Romance Fiction Has a History

Writing teams have been a pretty common occurrence in romance over the years. Modern examples like best friends Christina Lauren (Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings) and the husband and wife team of Ilona Andrews (Ilona and Andrew Gordon), have carried the torch passed by those who came before, like Laura London (Sharon and Tom Curtis) and Tori Carrington (Lori and Tony Karayianni). While men have often played a role in these teams, few pairings have featured two male writers. Enter cousins Donald Bain and Jack Pearl.

Donald Bain (1935-2017) worked in advertising at American Airlines when he wrote Coffee, Tea, or Me? (1967), the fictionalized memoir of two flight attendants, under the byline Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones. The novel was wildly successful, spawning three sequels and even a TV movie. Bain turned himself to writing full time working as a ghostwriter and writer-for-hire churning out non-fiction, celebrity memoirs, and fiction under famous names and pseudonyms alike.

Jacques “Jack” Pearl (1925-1992) had a fifteen year head start on his cousin as a professional writer thanks to a TV writing gig in 1952. Pearl left his career as an engineer and began writing fiction for and editing men’s adventure magazines. In 1961, he published his first full-length book, a non-fiction biography of General Douglas MacArthur. In the more than a decade that followed, Pearl made his name writing violent and pulpy men’s adventure fiction as well as military non-fiction. In 1974, he wrote his first historical romance, Callie Knight, set in 1920s New York. This new direction for Pearl set the stage for his next publishing adventure.

We can’t go any further in the story without talking about Playboy Press. Yes, that Playboy. Originally founded as an in-house mail order publisher of books related to its namesake magazine, it’s the one of the last places one would expect to find historical romance. But after the enormous success of more explicit historical romance in the mid-1970s by authors like Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers, Playboy Press editor Mary Ann Stuart saw an opportunity for her company. Stuart convinced her skeptical bosses to dip their toes into historical romance and in 1976 they published their first title, Proud Passion by debut author Barbara Bonham. Concern about the Playboy image made the company replace their familiar bunny logo on the spine with a more generic looking, very 70s logo consisting of what look like four letter Ss joined in the middle. 

The first reprinting of Proud Passion was enough to convince Stuart’s bosses, and Playboy jumped fully into the historical romance game, beginning by publishing five titles a month, more than any single romance publisher was issuing monthly at the time. That kind of volume required the publisher to seek out new authors who could produce quickly, such as a bright new talent named Stephanie Blake. Blake was of course known to her family as Donald Bain and Jack Pearl.

Between the release of their first title, Flowers of Fire in 1977 and the purchase of Playboy Press by Jove/Berkeley in 1982, Bain and Pearl churned out nine Stephanie Blake titles, or roughly two per year. 

Playboy had continued to increase their output during this time, from five per month in 1977 to fifteen per month in 1981. One doesn’t need to have read all of those titles to understand that quality was outstripped by quantity.

Bain and Pearl produced five more books for Jove under the Stephanie Blake name, with the last, The Devil In My Heart, published in 1990, just two years before Jack Pearl died.

Also in 1990, Donald Bain began a new project, as the co-author alongside fictional character Jessica Fletcher of the Murder, She Wrote novelizations, based on the popular TV show. This would be the first time he found fame under his own name! Bain wrote 40 books in the series before his death in 2017. He also continued a partnership begun in 1980 with former First Daughter Margaret Truman, writing or co-writing most of the titles in her Capital Crimes series, though his name did not appear on the series covers until after Truman’s death in 2008.

Donald Bain and Jack Pearl are an example of working authors who saw romance as both a paycheck and a new sandbox to tell stories in. Their historical romances will never be held up as classics of the genre, but they do represent a fascinating period where just about every publisher saw romance as big business.