“The success of Charles’ storytelling is that she draws the reader into the narrative romp and the luxuriating passions while also promising the connection of souls that we also desire.“
It’s been some time since I have found books so entertaining as The Will Darling Adventures trilogy by KJ Charles. [1] Though new to me, she’s been writing for a while now. This title is the first I’ve read of hers and I am looking forward to reading more.
A m/m romance trilogy in the spirit of Golden Age pulp fiction. It’s the 1920s and tensions are rising along with hemlines. Soldier-turned-bookseller Will Darling finds himself tangled up in spies and secret formulas, clubs and conspiracies, Bolsheviks, blackmail, and Bright Young Things. And dubious aristocrat Lord Arthur ‘Kim’ Secretan is right in the middle of it all: enigmatic, unreliable, and utterly irresistible.
I’d only discovered Charles, who has been writing for no small while, this past year after seeing a sharply written, witty retweet of hers on Twitter. And although I do not typically read in the romance genre, Reader, I followed her immediately and started in with Book 1 of the series.
Slippery Creatures opens things in a mostly certainly lively fashion. The 1963 movie Tom Jones (with Albert Finney in the titular role) came to mind immediately. [2] Specifically, the famous eating scene. Here is Wook Kim’s 2012 summary of it:
“Bawdy, boisterous, and full of heart, ‘Tom Jones’ won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director (for Terry Richardson). In the film’s perhaps most famous scene, the raffish but utterly charming Tom (Albert Finney) shares a tavern meal with a Mrs. Waters (who, unbeknownst to Tom, just may be his mother). The dinner begins innocently enough, but their furtive glances soon turn into almost incandescent gazing: even a village fool can see where this is going. It’s a simple two-shot scene, oft parodied, that fleshes out, both literally and figuratively, the sometimes eye-winkingly genteel descriptions in Henry Fielding’s picaresque novel.” [3] The young Finney, I imagine, would be a lovely Will Darling, the rough and tumble, murderous WWI soldier turned bookseller in Creatures. Opposite him, as the charming and devious Lord Arthur “Kim” Secretan, I’d cast Matthew Goode. In fact, for all that Creatures is set in England in the 1920s after the so-called Great War, I kept harkening back to my grad school days when I seriously considered shifting from my focus on medieval lit to 18th-century stuff. Tom Jones, yes, and the roaring, bawdy William Hogarth, “English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic, and editorial cartoonist.” (Wikipedia) Not surprisingly, Tom Jones author Henry Fielding was a friend.
Hogarth’s engraving of
The Idle ‘Prentice return’d from Sea & in a Garret with a common Prostitute, 1747
Creatures has that kind of joie de vivre, raucous, broadly adventurous, and terrifically sexy. Here’s the quick intro from Charles’ website:
Will Darling came back from the Great War with a few scars, a lot of medals, and no idea what to do next. Inheriting his uncle’s chaotic second-hand bookshop is a blessing…until strange visitors start making threats. First a criminal gang, then the War Office, both telling Will to give them the information they want, or else. Will has no idea what that information is, and nobody to turn to, until Kim Secretan—charming, cultured, oddly attractive—steps in to offer help. As Kim and Will try to find answers and outrun trouble, mutual desire grows along with the danger. And then Will discovers the truth about Kim. His identity, his past, his real intentions. Enraged and betrayed, Will never wants to see him again. But Will possesses knowledge that could cost thousands of lives. Enemies are closing in on him from all sides—and Kim is the only man who can help. A 1920s m/m romance trilogy in the spirit of Golden Age pulp fiction.
It took me a bit to get into Creatures as I am, admittedly, a reader with serious attitude. I almost put it down as a no-go, in part because the character of the bookseller is such a worn trope. I follow Charles on Twitter, though. She is sharp, witty, opinionated, and writes a damn good tweet. So I skipped ahead a chapter or two and, oh wonderful! Creatures indeed resurrects the Golden Age of pulp fiction in that it is action-packed, clever and funny, and moves the reader along right proper. What’s unique and particularly intriguing and frankly, appreciated, is its eroticism, queer specifically.
Charles notes on her Content Warnings web page that all of her “full-length novels contain on-page sex and swearing.” On-page, oh my, yes. (Though the swearing in Creatures escaped me, I have to admit. Then again, the F-word is so frequent in my own natterings that I hardly see it.) The sex is explicit, occasionally quite raw, and matter of fact. It is also historically accurate in that Charles keeps the mindset of her characters in their time period. On that Warnings page she states that her “books are historicals and thus set against a background of Georgian/Victorian/20s British attitudes to sex and gender. I’ve mentioned homophobia where it’s explicit.”
Will Darling and Kim Secretan cannot be out though Secretan’s proclivities are known to certain colleagues. Secretan has a fiancée–the delightfully solid Phoebe Stephens-Prince–and Darling a good friend, the pragmatic and smart Maisie Jones. So their couplings are intense but always guarded. It adds to the sexual tension that they are so but also brings painfully to mind how even now the LGBTQ community lives, or is forced to live, in society’s substrates.
“Gassed”
Imperial War Museum, London, John Singer Sargent, c. March 1919
Like the current pandemic, Death doesn’t simply hover. It is quite real. Former soldier Darling isn’t simply a victim of war. Killing remains a visceral component of his psychology and behavior. Secretan, whose younger brother served as his war surrogate and died in his place, and who is himself something of what was referred to in 1920s London as a Bright Young Thing, is made melancholy and driven by the loss. Yes, there is sex for these two, but the sex is as much driven by a mortality-wrought aphrodisia as it is their own desires.
Charles describes The Will Darling Adventures series as a romance trilogy. She promises a happy ending, as she does for all her works. Will and Kim are of that mode, but they are also of an older tradition, that of romantic friends. I rather like the Wikipedia description of this:
“A romantic friendship, passionate friendship, or affectionate friendship is a very close but typically non-sexual relationship between friends, often involving a degree of physical closeness beyond that which is common in the contemporary Western societies. It may include for example holding hands, cuddling, hugging, kissing, giving massages, and sharing a bed, without sexual intercourse or other physical sexual expression.”
In Slippery Creatures the emotional tenor of a romantic friendship is just aborning as is the sexual romance. The success of Charles’ storytelling is that she draws the reader into the narrative romp and the luxuriating passions while also promising the connection of souls that we also desire. Quite a feat for a novel with such a breezing style and relative brevity.
NOTE: This essay is an updated version reviews I originally published on my artist blog, Dante’s Wardrobe.
© J.A. Jablonski 2021. All rights reserved.
ABOUT BOOK THOUGHTS
“Book Thoughts” is an intermittent column within my blog. The essays are not so much book reviews as book responses. I like to converse with and around the books I read.
HOW TO CITE THIS POST
Jablonski, J.A. (2021, Aug 16). KJ Charles |The Will Darling Adventures | Pt. 1. Blog post. J.A. Jablonski (website). https://jajablonski.com/2021/08/16/kj-charles-will-darling-pt1/
IMAGE CREDITS
Covers of The Will Darling Adventures. From KJ Charles Website.
KJ Charles logo. From KJ Charles Website.
William Hogarth, The Idle ‘Prentice return’d from Sea & in a Garret with a common Prostitute, 1747. Public domain via Wikipedia.
SOURCES
Disclaimer: As KJ Charles sells/promotes her books via her own website, I do not link to the Bookshop.org listings. See the first link below.
[1] Charles, KJ. (2020, 2021). The Will Darling Adventures. (Slippery Creatures, The Sugared Game, & Subtle Blood). KJC Books.
[2] Tom Jones film info via Wikipedia. Info on the original book (also from Wikipedia), The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by Henry Fielding.
[3] Kim, Wook. (2012, Jan 5). Top 10 Memorable Movie Eating Scenes. Populist column from Time.com.
