Romance Reigns--in Books, Anyway

What author is about to claim more bestsellers since 1992 than Michael Crichton and John Grisham combined?

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Amanda Quick, who also writes under her real name, Jayne Ann Krentz.

Quick’s new romance, “Mistress,” released last week by Bantam Books, finished its first week on the shelf as the No. 4 hardcover fiction seller in the Waldenbooks chain and the No. 5 hardcover novel at Barnes & Noble Inc.’s stores. Once “Mistress” takes its place on various bestseller lists, as seems all but certain in the next few days, the output of Quick / Krentz will total 11 hit novels, compared with 10 for Crichton and Grisham.

That Krentz and her pen-named self should remain relatively obscure despite having more than 20 million books in print offers ample evidence that the romance genre, which accounted for nearly $1 billion in sales last year, lacks respectability outside its dedicated following.

“The anonymity doesn’t bother me,” Krentz says, “but I sometimes find it irritating because I find elitism irritating. People should keep in mind that they would not slander readers of horror fiction, for example, but for some reason they think they can make an assumption about the romance readership--that it’s blue-collar and uneducated, when in fact it’s squarely the middle and upper classes who are reading these books.”

As Amanda Quick, the author writes regency romances, so named because they are set during the period 1811-1820 when George IV, while still the Prince of Wales, served as the regent for his father, King George III. In “Mistress,” Quick again mines the frothy excitement of the era, the time of glittering balls and Lord Byron’s passionate liaisons, to tell the story of a woman who passes herself off as the lover of a mysterious earl in order to unmask a blackmailer.

Under her own name, Krentz, who lives in Seattle, turns out contemporary romances for Pocket Books, such as the recent “Grand Passion,” a tale of opposites attracting at a country inn in the Pacific Northwest.

In book after book, the prolific writer says she knows exactly what is expected of her. “I believe that in all genres of popular fiction, whether it’s romance, science-fiction or Westerns, you kind of know where you’re going before you open up the book. That’s part of the pleasure for the reader, to sit back and enjoy the ride.”

Among the invariables to romance is that sex, although steamy in modern romance novels, “always culminates in marriage, a commitment, a relationship that escalates,” Krentz says. “For women, that’s the way sex ought to be. The romance genre holds particular appeal for women because it celebrates female values.”

Krentz, who holds a master’s degree in library science, has also compiled and edited for the University of Pennsylvania Press a collection of essays, “Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women,” in which she and other romance writers address misconceptions about their trade and highlight the empowerment of women in their books.

“It’s difficult to overcome the resistance to the culture of the romance novel,” Krentz says. “You have to start at the university level--but change takes a long time.”

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Meg Greenfield, editorial page editor of the Washington Post, and Burl Osborne, editor, publisher and CEO of the Dallas Morning News, have been elected co-chairs of the Pulitzer Prize Board, succeeding New York Times columnist Russell Baker. . . .

The sleeper hit film of recent months, “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” makes emotional use of the poem “Funeral Blues,” written by W. H. Auden (“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone. . . .”). Quick as you can say (almost) instant book, Vintage Books has brought out a slender $6 paperback, “Tell Me the Truth About Love,” which contains “Funeral Blues” and nine other verses previously found in Auden’s “Collected Poems.” The new book was compiled by Edward Mendelson, literary executor of Auden’s estate.