Men Writing Romance

Men Who Write Romance- Ken Casper (1941-2021)

Posted on by Steve Ammidown

Covers of Harlequin NASCAR romances To The Limit (2005) by Pamela Britton and Speed Bumps (2007) by Ken Casper.

I’d originally planned to do a reel or two on the Harlequin NASCAR line, a weird and under-remembered early 2000s partnership between two iconic brands. While your first instinct might be to think that this was some oddball attempt to woo male readers, it really seems to have been more synergistic than that; at the time NASCAR had a growing female fanbase who their studies showed were more likely to be readers than their male counterparts, and Harlequin had a readership who enjoyed new plots, not to mention their desire to sell more books. After a pair of Pamela Britton NASCAR themed books in 2005 sold well, the companies agreed to a more formal partnership in 2006, with NASCAR’s logo appearing on the covers, and book sales happening both on their website and at race events. The Harlequin NASCAR was in the mold of traditional Harlequin Romances, so closed doors and no drinking or drugs were the rule. The series lasted for about five years and 91 books, wrapping up in 2010.

Edgar Wallace’s 1931 title The Man at the Carlton, reprinted by Harlequin in 1959. (image via eBay)

And all that is fine and interesting, but it’s not why I’m here today. Scrolling through the list of authors, I came across a name I’d never seen before. Ken Casper was listed as the author of Speed Bumps, published in May 2007 and book 14 in the series. Regular readers will not be surprised to learn that I hit the brakes so hard I spun and the roof flaps deployed. To the best of my knowledge, male names had disappeared from Harlequin covers in 1959 with Edgar Wallace’s The Man at the Carlton, after which the publisher began its exclusive romance reprinting deal with Mills & Boon. Clearly more research was necessary!

According to his 2021 obituary, Ken Casper was a New York native whose Air Force career took him around the world until he finally settled in San Angelo, Texas. He retired from the Air Force in 1997 as a Colonel. In San Angelos, he tried his hand at writing a few years before retirement. He wrote that his critique partners challenged him to write a romance story, and when his early efforts earned him a prize, he submitted it to Harlequin. A Man Called Jesse was published as a Harlequin Superromance in October 1998. Like many of the men who’d written romance before him, Ken adopted a pen name (K.N. Casper) that didn’t immediately give away his gender.

Ken published 15 more Superromances between 1998 and 2005, many of which used his adopted home of Texas as a setting. With the publication of Speed Bumps in 2007, he switched to using his real name on his Harlequin titles, a practice that he used for the next 8 books with Harlequin as well as the 7 indie published romances and mysteries at the end of his career.

Ken Casper didn’t get rich off romance or sell millions of copies or get a book made into a movie. But like all category romance authors, he did the work and acknowledging that work matters. Since the 1990s, the romance community has often leaned on the idea that “romance is by women, for women”, but people like Ken Casper, David Wind, and Tom Huff serve as reminders that genre within the romance genre has always been more complicated than that.

I did make an Instagram reel about Ken Casper and not the NASCAR series, in the end. Enjoy, and give me a follow if you liked it!

Men who Write Romance- David Wind

Posted on by Steve Ammidown

David Wind’s author photo as it appears in Love Lines (1983)

It was not all that uncommon for romance authors of the 1980s to collect pseudonyms like they were baseball cards. The legendary Jayne Ann Krentz has used at least 7 pen names (that I know of) over the course of her 40 year career. Sandra Brown and Nora Roberts have each used at least four different names. 

The reasons vary- until relatively recently, some publishers required authors to adopt a pseudonym that then was owned by the publisher, giving them free reign to continue putting out books under that name long after the original author left. In other cases, authors like Krentz and Roberts have adopted new pen names to signal to readers the type of content the story will contain- for example, readers of Amanda Quick (Krentz) know they’ll be getting a historical, and J.D. Robb fans (Roberts) know they’re in for a futuristic suspenseful ride.

Now best known for writing mysteries and science fiction under his own name, author David Wind used at least four additional names during the early days of his career. His first book, By Invitation Only (1982), was a contemporary romance published under the name Monica Barrie. From there he published a historical, Whispers of Destiny (1982) as Jenifer Dalton, and A Love So Fresh (1984) as Marilyn Davids.

Covers of By Invitation Only (1982), Whispers of Destiny (1982), and A Love So Fresh (1984)
Images via Goodreads

According to an interview Wind gave to Rosemary Guiley for her book Love Lines (1983), he set up his contracts so that he could actually take the pseudonyms Monica Barrie and Jennifer Dalton to any publisher, so long as the books did not compete with each other. In the end, Wind relied more on the Monica Barrie name than anything, publishing at least 20 books compared to just two Jennifer Dalton titles. Wind also mentions a fifth pen name, Marilyn Davidson, as being exclusive to New American Library, but I can’t find any record of a book published under that name. 

Like his fellow author Tom Huff, David Wind seems to have enjoyed the novelty of being a male writer in a female-dominated genre. In addition to his interview with Guiley, Wind wrote regularly for Romantic Times and made conference appearances. In Love Lines he is quoted as saying,

 “It’s usually writers who are ashamed of what they’re doing who don’t want their pseudonyms revealed. I’m not, because I like to entertain people. Writing romances hasn’t stopped me from selling mainstream. Even so, I plan on staying with romances- I enjoy them.”

David Wind in Love Lines (1983), page 240

The last Monica Barrie book with a major publisher was 1987’s The Executives, a Silhouette Special Edition. David Wind turned to independent publishing in the 2000s, and has self-published 30 books on his own. In 2013, Monica Barrie’s 1983 title Cry Mercy, Cry Love was republished independently as well. And that’s where I thought the story got interesting. Let me explain.

Cry Mercy, Cry Love in their 1983 and 2013 editions.
Images via Goodreads.

These days when authors get the rights to their books back (in the case of most category romances, it happens a set amount of time after the last time the major publisher put out a version of the book), it’s not unusual for them to republish the books on their own. In the case of the Monica Barrie books, they are not mentioned on his website, but on a separate one specifically for Barrie. This itself isn’t that unusual- you’ll find separate sites for Nora Roberts and J.D. Robb, for example. It goes back to the idea I mentioned earlier of separating genres to make it easier for readers.

Where I became intrigued in this case was in the author biography, where Monica Barrie introduces herself with a brief description including the mention that she is the wife of David Wind. 

Screenshot with headline "About Historical and Contemporary Romance Author Monica Barrie"
Description from Monica Barrie’s author biography

David Wind’s biography mentions that he is married to his wife Bonnie. Both Bonnie and Monica are identified as geriatric social workers. It seems pretty clear that these two are linked in more ways than one.

Image of biography from David Wind’s website

So what does this mean? Is Bonnie responsible for the Monica Barrie books, either as author or co-author, and David is now giving her more credit for the work? Or is this just a bit of fun on David Wind’s part to give Monica a back story? My guess is that it’s the latter, although it wasn’t unusual to have husband/wife teams in the 1980s, and there have been examples of republished novels in other genres suddenly appearing with two named authors where it had originally been one. In academia, we’ve seen the #ThanksForTyping phenomenon for decades, where academics will thank “my wife” for doing  typing, editing, translating, and even research on published works. So it could be a bit of the former as well. 

In the end, it makes no nevermind what the real story is when it comes to David Wind and Monica Barrie. Authors have license to do whatever they like with their pen names and works. But as an archivist and researcher, I’m always digging for the untold or even just slightly obfuscated tales of how things come to be. I can’t help myself! Do you have a favorite example of authors being revealed to be someone, or someones, other than who they wrote as?

Men Writing Romance- Tom Huff (1938-1990)

Posted on by Steve Ammidown

A short time back, friend of the blog Katrina Jackson raised a question that comes up every once in a while- what’s the history of cishet men writing cishet romance?

It’s a good question, with no simple answer. Most of the cis men whose names I’ve come across use(d) female pseudonyms for their romance books, and historically, only a few have owned up to doing that work. Some have obfuscated this past work by crediting books to their female partners, and some have denied any attribution to them. And in many cases, we’ll never know because the records were sparse to begin with. The rise of self-pub and indie publishing has made this a less common practice today- you pretty easily find men writing historical and inspirational romance using either their own names or male pseudonyms. That definitely wasn’t always the case.

One of the reasons is that the world of paperback originals during the mid-20th century was a mercenary game. Big names aside, working authors- male or female- would write anything for anyone if they thought it would make them a buck, and acquired and shed pseudonyms the way some of us change socks. Sometimes this name-hopping was due to publisher contracts, and sometimes it was a way for the author to keep their distance from work that they may not have wanted to be linked to them. In the case of a publisher-enforced pseudonym, that pseudonym may have then been used by multiple authors over decades (Nancy Drew author “Carolyn Keene” being the most well-known example). All of this means that it can sometimes be nearly impossible to identify or verify who wrote what, so be sure to take everything in these posts with a grain of salt.

Quick side-note: In the world of romance, Harlequin was particularly notorious for its enforcement of pseudonyms. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that Harlequin authors were allowed to take their pseudonyms with them to work with other publishers.

To start this exploration (which I now realize is going to take multiple posts!), I want to start in the 70s, with one of the best-known male writers of romance, Tom Huff (1938-1990). Huff began his writing career in the late 1960s, adopting the pen names Edwina Marlow, Beatrice Parker, and Katherine St. Clair to write gothics for multiple publishers. He even put out two under the androgynous moniker T.E. Huff. But in 1976, as the historical romance boom begun by Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers was well underway, Huff jumped from gothics to historicals hoping for success. And he found it. Adopting the name Jennifer Wilde, Huff published Love’s Tender Fury in 1976 for Warner Books and it sold like gangbusters. Reports were that it went through more than 40 printings in its first five years, and if the cover of this edition is to be believed, more than 2 1/2 million copies.

Cover of Love’s Tender Fury by Jennifer Wilde (Tom E. Huff). (Image taken from Goodreads)

A second Jennifer Wilde book, Dare to Love, arrived in 1978, and spent 11 weeks on the NYT paperback bestsellers list. Jennifer Wilde was on a roll, but few knew her true identity.

And then in 1981, something rather rare happened. Huff had become friends with Romantic Times publisher Kathryn Falk, and in the second issue of her brand new periodical, he revealed himself to be Jennifer Wilde. While he told Rosemary Guiley in Love Lines that this had always been something of an open secret, this revelation could have been career suicide- what if women decided to stop reading his books because he could be seen as “inauthentic”? What if he were to now get pigeonholed as a romance writer, unable to get work writing anything else?

Instead of running from his association with romance fiction, Huff leaned into it. He made public appearances, and even took part in a 1981 article in Life Magazine about romance authors, with photographs by Mary Ellen Mark that truly have to be seen to be believed. He’d go on to publish six more books as Jennifer Wilde before his death in 1990, all of which sold well. For a time, he even wrote the “men’s column” for Romantic Times, and earned a Lifetime Achievement Award from the magazine in 1988.

Tom Huff had just turned 52 when he died of a heart attack on January 16, 1990. His works have been republished numerous times since his death, including a series of very confusingly attributed Open Road Media editions. This one for Marabelle, the only book he wrote under his full name, is listed as “Jennifer Wilde writing as Tom E. Huff”.

Huff’s revelation as a male author inspired several other to do the same. Next time, we’ll turn again to Rosemary Guiley’s 1983 book Love Lines to learn more. Stay tuned!

This post by Forth Worth history blogger Mike Nichols is a goldmine of biographical information about Tom, including pictures from his high school yearbook! Definitely take a look.