Georgette Heyer

Georgette Heyer began writing to entertain her ailing younger brother, turned the story into a novel called The Black Moth, and published it in 1921. An entire genre came out of that: the Regency romance as a distinct commercial form, with its own vocabulary, its own class comedy and its own rules, is largely her invention, and everything written in it since has been working inside her house.

These Old Shades (1926) is where the sales arrived, and its release during the General Strike taught her a lesson that shaped the rest of her life. The book sold anyway, so publicity was clearly unnecessary. She refused to give interviews from then on.

The research is the least interesting thing about her, though it is formidable: the slang, the vehicles, the exact cost of things. What actually makes the books work is that she wrote comedy of manners rather than romance with period wallpaper. Her heroines are funny and frequently bad-tempered, her heroes are often ridiculous, and the plot usually turns on somebody being too proud to say one plain sentence. Venetia is the best of them, an adult novel about two clever people who genuinely like each other, which is rarer in the genre than it ought to be. Black Sheep is late Heyer and one of her driest.

She also wrote detective fiction, and it is good rather than a curiosity: A Blunt Instrument, Merely Murder and Detection Unlimited are golden-age puzzles with the same asset as the romances, which is that the suspects are funny. The Conqueror and Beauvallet (Beauvallet Dynasty #2) are straight historical fiction and are not what she is remembered for. She married George Ronald Rougier, a mining engineer, in 1925, and the couple lived for several years in Tanganyika Territory and Macedonia before returning to England in 1929. None of it shows up in the novels, which she built out of documents rather than out of anywhere she had been.