Steamy Nights. <i> Check</i> : Lusty Loins. <i> Check</i> : Burning Passions. <i> Check</i> : Brainy Romance. <i> Double Check</i> : Jayne Ann Krentz is Redefining the Romance Novel by Taking the Trash Out. We Know it’s a Dirty Job, but Someone’s Got to Make Millions Doing it.

They are the lowest rung of the literary totem pole. Though their sales rack up an estimated $750 million annually, accounting for nearly 50% of the entire mass-market paperback industry, they rank below “literary” fiction, below mysteries, below science fiction, horror, Tom Clancy techno-thrillers, even Westerns. They are rarely, if ever, reviewed in the mainstream press. Some bookstores don’t carry them. Never having read one in no way disqualifies you from having an opinion about them. Everybody knows they are formulaic, they are “bodice-rippers,” they are for dizzy teen-age girls and brain-dead matrons.

They were even implicated recently in the national debate on domestic violence. In an editorial-page column of a major newspaper headlined “Why Women Stay With Abusers,” the authors’ answer was: romance novels. These books, the column alleged, give readers “the hope and thrill of being ‘saved’ by a strong, dominant male who will take care of them and make them feel strong.” And therefore lead them to overlook the fact that the strong, dominant male is socking them.

To anyone who’s followed the trends in the field in recent years, the response to the column a few days later was not surprising. Three outraged romance novelists, an editor and a romance fan club president denounced the piece, and in the lead letter, author Jayne Ann Krentz accused the columnists of making “ludicrous, unsupported statements that insulted the many millions of intelligent, literate women who read romance.”

Krentz, who also writes under the name Amanda Quick, was the inevitable leadoff hitter. She has emerged in recent years as a kind of ever-vigilant watchdog for the romance genre, ready to defend it against the misinterpretation and calumny that seem to be its birthright.

Her own romance novels emphasize strong women characters with jobs and brains and leading men who (eventually) appreciate them. Recently, she edited “Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women,” a university press collection she edited in which she and 19 other romance writers, in separate essays, attempted to explain the romance’s appeal as something other than retrograde or opiate-of-the-masses fantasy. It was the fastest selling book in the scholarly University of Pennsylvania Press’ history.

Krentz writes one (contemporary) Krentz book and one (historical) Quick book a year, and since 1992, all of them have reached the national bestseller lists, first in paperback and more recently in hardcover and paperback reprints. An educated guess puts her income in the neighborhood of $2 million a year.

But any serious writer wants respect, and Krentz, who is quite serious about her work, has been given very little. For example, although every book she writes appears on the New York Times bestseller list, the New York Times has never reviewed one of them.

But Krentz takes this generically, not personally. No romance novels get reviewed, and when they are mentioned in print at all, they are a kind of code-word for sub-literature. “In the last couple of months, I read two suspense books that used the phrase ‘trashy romance novels,’ ” she says, sitting in her sun-filled Seattle penthouse apartment overlooking Puget Sound. “It’s always something like ‘The overweight, candy-eating woman surrounded by trashy romance novels.’ ”

Krentz, generally soft-spoken, barks out a trademark laugh. “Why are romance novels called trash? They’re certainly no more formulaic than any other kind of genre fiction. Mystery authors use the same characters from book to book, and they always have the same resolution. Somehow, they never get criticized for that. The difference, of course, is that men read all the other genres and women read romances.”

There’s no doubt that Krentz’s campaign is making some headway, but it’s still an uphill battle. In January, the IKEA furniture chain ran a national advertisement that included the line “By the time our next sale rolls around, you’ll be reading novels at the beach. (You know, the trashy romance kind.)” Needless to say, Krentz sent off a letter of protest to the company and also got herself quoted in the New York Times, saying, “People feel so free to casually insult the reading tastes of millions of American women whose money they want. No one thinks of talking about trash mysteries or science fiction. Romance is as important as other genres and deserves the respect other genres get.”

Of course, Krentz’s pleasure at being offered this forum was tempered by the fact that the Times identified her as “Amanda Quick, who also writes under the name Jayne Ann Krentz.”

*

Krentz’s apartment, which she shares with her husband, Frank, a retired engineer, has spectacular views of the sound and of the Olympic Mountains to the west. It’s the kind of place a character in a Danielle Steel novel would live in. But not a character in a Jayne Ann Krentz novel, which brings up an important distinction. While to the rest of the world, romance is a fairly broad concept, to those who read, write or publish romance novels, the term means something quite specific. Steel, Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins do not write romances. They write popular women’s fiction, more specifically (in Jayne Krentz’s terminology), they write “sagas.” More specifically still, Collins and Krantz’s books are what Krentz calls “glitz . . . the story of a woman’s rise from rags to riches in a tough and glamorous world, and sometimes back again. The hero is icing on the cake.”

A romance, by contrast, focuses intensely on the relationship between one man and one woman--and not just any woman and man. The heroine of a classic historical romance, such as Krentz writes, is a more or less virginal young woman--intelligent, independent, yet somewhat innocent in the ways of the world. Krentz doesn’t consider knockout looks critical to the story. “My heroines tend to be interesting-looking rather than alluring,” she says. “I don’t like beauty to be a distraction.” (Krentz herself, who is in her “mid-40s,” is slim, with wire-rimmed glasses and medium-length, straight dark-brown hair. Today she is wearing blue jeans and a sweater. Only the pink lipstick she favors, rather like the “y” in her first name, supplies an note of the exotic or unexpected.)

The hero is a darker figure, someone stoic, controlled, powerful, apparently wrestling with some inner demons. In Krentz’s books, he is usually dark-haired; he is almost always tautly muscled.

Caleb Ventress, in her novel “Hidden Talents,” for example, is “a tall, lean, startlingly graceful man. His hair was as dark as a night in the forest, and his features as bold and uncompromising as the mountains around her. His voice had been deep but virtually devoid of any discernible emotion other than a cool civility. . . . He projected the image of a man who needed no one, relied on no one, trusted no one.”

There is an immediate attraction between hero and heroine, typically felt more strongly by the woman than the man, who doesn’t initially realize that the bond is not just physical. There are plot complications of one kind or another, and there is sex. But the book does not end until the relationship goes beyond the physical, until the hero realizes that he deeply loves the heroine and is ready to commit himself to her through marriage.

Variations of these elements can be found in Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” and, for that matter, in “Beauty and the Beast.” Growing up in the town of Borrego Springs, near San Diego, Krentz first encountered them in horse books. “They’re about a mystical bond between a horse and a little girl,” Krentz says. “It’s a powerful creature you tame with basic nurturing instincts.”

In high school (her family moved to Cobb, not far from Napa, in Northern California when she was 12), Krentz’s preferred reading material was science fiction. Having earned a BA in history at UC Santa Cruz, Krentz was working on her thesis--on the alternative lifestyle movement--for a masters in library science at San Jose State when she met Frank at his small counterculture bookstore.

Years later, when she was living in Durham, N.C., and working as a librarian at Duke University, she discovered romances and decided to try to write them. She collected rejection slips for six years, she says, because she was still learning the craft of plotting and techniques of characterization, and because the publishing industry had not yet recognized the sizable demand for romances. She sold her first book in 1979 while she was working as a corporate librarian in Torrance. It was a novel about a corporate librarian who falls in love with a man who has been hired to shake up the company. Less than a year later Krentz had quit her job and was writing full-time, turning out four books a year. They were all “category, or series, novels,” a term that refers to relatively short books, uniformly packaged and placed within a continuously issued series of paperbacks.

The most famous and successful publisher of categories is Toronto-based Harlequin Books, which began to focus on romance fiction in 1957, moved on to steady growth in the ‘60s and achieved spectacular success in the ‘70s, when W. Lawrence Heisey, a former Procter and Gamble marketing executive, took over the operation. By 1977, the company was posting $75 million in sales. and $11 million in profits. Its 1994 operating profits were $70.7 million.

Other publishers took note and inaugurated their own romance lines. The first was Dell, which bought Krentz’s corporate-librarian novel as an early entry in its “Candlelight Ecstasy” series. Krentz had been using her maiden name, Castle, and published with Dell as Jayne Castle. But when she left the company in 1982, Dell retained the rights to her name. (Dell has been exclusively entitled to publish those books, and until recently, Krentz was prohibited from writing as Jayne Castle elsewhere.) So she began using her married name and became Jayne Ann Krentz. Also in the early ‘80s, they moved to Seattle when Frank got a job in the aerospace industry.

She continued publishing successful categories novels with Harlequin, Silhouette, under many different names, developing as personal trademarks the corporate settings of her stories and humorous repartee among the characters. As the decade progressed, she poised herself to move to the next rung on the romance hierarchy, to single-title sales: that is, books that aren’t part of a name-brand series but designed to stand alone, with distinctive packaging, and marketed more on the basis of the author than the publisher.

As far back as the early ‘70s, authors such as Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, Rosemary Rogers and Janet Dailey had recorded substantial single-title successes, and romance authors Jude Deveraux, Judith McNaught, Sandra Brown and LaVyrle Spencer all became huge sellers in the ‘80s. By the end of the decade, Krentz, having built a loyal and growing following, was ready to join their ranks.

She did so as Amanda Quick.

There are two kinds of romances, each with its own tradition, conventions and fans: the contemporary and the historic. Krentz had been writing contemporaries under her own name (as she still does), and when Bantam Books agreed to publish single-title releases of her historicals, she didn’t want, she says “to give my readers the false impression that they’d be getting the same kind of book.” So she chose yet another name, Amanda Quick, inspired by the fact that there were no romance authors whose names started with “Q.”

The Quick books are generally set in Regency England, from 1811 to 1820. It was great for romance writers, Krentz says, because it was a period when “basically nothing was happening. Social issues came to the fore. And it was a turning point. There was a great reverence for antiquity, and at the same time a sense of excitement about what was to come.” Occasionally--as in her latest Quick, “Mystique,” due out in June 15 Krentz will set a book in the Middle Ages, though she confines herself to the second half of the 12th Century. “It was a mini-Renaissance,” she says. “The Moors were pulling out of Spain, Arab science was in the hands of Europeans for the first time; all sorts of things were happening.”

She does considerable--though not James Michener-level--research for her novels. In neat shelves behind her desk are arrayed some of her source materials: “History of Costume,” “Food in History,” “A History of Jewelry” and, for a forthcoming contemporary novel with a heroine who grew up in carnivals, Ricky Jay’s “Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women.”

Krentz’s own reading taste runs to works on evolutionary biology and the history of science. In fiction, she likes mysteries by Dick Francis and John Dunning (whose hero is a rare-book dealer), science fiction by C. S. Friedman, and vampire horror by Laurell Hamilton. This assortment enables her to make various analogies and comparisons, one of her favorites being that romances are going through the same mutation that mysteries did 25 years ago. By that she means the transition from pulp fiction to mainstream respectability. One sign of this change is that during the last four or five years, Krentz and the dozen or so other top writers have been published in hardcover as well as soft. This level of product translates into best-seller-list appearances and library sales, both of which attract new readers to the genre.

Another change can be noticed by examining romance covers. Cheesily realistic bodice-ripper art (known in the field as “clinch art”) had long been an embarrassment to many romance readers and writers, as well as ammunition for the books’ detractors. Where once such art decorated all romances, covers now reflect a definite hierarchy. The books of Krentz and the other top-sellers are festooned with tasteful renderings of flowers, jewel boxes, horse-and-carriage teams and the like, while the writers who haven’t established name recognition still carry the “clinch” signifier. Books by writers in the middle of the spectrum have flowers on the cover and a “step-back,” or overleaf, with a Fabio-type clinch.

Until recently, publishers believed in sending a signal to women that a particular book is a romance. “I did a pitched battle with my publisher to get my last book (“Forget Me Not”) published without a step-back,” says Ann Maxwell, who writes as Elizabeth Lowell and A. E. Maxwell and is a close friend of Krentz’s and a fellow State of Washington resident. “What they say is that you have to send a signal to women that this is a romance. But that’s not necessary anymore.

“My daughter loves romances. She’s a Ph.D student at George Washington University, and when my first book without a clinch cover came out, she said to me: ‘Finally, a book I can read on the Metro.”

*

Krentz and her like-minded colleagues have forced into the open two related questions about romances: Are they any good? Are they good for women?

To address the first, the answer depends on what you mean by good . If your definition involves such qualities as complexity, ambiguity, psychological depth, “realism” and writing that is completely free from cliches, the answer will be no. Krentz and her allies say that definition is unfair. “The problem is that when it comes to judging romances, they’re held to a literary standard,” she says. “But literary criticism doesn’t have the tools to discuss popular fiction. Popular fiction comes out of the heroic mold, where the idea is overcoming adversity, not the modern psychological mold, where the model is the character as the victim of its flaws.”

Duke University literary critic Janice Radway, whose 1984 book “Reading the Romance” was the first scholarly attempt to take the genre seriously, echoes Krentz’s opinion. “Romances come out of the sentimental tradition, whereas most people’s ideas about what constitutes good writing comes out of modernism,” Radway says. “For example, we assume that originality is good, the that complex prose is good. That kind of thing just doesn’t apply to romances.”

To the contrary, women seem to read romances precisely because they know what is going to happen. The parallel, Krentz says, is with other genre fiction. “There’s always some kind of reader expectation that has to be satisfied. Try to imagine a detective novel where the mystery isn’t solved.”

As for “complex” prose, Krentz and Linda Barlow (a romance writer who holds a master’s degree in English) argued in an essay in “Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women” that the apparent cliches of romances were themselves a virtue. “Romance readers have a keyed-in response to certain words and phrases (the sardonic lift of the eyebrows, the thundering of the heart, the penetrating glance, the low murmur or sigh). Because of their past reading experience, readers associate certain emotions--anger, fear, passion, sorrow--with such language and expect to feel the same responses each time they come upon such phrases.”

Without a doubt, there are third-rate romance writers whose books will appeal only to die-hard fans of the genre. But top practitioners like Krentz, can offer a variety of pleasures to the even the romance-immune reader. The current Amanda Quick Regency-period paperback “Mistress” has a standard-issue plot and characters who could fill in in any of her books, but it also has a continuing theme about the battle between the ancient and the modern, some interesting color symbolism, tidbits about the history of science (a particular interest of Krentz’s) and an eyebrow-raising scene set in a pornographic-sculpture garden.

The second question, about romance novels’ message for women, is more ticklish. Traditionally, women who consider themselves feminists have tended to, at best, ignore romances and, at worst, make statements such as this one, written in 1980 by Columbia intellectual historian Ann Douglas: ‘How can (romance readers) tolerate or require so extraordinary a disjuncture between their lives and their fantasies? . . . Women who couldn’t thrill to male nudity in Playgirl are enjoying the titillation of seeing themselves not necessarily as they are, but as some men would like to see them: illogical, innocent, magnetized by male sexuality and brutality.”

Krentz and the romance militants will have none of that. The key to their argument is the character of today’s romance hero. He is not, they say, a “strong, dominant male” who will “save” the heroine--and certainly not someone who will cause readers to sit still for spousal abuse. On the contrary (in Krentz’s books at least), the heroine is always presented as at least the hero’s equal in courage, determination and intelligence; in the end, she turns out to be the stronger, more active character. Just as in “Beauty and the Beast” or any number of horse novels, she has tamed the hero, domesticated him, brought him back to society. The message, Krentz says, is one of empowerment.

The message is also one of pronounced gender difference. A generation ago, when androgyny was the word of the day, such a view was anathema in feminist circles. The ideological winds have shifted, as Krentz well realizes. “Feminism is going where romance was going 10 years a ago,” she says with another of those barking laughs.

Devon Miller-Duggan is a Ph.D candidate at the University of Delaware who in April presented a paper to the Popular Culture Assn. called “Reading with a Vengeance: The Romance Novel and Feminist Critics.” Miller-Duggan sees the underlying message of romances as quite feminist. “They say that there are men interested in marrying smart, powerful women and working out their problems,” she says. “Romances have also been very important in terms of sexuality. There was a period in the late ‘70s when rape or near-rape was very common in the books. I think that was because there were such limited ways of talking about female sexual excitement. You don’t see that anymore, because romances have single-handedly created a female sexual vocabulary. Now, there’s a lot more oral sex, and much more sensual writing, with hands and fingers and skin.”

One sign of a sea change was that in 1993, the Women’s Caucus of the Popular Culture Assn. named “Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women” as one of the year’s “outstanding feminist works in popular culture.” Another was an admiring review in The Women’s Review of Books that suggested that “women who sneer at romances . . . need to recheck their feminism.”

*

Krentz suggests a walk through Seattle. She spends every weekday from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., at the word processor, turning out 10 pages. In the late afternoon, she’ll generally work out at the gym or head to Pike Place Market, her destination on this day, for ingredients for some of her ambitious cooking. She doesn’t have children, and her other main pastime is conferring and visiting with her friends, most of whom are fellow romance writers. Besides Ann Maxwell, she is close to Stella Cameron, another Pacific Northwesterner, and Suzanne Guntrum, an Indianian who writes as Suzanne Simmons and Suzanne Simms. A sign of Krentz’s loyalty to the romance community in general, and her friends in particular, is that she supplied two blurbs for Cameron’s latest book, one as herself and one as Amanda Quick.

At the market, she greets a produce vendor. He’s never read one of her books--he prefers mysteries--but at least he knows who she is.

As far as her upcoming work goes, she says she has no interest in moving out of the romance genre. “Continuing a story after marriage would mean writing about the long-term problems of a stable relationship,” she says, comparing packages of Oriental noodles. “That doesn’t interest me. But there are themes I’d like to develop.” Krentz, whose parents divorced when she was 16, says she’s now “moving into more examinations of family within a community, of community as family, of the effect on children of broken families and broken homes.”

This being Seattle, the logical next stop is a place to get a latte . Krentz suggests the Elliott Bay Book Company, a capacious bookstore that’s the hub of literary Seattle. Once there, she’s asked to indicate where and how the books of the city’s most successful author are displayed.

No display, she says with a smile. Not even a romance section. But hidden among the new releases is a copy of her latest book--a first. And a start.