Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 96

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Popular Culture Review

or virtue may be endangered, but only villains, and nutle villains at
that, die.
Ross has dealt with this major transgression from Regency
expectations by focusing on the period and curtailing Regency slang, as
if simply writing an historical mystery. Further, she has reversed
the Regency pairing of romance and mystery: lovers and flirtations
take a back seat to detection, as they do in all mysteries except that
sub-genre, romantic suspense, in itself something of a hybrid of gothic
atmosphere and mystery plot.
Because mystery heavily dominates the Regency form, the
mixture holds together, yet it seems less a blend then a crime novel
dropped into the era. Ross seenw to intend a Regency sensation novel
along the lines that Anne Perry has developed in her Victorian crime
series. Yet it is difficult to create a new Regency framework while
using details that evoke the one already established, such as
fashionable dandies and arranged marriages.
Steven Hawking, in A Brief History of Time, has defined a
successful theory as one which not only describes what has occurred
but also applies to what happens next. The prediction of hybrid
theory is that fantasy will continue to merge other forms, adapting
them satisfactorily into its resilient framework, and that Regencies
will continue to be adapted by a variety of forms, with varying
success dependent up>on compatibility. Ross's novel, the first in a
projected series, is some evidence that this is happening. Further,
these examples will encourage other hybrids between popular
frameworks; horror frames, for instance, are already being exploited
by science fiction, fantasy, and literary realism. Such hybrids will
fail when the stronger frame is not given its due, and succeed, as do
the novels of Wrede, Edgerton, Williams, and to some extent, Ross,
whenever a well-defined and flexible frame is allowed to shape a
narrower or more nebulous one.
University of Nebraska, Kearney

A.B. Emiys

Works Cited
Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique. 2nd Ed. Bowling Green, Ohio:
The Popular Press, 1984.
Edgerton, Teresa. Goblin Moon. New York: Ace, 1991.