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Tumperkin’s Take:

Tempt the Devil by Anna Campbell: High Concept Romance

Tempt the Devil is the second book I’ve read by Anna Campbell.  The first was her debut, Claiming the Courtesan, which was the subject of some online controversy on account of a forced sex scene between the courtesan heroine and the ex-client hero (a Duke, naturally).  I was non-plussed by the forced sex but considerably irritated by the entirely charmless Duke.  Tempt the Devil, Campbell’s third novel, again features a courtesan heroine and client hero.

On the plus side, TTD is a more assured piece of writing than CTC and features a much more appealing hero.  It might, in fact, be argued that TTD is a more successful execution of the story Campbell has already told in CTC.  Less positively, TTD suffers from some of the drawbacks of High Concept Romance.

Like a high concept movie, a high concept romance novel features a strong but simple premise.  High concept can work brilliantly, but it sometimes it falls flat on its face, relying as it does on strong ideas and predictable genre conventions at the expense of plotting, characterisation and subtlety.

The heroine of TTD is Olivia Raines, The Most Desirable Courtesan in All London (my capitalisation).  Olivia was sold into prostitution by her gambler brother.  Her great secret *mild spoiler* is that she is frigid but is very good at pretending to enjoy sex,

The hero is Julian, the Earl of Erith.  Married young to a woman he loved madly, he was so grief-stricken when she died that he abandoned his two children and went to travel and become a diplomat.  When he returns to England, his children are young adults.  We are told that he recognises that he has failed them and wishes to reconcile with them before he returns to his work in Vienna.  Of course, he can’t simply spend his time with the children he hasn’t seen since they were toddlers (um – why?).  He needs to take a mistress to service his vast sexual appetite.  And that woman must be Olivia Raines, The Most Desirable Courtesan in All London.

Julian quickly discovers that Olivia is frigid (despite the fact that no-one else has ever guessed this).  Olivia is mortified and wants to bring their association to quick end but Julian persuades her to accept a wager.  If he can ‘bring her to pleasure’ she will admit defeat and remain his lover until he returns to Vienna.  If he cannot, he will publicly admit she is the only woman who ever got the better of him.

And so we have our high concept: Can the heartbroken rake make the frigid whore come and can the frigid whore make the heartbroken rake love?

There were, throughout the book, a number of enjoyable scenes.  In particular, there were a few fairly good Excruciating Moments, to which I am admittedly very partial.  However, my major gripe was that it seemed that many of the decisions the author made were driven by the high concept rather than by whether these events were consistent with the characters.  This gave the book quite an uneven feel for me.

For example, Erith is incredibly sensitive to and understanding of Olivia’s tragic history – far more than would be expected of a man of his time and class.  By contrast, however, beyond a token recognition of his failure as a parent, he appears to have absolutely no sympathy for or understanding of the children he has shamefully neglected for 16 years.

This is Erith’s internal thought-process as he pushes Olivia for details of her past:

Painful compassion paralysed him.  How could he put her through this? Her suffering was clear.  And she’d already suffered too much.

And this is his internal thought-process when he is out riding with his daughter Roma and pondering his absence from her life:

[Roma had] greeted him with surly dislike when he arrived from Vienna, and her attitude hadn’t warmed since.  He’d allowed her to get away with her open resentment since he’d got back because he felt guilty.

He wasn’t letting her go unchallenged any longer.

The generosity that Erith shows to Olivia is noticeably lacking when it comes to his daughter.  But then the problems between Erith and his daughter aren’t there to do anything other than serve the high concept.  She is an obstacle to their love, a wildcard who turns up at the protaganists’ ‘love-nest’ uninvited to prompt the showdown that serves as the book’s bleakest and most excruciating moment.

I should say that overall, and despite these inconsistencies, I did find the hero quite appealing.  The descriptions of him are delicious and he is generally full of humour and warmth.

There were also some really nice scenes.  I liked the showdown and thought Campbell did a good job of making characters’ reactions to that credible.  And if I felt that the resolution of how they would get their HEA was something of a sop to Cerberus, I was nevertheless moved by the final scene.  There was a lovely suspended quality to the final words that left me with a sort of breathlessness.  So that was all to the good.

I really can’t leave this book alone though, without mentioning that the sex scenes – which were legion – involved some of the purplest prose I’ve read in a while.  There were endless references to stallions, mares, heat, lack of control and sweating.  (What is it with sweating during sex in romances?  Hmmm, perhaps that’s a post for another day).  And when the orgasms finally came, there were the inevitable stars:

Then behind her closed eyes there wasn’t dark at all.  The midnight sky exploded with a conflagration of a million stars.  A million suns that illuminated a new world.

This new world was beautiful.  More beautiful than anything she’d ever seen.  For an eternity she hung suspended among those blazing stars.  Earth had no meaning.  She left mortality behind.  Instead she was a being of star fire and passion.

To quote When Harry Met Sally…….

……….. I’ll have what she’s having.

Jessica’s Rejoinder:

I agree with everything Tumperkin has written, and am actually quite vexed that she used the galaxy orgasm passage because I so wanted to. Suffice to say that Ms. Campbell tends to write more modifiers than I like to read. YMMV.

After my disappointment last year with the celibate courtesan heroine of Loretta Chase’s Your Scandalous Ways, I hoped that in Olivia I would find a sexually experienced heroine who was, if not completely happy with her life (that wouldn’t do), at least semi-happy in bed. But no, Olivia is frigid. And Erith, it turns out, is not “ruthless and merciless” as he is so often described. He’s a pretty good guy. So, instead of professional caliber sex between two people who think of themselves in terms of sexual superlatives (as London’s most infamous courtesan, and London’s most infamous rake, respectively) we get, unexpectedly, a metaphorical virgin and a virtuous man who won’t sleep with his mistress until she can enjoy it, too.

Like Tumperkin, I thought the checklist “1. give London’s most famous courtesan an orgasm, and 2. reunite with my abandoned child” showed a value system slightly out of whack. But I liked Erith very much, and I loved the fact that he was so quickly enthralled by Olivia and so desperate to keep her. That kind of obsession — the galloping from London to the English countryside, the spying, the dragging her to the park in a rainstorm and continuing to plead — is so rare in romances. Passion, yes, but out of control obsession? Not so much. And I enjoyed trying to figure out when Erith’s obsession turned from a sexual one into a romantic one. This was compelling enough stuff for me: being told over and over how out of character it was for the callous rake to behave this way was needlessly distracting.

I also liked the honesty that characterized the relationship between Erith and Olivia. For example, at one point he says, “What can I say? I was jealous.” And at another, Olivia, instead of engaging in a long monologue wondering why Erith is sitting so stiffly, says, “Erith, I hate to admit this, but you’re making me nervous.”

Olivia was harder to get a handle on. She was defined almost wholly by her twisted relationships with men. What did Olivia want? What did she do outside the bedroom? Who was she? When we meet her, she’s the infamous courtesan who wears pants and smokes cigars. Later she’s in the countryside, canning. Yes. Canning. Erith very quickly comes to regard her as a wonderful woman. I couldn’t see it.

Tumperkin mentions a “showdown” near the end, with an Excruciating Moment, and I liked that scene a lot, too. Not just that Olivia gave Erith an ultimatum, but his response. It’s not “Ultimatum, Acceptable Alpha Reaction to” from Chapter 3 of the Alpha Heroes Textbook (“How dare you give me an ultimatum. Good day, madam.”), but the more heartbreaking, sexy, and ultimately compelling “Listen to me. Let me help you see it my way. While I make sure your nether regions are clean. With my tongue.” Ah, Last Chance Sex.  We know it’s not goodbye, but thank heavens they don’t because it’s compelling, desperate stuff (and in this scene the desperation leaves less room for the Purple). In Regencies, Last Chance Sex is always on a chaise in a drawing room. In contemps, it’s often in a car or a foyer. In paranormals, it’s usually in midair. (Kidding!)

I liked the premise, and I absolutely adored certain scenes, but there were a number of head scratching moments, and I found it hard to press on at some points. Like Tumperkin, my overall reaction is mixed.

I see it came out in January of this year. So, let us know. What did you think?

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