For those who, like me, can’t get enough of books about pirates at the moment, I’m delighted to share an author collaboration to list queer pirate books (of a variety of ilks) in one place.
The timing has been chosen to celebrate International Talk Like A Pirate Day on Tuesday – always a joy, especially in the workplace…
I hope you find some new authors and books to enjoy!
My books are rather like buses – you wait for ages without one, and then three come along almost at once. My steamy Regency – described by one five-star reviewer as “gloriously carnal” – is out today, available at Extasy Books, Amazon, and other online retailers.
One glance and his past life was history
Leander Talbot’s life changed forever when his wife died. He is now reluctantly venturing back into society, knowing that, as the Earl of Ockley, he must marry again to produce an heir. But he can’t bring himself to the sticking point. Instead, he spends his time evading the matchmaking mamas of the ton.
The dark and dangerous Duke of Arden is an infamous libertine. It is said that he seduces innocents, and there are even more sinister tales whispered of his predilections. Only the wild young blades who form his retinue know the truth, but he is shunned by all save those wishing to court notoriety.
A chance meeting brings Leander into Arden’s orbit. Ignoring the warnings about Arden’s intentions, Leander is drawn into a seductive world of sexual indulgence. There, he finds the freedom he craves from his overbearing family. By the time he suspects Arden might have ulterior motives, it may be too late to save his reputation—and his heart.
The Museum of London has summarised perfectly London’s pleasure gardens of the Georgian and Regency years – part art gallery, part fashion show and part brothel.
The gardens were designed purely for entertainment, featuring whimsical architecture, miniature waterways, and extensive shrubberies that provided opportunity for all sorts of visitors. The gardens swiftly developed a reputation for being debauched places, with one visitor wishing “there were more nightingales and fewer strumpets”.
Below: Vauxhall Gardens 1809
That didn’t stop the cream of society from visiting, though! Anyone who was anyone might be seen at one, promenading in their finery, dancing, listening to concerts (Handel was practically artist in residence at Vauxhall Gardens in the 1730s and 1740s), and eating and drinking in the booths where art by Hogarth and others was displayed,
As the disgruntled visitor’s complaint suggests, the entry fee designed to exclude the riff raff had little effect on the number of prostitutes who congregated at Vauxhall, and who, by all accounts, found it a lucrative hunting ground. The main walkways through the trees were lit by lamps, but there were also the dark walks. These were unlit and so provided cover for any number of private activities. Early in the eighteenth century, magistrates enforced the lighting of the coyly named Lovers’ Walk in an attempt to deter wanton behaviour. Their insistence sounds rather Canute-like to me – one might as well try to hold back the sea as to deter lovers from seeking places to be private together.
You might think it’s a perfect place for clandestine assignations, and that’s precisely what the rakish Duke of Arden concludes in my forthcoming book The Earl’s Awakening. It’s released on 8th September and can be pre-ordered from Extasy Books, Amazon, or your favourite online bookseller.
Vauxhall Gardens in 1751, showing the extent of the shrubberies and the opportunities for assignations.
To mark the release of A Star to Sail By, I’m undertaking a blog tour. I’m very grateful to all the bloggers who are so kindly hosting me and am plucking out one at random to link to the Rafflecopter that’s running with an Amazon voucher as its prize. Pop on over to Archaeolibrarian – I dig good books if you’d like to enter.
A Star to Sail By (next book, I’m going with a title that doesn’t take as long to keep typing out!) has also received a lovely review from MM Romance Reviewed – “A compelling story…entertaining with some action and danger, hurt/comfort, and some real emotional growth from Crispin…An unexpectedly wonderful read.”
I’m thrilled that I can finally share Billy and Crispin’s rum-fuelled adventures with you!
Out now at Amazon.
Abducted by pirates, a naval officer is torn between duty and desire.
All Crispin Merrick has ever wanted is to be a captain in the Royal Navy. But once the war ends, the navy places him on half-pay, and he’s reduced to serving on a merchant ship. When pirates board the vessel and force Crispin to join their crew, his dream has never seemed further away.
Billy loves the freedom he has as a pirate. As master gunner aboard the most beautiful ship to sail the seas, he couldn’t be happier. But then his captain tasks him with guarding the naval officer they’ve taken on board. Billy loathes the navy. He hates its officers even more.
Forced to spend time with Billy in his tiny cabin, Crispin is increasingly fascinated by the pirate. He’s still fighting the attraction he feels when disaster strikes the ship. Beset by danger, Billy and Crispin have to work together to survive. But how can they trust one another when they detest everything the other stands for?
The book contains material some readers may find upsetting. Full details are given on the contents warning page of this site.
I love autocomplete and the random paths it takes me down. When I was researching pirates, I found some excellent books on the subject, but I also – of course – used Google. I started to type in a perfectly reasonable question that autocomplete turned into Did pirates wear socks? Another I stumbled across recently was Can dragons blow out candles? The sort of thing that would never occur to me, and I love that there are people out there thinking about these important issues.
When I looked into Caribbean pirates’ footwear before writing the book, I found opinions are split. Some say they wore sandals and others say their feet remained bare. The sandals side argue that climbing the rigging in bare feet would have been very uncomfortable; the barefoot people argue that it would be safer to climb with bare feet.
Looking at various engravings of famous pirate captains from the time, they’re variously wearing shoes or boots, but there are often bare-footed pirates around them. And given that I have a bit of a horror of feet, studying them in engravings is not something I undertook lightly! I’m still not quite certain on pirates’ footwear. The one thing I am (almost) sure of is that pirates did not wear socks.
A Star to Sail By is released on 30th August and is now available for pre-order.
They really don’t make maps like they used to. I love this one from 1751 of New Providence Island in the Bahamas. As well as the aforementioned pines – were they really so much higher than ordinary pines? – there’s the cautionary ‘This part of the country is little known’. For an island that’s about twenty-one miles long and seven wide, it seems to lack something of a spirit of adventure.
I’m also not at all sure what’s happening to the ship in the top left-hand corner. Is it blowing up? On fire? Or simply firing its guns? Regardless, I think every map would be better for a little more random illustration and commentary.
The reason I’ve been thinking about New Providence is because that’s where part of A Star to Sail By is set. I’m thrilled to report that MM Bookworm Reviews has given the book a lovely 4.5 star review: “I really liked this book as I didn’t know what would happen next…I would definitely recommend this for readers who love historic adventure romance on the high seas.”
The book’s available for pre-order at Amazon. And if you’re not already familiar with MM Bookworm Reviews, it’s a site to bookmark – as well as reviews, it has a comprehensive listing of forthcoming m/m releases organised by month, and a handy reminder of each day’s releases.
Now back to persuading myself not to draw exploding ships on my ipad screen when I have my maps app open…
With Crispin and Billy’s adventures coming out on 30th August, it seems a good time to share the moment Crispin first lays eyes on Billy.
A pirate who had been examining one of the deck guns looked up at the pirate captain’s shout, long dark hair falling around his face. He was even more disgraceful than the other pirates, something Crispin had not thought possible. The man was half-naked, his chest and arms filthy with grime and soot. He wore blue knee breeches, tighter than the petticoat breeches most of the pirates favoured, and even they bore dirty stains. At least the crimson sash around his waist looked clean, though Crispin noted uneasily the two pistols thrust into it. The pirate moved towards his captain, his stride long and easy. He was leanly muscled and taller than many of the other pirates. Almost as tall as Crispin himself, he thought.
“Take this and check it against the contents in the hold,” the captain said, thrusting the manifest at him.
Disreputable as this pirate was, he could evidently read. That fact was unexpected enough for Crispin to look more closely at him as he turned away from his captain, and the world seemed to shift around Crispin. His face… He had seen that face before, worn by a marble carving of the Archangel Gabriel. It had been so perfect he had known it to be the sculptor’s attempt to express the ineffable, finding his answer in a beauty this earth could not contain. But it did. That statue’s face was here and alive, if rather dirty. The high cheekbones, clean jawline, straight nose and lips full enough to cause impure thoughts formed a face that transcended the dirt and grime. Crispin almost forgot it belonged to a pirate until the man, perhaps feeling Crispin’s scrutiny, looked at him. His grey eyes were cold and hostile, like the Atlantic before a storm.
Crispin glanced away, no longer caring if doing so was a sign of weakness. The sculptor had mistaken the angel he was carving, for the man standing on the deck of the Eurydice was Lucifer. There could be no other explanation for such beauty to be subverted in the service of evil and vice.
Along with so many people, I have an ongoing fascination with breeches. I consider myself something of a connoisseur of Regency-era gentlemen’s nether garments, for which I blame many happy hours reading Georgette Heyer and the way Mr Beaumaris’s grandmother is surprised he can sit down in his skin-tight pantaloons.
I am a big fan of buckskin breeches with top boots. Buckskin breeches were hard-wearing and comfortable to wear, the leather stretching and moving with the gentleman wearing them, and most fashionable, adopted as they were by so many sprigs of fashion. They could also be – and often were – skin-tight,
Ian Kelly, in his biography of Beau Brummell, describes them as highly sensuous to wear. I can’t comment on that, but they certainly look rather wonderful, framing the gentleman’s thighs with top boots and cutaway coats.
And that’s before getting into – so to speak – silk knee-breeches for evening wear (see left). Both Perry and Jack in my Carnevale series spend a lot of their time modelling these in the late eighteenth century. When they’re clothed, that is. Ahem.
Moving swiftly on, before I began working on my pirate book, I was unfamiliar with the fashions of sailors in the early eighteenth century. I’ve ended up quite charmed by petticoat breeches, so named because when the man wearing them is standing still, they truly look as if he’s wearing a petticoat. They were fastened at the knee with ribbon, buttons or a garter. Of course, sailors had a particular need for clothes that didn’t impede them, with all that climbing of the rigging and so on, but in my book, as Billy is the ship’s gunner and rarely has to engage in all the other sailor-type chores, he spends some of his life in tighter knee breeches. It’s the best of both worlds.
Above: the pirate Edward Thatch (also spelled Teach), better known as Blackbeard, modelling what look to be petticoat breeches while fighting Royal Navy lieutenant Robert Maynard.
And some final Regency breeches to share with you, modelled by the rakish Duke of Arden. They may not be a completely accurate historical representation, but I think they’re rather impressive.
The Earl’s Awakening will be published by Extasy Books on 8th September.
I’ve been having far more fun that should be legal messing about with pirates for my next book. And the Royal Navy, a little. A Star to Sail By is set in the Caribbean in 1715, during the Golden Age of Piracy. I was working on it during the heatwave we had in the UK earlier in the summer, which helped enormously in imagining what my characters were going through!
I’m looking forward to sharing Billy and Crispin’s adventures with you as they yo-ho-ho across the seven seas, drinking copious amounts of rum as they go.
Abducted by pirates, a naval officer must choose between duty and desire.
All Crispin Merrick has ever wanted is to be a captain in the Royal Navy. On half-pay after the war, he’s reduced to serving on a merchant ship. When pirates board his ship and force Crispin to join their crew, his dream has never seemed further away.
Billy loves the freedom he has as a pirate. As master gunner aboard the most beautiful ship to sail the seas, he couldn’t be happier. But then his captain tasks him with guarding the naval officer they’ve taken on board. Billy loathes the navy. He hates its officers even more.
Crispin is looking for a way to escape when disaster strikes the ship. Beset by danger, Billy and Crispin have to work together. But how can they trust one another when they detest everything the other stands for?
Please be aware that this book contains material some people may find upsetting. Detailed content warnings can be find on the content warnings page on this site.
MM romance novels 