet such an endearing trope. Including the physical act within a a book about a murder is just an extension that would never have been tolerated by publishers a century ago. If great fiction is about pushing the envelope and exploring boundaries, it’s one more reason why we ought to recognize its value and be including it.

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