Loretta Chase has a lot to celebrate this year. Not only is she wrapping up her Difficult Dukes trilogy with My Inconvenient Duke, but she’s also marking the 30th anniversary of the crowning jewel in her oeuvre—and one of the most beloved romance novels ever written—Lord of Scoundrels. Chase has become somewhat of an expert on inconvenient scoundrels and scandals over her 38-year career, but perhaps her greatest contribution to the Regency romance canon is her ability to craft the perfect conversation.
My Inconvenient Duke is a fun, chatty tale that leans in to the talents of Chase, the Lady of Scoundrels and Queen of Conversation. This best friend’s little sister, coming-of-age, second-chance romance brings the story of the Dis-Graces, the stars of the Difficult Dukes trilogy, to a satisfying conclusion.
The Dis-Graces—three dukes—inherited very young, with no rules and all their freedom. “They could have been nice, sober individuals,” Chase says from her home in Worcester, Massachusetts, “but they chose to be wild. They’re rebellious, you know, like Rebel Without a Cause—and they don’t care about the rules because they’re dukes. They do whatever they want. It was a good way to explore the whole concept of someone being at the top of the tree in terms of class in England, with nothing holding them back.”
“If there isn’t enough banter, I hear about it from my readers.”
In this last act of the Difficult Dukes trilogy, Lady Alice Ancaster and Giles Lyon, Duke of Blackwood, finally realize their happy ending. It’s no small feat: Alice disapproves of Giles’ reckless behavior, and one of his fellow Dis-Graces is her older brother, Hugh. And Hugh made Giles promise years ago to not ruin Alice’s reputation by pursuing her.
“I think it might have been easier [for Alice and Giles] if they had not been tied together by Hugh,” Chase says. Giles, the most responsible of the trio, is told he must choose between his friends and Alice. “And at a young age, he chooses the friends. Had he not chosen them, would he have been with Alice? Yes, I think so, and maybe sooner with less difficulty. But then I wouldn’t have had a great story to write.”
The sibling dynamic between Alice and Hugh, and the practically lifelong relationship both siblings have had with the Dis-Graces, gave Chase a lot of feelings to dig into for My Inconvenient Duke. “One of the things I loved about writing this book was it gave me an opportunity to explore the relationship among the men who were friends when they were kids, and how the heroine has responded to [the friendship],” Chase says. “I never had brothers, so I’m trying to put myself in her shoes. What would it be like for me if I had to deal with this? My brother—I love him, but he’s really acting like a jerk. And I don’t know whether it’s his friends helping him be a jerk or if he’s doing this all on his own . . . and also being attracted to one of the friends and knowing he’s a jerk like the others? How do you pry the guy loose from his friends?”
A lifelong Bay Stater, Chase was born and raised in Worcester. And although she can work from anywhere, like most authors, she prefers working from home. “All my materials are here—my library is here and that’s something that’s hard to transport,” she laughs. She’s got a cheeky sense of humor, which is shared by many of her heroines, including My Inconvenient Duke’s Alice. Filling that home library are biographies and books on social history, architecture and places she’s written about, as well as mementos from her travels. Her favorite biography? We Two by Gillian Gill. “It was so well written. It read like a novel and it had a perspective on Victoria and Albert that I had never had from any other materials I’ve read,” she says. “It was one of the least depressing books about them that I’ve ever read. But just beautifully written, and containing so much interesting information.”
She and her husband, whom she whimsically refers to online as “Mr. Chase,” travel to London and England as often as they can. “There’s nothing like having a sense of place,” she says. “Sometimes it might be 10 years before it becomes the basis of a book. A lot of the book Last Night’s Scandal is set in Scotland in this particular castle from a trip from many years prior. When you’re actually there you’re experiencing the place. The smells, the sights, the sounds, the voices. I think it enhances the writing.”
My Inconvenient Duke is set in 1832, just before Victoria ascends the throne. After nearly four decades of writing about the Regency and Victorian eras, Chase should certainly be considered an expert in British history. Research comes naturally to her as an English major who cut her teeth in the professional realm as a college administrator and freelance video scriptwriter before selling her first manuscript, Isabella, in 1987. “I’ve always written historical romance,” she says. “I was particularly interested in 19th century literature—novels, plays, short stories, that sort of thing. When I started writing romances, this just seemed to be the best fit for me.”
Chase counts among her favorite historical authors Jane Austen and Charles Dickens “because the quality of their writing is just so fabulous,” but she’s had lots of other influences as well. “P.G. Wodehouse is brilliant, and I would love to create plots the way he does and be as funny as he is. I recently read a wonderful biography of Frances Trollope and I’ve read her nonfiction. Again, there’s an inspiration for you because you get the tone of voice from the period, and she was writing in the 1830s, so all those things feed it.”
“You can’t follow trends, because by the time you get on the trend, maybe they’re on to the next thing.”
Those historical details fuel the plot of My Inconvenient Duke. “You have to be pretty drastic these days to make a scandal, don’t you?” Chase says. But for the upper class, in 19th-century Britain, scandal was as simple as leaving the house without a chaperone. “It was easy for scandal to happen in those days. And that’s great for us writers, because we’ve got so much material to work with. It also forces you to be creative if you’re trying to make your hero and heroine get together.”
Another key historical constraint helps shape Chase’s writing, and the genre of historical romance overall. “There was not a lot of entertainment, so people had to entertain themselves,” she says. “You’re sitting with a group of people, and the person who’s witty and interesting is the popular person. That’s the entertainment.”
That’s where banter comes in, where the exchange between the hero and the heroine needs to be witty and clever, with subtext the reader can pick up on. “In the books I write, there’s a lot of buildup in the first part of the book, and there’s sexual tension,” Chase says. “And how do you convey that? Through conversations and banter. So there’s an undercurrent and there’s the conversation. If there isn’t enough banter, I hear about it from my readers.”
Writing heroes and heroines that are equally matched is a perennial goal for Chase. “I want the women to be strong. I want them to stand up to the men and I want the men to prove they’re worthy of this strong woman,” she says. “I want it to feel inevitable that they’re going to be together because it’s the right mix.”
Chase’s readers have appreciated her well-matched couples throughout her career, through nearly five decades of changes in trends, norms and times. Her first published novels were traditional Regencies, which echoed the language and sensibilities of Austen and the subgenre’s modern godmother, Georgette Heyer. “We were not supposed to go in the bedroom; we were supposed to close the bedroom door,” she says. “And you had to be careful about your language. A few years into my writing, Signet started publishing these sort of super-regencies, which were a combination of the traditional short regencies and longer historical romances. So you have a bigger story where you’re going to open the bedroom door so there could be sex scenes—and it sort of took off.”
There was another major trajectory shift in historical romances in the early 2000s, one that Chase attributes to novelist Amanda Quick. “She took her sensibility of writing contemporary romantic suspense and applied that to a historical romance,” says Chase. “And she made this wonderful, compact but funny, interesting and suspenseful form of historical romance. I think it caused a shift in the way many of us were writing, and it opened opportunities for so many people.” Not only did it give readers a new style of historical romance to read, it presented authors a new lens from which to write it.
Though Chase’s work has certainly evolved with the times, she’s always written what she loves and what she knows rather than writing to trends. “You can’t follow trends,” she says, “because by the time you get on the trend, maybe they’re on to the next thing. Basically what I’ve seen in my career is just change. Things change. Things go in and out of fashion.”
Her favorite book of her own is typically the one she just wrote, because it’s finished and she knows she wrote the best possible book she can. But the covers are a different story in terms of favorites: While they’re all lovely, dreamy and romantic, Chase is most fond of her current series. “I think HarperCollins has done a really nice job with my covers, particularly for the dukes. The women feel alive, and the colors are beautiful,” she says. “I particularly like the cover they did for My Inconvenient Duke because they were able to use the actual building that I used in the story.”
When asked which of her characters most closely reflect her, she laughs. “My heroines are often the woman I would like to be because they’re usually fearless. They’ll take risks I would never have taken. They’re brave in ways that I’m not brave. I guess part of it is like my own fantasy—if I could be someone, I would be this woman.”
One of the doyennes of the Regency romance, Chase is witty and smart and, like her characters, she’s adventurous in spirit. And while you’re reading one of her novels, that adventurous spirit beckons to you, too.
Photo of Loretta Chase provided by the author.
