Die for Love (1984)

 


What's Love Got To Do With It

Desperate to get out of the small Midwestern college town she's now living in, Jacqueline Kirby signs up for the first east coast conference Coldwater College will underwrite expenses for...but when she arrives at the Historical Romance Writers' Convention, she realizes it's not just Prisoner of the Zenda anymore. The absurdity of her surroundings appeals to Jake's zany's sense of humor, and she quickly makes friends and enemies alike. But when a reporter who has been threatening to unveil dirt on the biggest agent in the business drops dead, murder and mayhem aren't just threatening the lives of the attendees, they're interrupting Jake's new book. And she won't stand for that...

I always think MPM is at her best when she's lampooning her own fields. Up until now, she's done plenty of vicious poking at academics and archaeologists. Now she turns her gaze on the cutthroat world of publishing, and it is a thing of complete hilarity. The artistic descriptions of the limp pink atmosphere of the 80s romance genre is glorious.

And of course, I always love Jake Kirby mysteries. Beautiful, sophisticated, sarcastic, intelligent, and independent, Jake leads her love interests, unwilling protegees (unwilling on her side: she'd love to deny her motherly instincts, but she can never quite shake them), and readers a merry dance. When I grow up, boy, do I want  to be Jake Kirby.

But I think the biggest takeaway from Die for Love, however, is MPM's challenging of the status quo. She drags, kicking and screaming, into the light the hypocrisy of the romance genre. Then (and even now, sometimes) the genre might have claimed to portray sexually liberated women, but the use of rape to titillate its audience and its shackling of the definition of a happy ending to marriage are questionable at best. Jake shakes it's head, and wonders why sex for heroines has to be justified by love, at the very least? Why can't women have sex just for the fun of it? That's not something she can ever be accused of--Jake has a string of handsome lovers that she loves ad leaves.

In the wake of the romance novel association scandals of the past years, Die for Love reads like a prescient study of the things that trouble us even today.

Rating: *****

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