By Margaret Lucke

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Today is the day when everyone’s mind—and heart—turns to thoughts of romance and love. We give people cards with heart designs to tell them we love them. Some lucky people receive roses and chocolates too.

And many people, whether they have personal sweethearts or not, pick up a romance novel to read. Of course, readers do that every day. My fingers are crossed that they might pick up one of mine.

Wait, you say, aren’t you a mystery writer? Yep. Always have been (I wrote my first short story featuring a private detective at age eleven). Always will be, or so I hope.

So, you might wonder, what am I doing as a member of the Bay Area Romance Writers?

I wondered that too when I first joined the organization. But the publisher of my my first Claire Scanlan Haunted House novel, House of Whispers, was billing the book as a paranormal romantic suspense, and I decided I should find out what that word romantic really meant. The book has a strong romance subplot. Maybe its potential audience extended beyond mystery fans. There are lots of romance readers—maybe one or two of them would enjoy a good love story with ghosts and murder mixed in. I hoped the group would help me figure out how to reach them.

Fact: In the year before House of Whispers came out, 74.8 million people had read at least one romance novel.

Those numbers sounded promising. So I sent in my dues and went to my first meeting not knowing what to expect. Dreamy-eyed writers wearing pink and sipping from china teacups with their baby fingers raised? Not on your life. These women were meeting in a brew-pub. For breakfast. Nowadays they meet mostly on Zoom, but what hasn’t changed is that they are a savvy, supportive, career-focused group. And they sell lots of books.

Fact: Romance fiction racks up $1.44 billion (that’s with a b) in annual sales. Mystery fiction brings in $728 million—just over half as much.

Sales of romance novels have shown a significant steady increase over the past five years. Being in love, it seems, is a more popular fantasy than being involved in a murder.

Fact: There are 39 subgenres and 127 tropes to be found within the romance genre.

I found those numbers on internet sites devoted to the genre. Of course, different sources provide different lists with different numbers, but the point is that the genre can accommodate almost any kind of story—including mystery.

I was surprised to learn how many types of books fall under the romance umbrella. It turns out that two of my favorite novels, Pride and Prejudice and Gone with the Wind, are romances. Books you might think of as mysteries, thrillers, suspense novels, science fiction, fantasy, paranormal are in fact romances. Okay, maybe not GWTW. Spoiler alert: This book falls short of the romance definition in its final pages.

Romance Writers of America has two criteria that a novel must meet to be considered a romance. First, a love story must be central to the plot—two people fall in love and must struggle to make their relationship work. Second, there must be an HEA ending—romance writer shorthand for Happily Ever After. Or at least an HFN—Happy For Now. Either way, the story must conclude on an emotionally satisfying and optimistic note.

But wait—even if a novel doesn’t fit that definition, it may still count as a romance. One of the official subgenres on RWA’s website (www.rwa.org) l is “novels with strong romantic elements”—books in which a romance plays a part even though major aspects of the story take the plot beyond the traditional romance boundaries.

So as long as one of your characters is romantically involved with another, or wants to be, then you too may have a romance novel on your hands. Perhaps Gone With the Wind fits after all. And the list of mysteries that qualify is very, very long.

“Romance fiction is smart, fresh and diverse … Romance novels may have any tone or style, be set in any place or time, and have varying levels of sensuality–ranging from sweet to extremely hot … Whether you enjoy contemporary dialogue, historical settings, mystery, thrillers or any number of other themes, there’s a romance novel waiting for you!” —From the RWA website

I’ll always be a mystery writer. But maybe I’ll get an HEA as an author if I let in a little romance.

I hope that today, Valentine’s Day, you’ll let in a little romance too—hopefully in real life but definitely between the covers of a good book.