by Dave Dentel

It’s no secret that one of the most popular genres of film and fiction these days is romantic suspense. (My cable lineup has at least two channels dedicated to it.)

And I’ve already confessed in an earlier post how I enjoy watching Hallmark-style mysteries with my wife. It’s true as well that I’m a fan of the once hugely successful (and now sadly passé) paperback line known as gothic romances.

My own debut novel was styled in part as an homage to these pulpy stories that enjoyed their heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. Now that I’m working on a sequel, I thought it might help the creative process to research how this cultural phenomenon got its start.

What I learned (as if you couldn’t see this coming)—was shocking.

Crime and Passion

From what the lit professors tell us, all crime stories that feature suspenseful elements and characters who pursue some sort of romantic attachment trace their lineage to a 1764 work by Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto. The novel is generally considered the first work of gothic fiction.

What you won’t hear from the experts is that The Castle of Otranto is about as fun to read as the prep instructions for a colonoscopy.

Sure, it’s sensational. Walpole peppers his narrative with all manners of supernatural occurrences, from the giant helmet that crushes his son on the second page to the heavenly manifestation of Saint Nicholas in the final chapter. It’s almost as if he’s relying on shock value to make up for the shallow characters, stilted dialogue, and culturally unrelatable tropes the author says he borrowed from medieval mystery tales.

(Raise your hand if you’ve ever read Chrétien de Troyes just for kicks.)

Literary Precedent

Despite these drawbacks, by all accounts Walpole’s novel was a tremendous success. More importantly, it inspired imitators.

One reason historians say The Castle of Otranto captured the interest of readers is that it offered a livelier alternative to the standard fiction of the day. In the edition I read, Walpole unravels the fate of three families, with the help of ghosts, a bleeding statue and talking skeleton, in about 85 pages. Contrast this to Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740), which takes 500 pages to instruct young ladies in the proper way to deal with overeager suitors.

So what’s the connection between, say, Murder, She Baked and a groundbreaking 18th-century gothic novel? Consider these motifs, which arise straight out of Walpole’s tome:

• A plotline driven by relational dysfunction.
• A crime that a seemingly ordinary person must help expose.
• Secret identities.
• Hidden passages (or clues).
• Settings integral to the narrative (whether a castle or a small-town bakery).
• Moody atmosphere.
• Protagonists who defeat evil in order to find love.

We take these elements for granted today, but there’s no doubt that without them our entertainment would be much duller. So hats off to Walpole, the writer who defied convention by reviving literary devices from half a millennium past. Turns out, we’re still enjoying them 250 years later.