Can Mr. Wrong Become Mr. Right? Choose your Favorite of Camilla's Unsuitable Suitors

The Camilla Mysteries feature perennially down-and-out former socialite Camilla Randall. I love writing about Camilla because she's so different from me. She’s an ultra-polite New York fashionista who’s a magnet for murder, mayhem and Mr. Wrong. (More about the real-life debutante who inspired her in my post "Why Camilla Randall?")

Me, I'm an old hippie who tends to use more four-letter words than I should. I live in a blue-collar small town on the coast of California. I'm partial to Crocs, sweatshirts, and stretchy jeans. My life is peacefully boring.

Camilla and I have one thing in common, though: we both make bad choices when it comes to romance. I won't say that the men in my life haven't taken me on excellent adventures, but I discovered some time ago that I'm happier living solo.

Camilla, on the other hand, is still looking for love in all the wrong places.

In the prequel to the series, The Best Revenge, we see Camilla as a teenaged New York debutante. While she's being interviewed in a trendy restaurant by the condescending reporter Jonathan Kahn, she sees her current boyfriend—a "Eurotrash" prince—with another woman, supermodel Regina (a cameo by the heroine of my comic thriller Food of Love.)

Camilla quickly gets over Prince Aldo, and proceeds to fall in love with the arrogant, but oh-so-sexy Jonathan Kahn.

But in Ghostwriters in the Sky, she's in the middle of a messy divorce from Jonathan and meets the charming L.A.P.D. captain, Maverick Jesus Zukowski, and they seem to be headed toward a happy ending.

But by the beginning of Sherwood, Ltd, Camilla's long-distance romance with Captain Zukowski has fizzled and Camilla falls for Peter Sherwood, the enigmatic, Robin-Hood-like figure who runs her UK publishing company. But she has to deal with the small problem that he may be trying to kill her.

In No Place Like Home, Camilla meets her most unlikely suitor, Mr. X, a.k.a. Ronzo (Ronson V. Zolek.) He's charming and brave, but he's a New Jersey boy and she's now living in California. 

Jonathan might look like '80s Jeff Goldblum

In So Much for Buckingham, Camilla reunites with two of her former suitors. (I'm not telling which ones: spoilers.)

I haven't decided who she will end up with in book #6, which has the working title The Queen of Staves. Maybe she'll have a whole new love interest.

Readers, if you have a favorite among Camilla's suitors, I'd love to hear from you in the comments. Vote for the one you'd like to see more of! 

Jonathan Kahn—This is how Camilla describes Jonathan at their first meeting:  "He had a profile special-ordered from Mount Olympus, a tanned, muscular body, and quantities of unruly black hair that a stylist would die to tame."

Or maybe Jon Hamm? 

Jonathan was a dedicated newspaper reporter, but he fell from grace when his success as a Geraldo-Rivera-style TV muckraker went to his head. And, um, other parts. He got caught up in a hooker scandal, and established a serious relationship with Jack Daniels. His relationship with Marva, aka Mistress Nightshade almost got a lot of people killed.Last heard from, he was drinking his way through the dive bars of Southeast Asia. 


But what if he got sober? Could he and Camilla finally reconcile? He says he still loves her.

Jimmy Smits could play Rick

Captain Maverick Jesus "Rick" Zukowski—Rick is a tall, Mexican-Polish L.A. policeman. He also writes novels (not very good ones.) He has overcome a difficult childhood and a street-gang past. He never quite recovered from the death of his wife and has some anger management issues. 

On the other hand, he's honorable and kind, with a great sense of humor, a "scrumptious smile" and "warm brown eyes." Camilla says "He had a brotherly/boy next door manner that made me feel safe."

Rick and Camilla couldn't keep up a bi-coastal relationship, and eventually he leaves her for "a sweet vice detective named Lola". 

But what if it never worked out with Lola? Could Rick and Camilla click again, now that she lives in California, too?

Peter might look like Peter O'Toole

Peter Sherwood—Peter is a charming Englishman with a murky past and a less-than-reliable moral compass. He's wiry and "good-looking, in an unkempt, What-Not-To-Wear sort of way: Oxford don meets Pirate of the Caribbean." 

It's rumored he won his publishing company in a poker game. Some people think he has an aristocratic background, but it's more likely he grew up poor in the English Midlands. 

The staff at Sherwood, Ltd. are loyal to him, but they're also aware of his faults. He has a habit of disappearing for months—or years—at a time. 

But he saves Camilla's life more than once, and protects her when everything around her is chaos. Did he really die when his yacht went down off Jamaica? 

Ronzo's a Jersey Boy like Jon Bon Jovi

Ronson V. Zolek a.k.a. Ronzo—Ronzo's Croatian immigrant parents died when he was young. He was raised in a Newark slum by his grandmother. He's a jack of all trades and full of contradictions. 

He's a music blogger for Rolling Stone who also works as a detective for a law firm. He has a Tony Soprano accent, but his manners are impeccable. He's an easy-going rock and roll guy and also an Iraq War veteran. 

He seems to have a lot of compassion for the homeless and loves small animals...or does he? He's famous for his butt tattoo of a Stratocaster guitar. Camilla finds him irresistible, and thinks he looks like Jon Bon Jovi. But is he a good guy or a bad guy? 

People tell Plant he looks like Leslie Howard

Plantagenet Smith—Through all the stories, Camilla's one constant is her best friend, the bisexual playwright, Plant Smith. Early in their friendship, they have a romantic relationship, but it doesn't last long. 

Plant was an orphan raised in poverty, but he earned a scholarship to Princeton and re-invented himself as a blue-blood by changing his name from John Smith and befriending Camilla's wealthy debutante set. He becomes an Oscar-winning screenwriter, but he seems to be as unlucky in love as Camilla, until he meets California businessman Silas Ryder. They marry, in a big wedding planned by Camilla, but the relationship is rocky.

In So Much for Buckingham, Plant finally gets his own voice and tells the story himself in chapters that alternate with Camilla's narration. He also gets accused of murder when he discovers the body of a young historical reenactor playing the Duke of Buckingham in the Old Hall at "Swynsby-on-Trent".

So readers, which one of Camilla's unsuitable suitors do you like best? Do you want to see any of them reappear? What kind of man do you think Camilla could find happiness with? 

News: I'm currently recording the audiobook of So Much for Buckingham with narrator C.S. Perryess reading Plantagenet Smith's chapters.

THE BEST REVENGE: The prequel (Camilla Mystery #3)

When Camilla Randall, a 1980s New York debutante, is assaulted by her mother’s fiancé, smeared in the newspapers by a sexy muckraking journalist, then loses all her money in the Savings and Loan Scandal, she seeks refuge with her gay best friend in California. But her friend has developed heterosexual tendencies and an inconvenient girlfriend, so Camilla has to move in with wild-partying friends. When a TV star ends up dead after one of their parties, Camilla is arrested for his murder. She must turn to a friendly sanitation worker, a dotty octogenarian neighbor and the muckraking journalist who ridiculed her--who also happens to be her boss. 

The Best Revenge is 99c until February 1st at all the Amazons. It's also available at Smashwords, Kobo, Google Play,  Apple, NOOK, and  Page Foundry (Inktera)

"…while laugh-out-loud funny, [The Best Revenge] carries a message about how we view ourselves and how others' views of us may conflict, yet make us grow."...composer Richard Alan Corson

Why Camilla Randall?

Happy 2016 and welcome to my new blog!

This is a blog for readers of my books who may not be all that interested in the nuts-and-bolts of writing that I talk about on my big blog at annerallen.com.

This blog focuses on the Camilla books, but my other novels (which sometimes include cameos by Camilla characters) will also get some attention. You can read about all my books on my books page.

People often ask me why I write about Camilla—a character who is so wildly different from me.

Camilla is a formerly-wealthy fashionista with a taste for Chanel bags, high-end designer clothes and expensive, very silly shoes (which she often finds make convenient weapons.)

Me, I'm a child of academia who is more likely to carry a backpack and slouch around in baggy jeans and Crocs.

Camilla is excruciatingly polite and always gives people the benefit of the doubt—sometimes many doubts. Me, I tend to use more four-letter words than I should, and I'm skeptical of everything.

Camilla is sort of a Bertie Wooster for the 21st century. She's a comic heroine we can love dearly, even as she stumbles into trouble once again. She couldn't get by without her best friend Plantagenet Smith, a gay screenwriter who isn't exactly Jeeves, but is generally the voice of reason as she careens off into another adventure.

I'm not sure that I chose to write about Camilla as much as she chose me. I first wrote about her in a short story I scribbled in the early 1980s, based on an interview I read in the New York Times with a debutante named Cornelia Guest. Guest has been called the first "celebutante" and was so thoroughly snarked in that article that I felt compelled to write the other side of the story.

I figured nobody could be as brain-dead and self-absorbed as that reporter portrayed Ms. Guest. (And she has proved to be a savvy businesswoman, author and fundraiser. Her book "the Debutante's Guide to Life" was published by Ballantine about 5 years after that interview )

Camilla isn't Cornelia, and I don't want to suggest my character is like her—after all, Camilla lost all her money by the time she was nineteen—but that interview inspired me to write about the debutante who became Camilla Randall, reluctant sleuth.

Camilla doesn't so much explore mysteries as stumble into them, get things wrong, and then solve them in her own quirky, and oh-so-polite way.

The number one book in the series is not the one I wrote first. That was The Best Revenge, which is now the prequel to the series. The Best Revenge was written as a comic coming of age novel, not a mystery, so although there is a mysterious death and Camilla is accused of the crime, The Best Revenge isn't a classic whodunnit.

The book introduces us to a nineteen-year-old Camilla and her best friend Plantagenet Smith, an aspiring playwright. It opens with the scene inspired by that interview with Cornelia Guest.

Like the interview, The Best Revenge is set in the early 1980s, and when Ghostwriters in the Sky—now #1 in the series—picks up on the characters in the second decade of the 21st century, Camilla is in her mid thirties and Plant in his forties.

Yes, that means I've done a little wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff there. I figure there's precedent. Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple didn't age very much over forty-something years and Kinsey Millhone only ages about one year for every five in real time.

When I decided to write a mystery series about six years ago, Camilla and Plantagenet seemed to be the perfect Nick and Nora Charles for the 21st century. They are a straight woman and a gay man who stand by each other through the upheavals of bad relationships and unfortunate romantic choices we seem prone to in our era. And like all the protagonists of the mystery genre, they find the people around them have a habit of turning up dead.

You can buy The Best Revenge right now for only 99c at all theAmazons, Smashwords, Google Play Kobo, Apple, and NOOK. It's also available at Page Foundry 

Sample Reviews:

"…while laugh-out-loud funny, [The Best Revenge] carries a message about how we view ourselves and how others' views of us may conflict, yet make us grow."...composer Richard Alan Corson

"Once I started THE BEST REVENGE, I found I couldn't put it down. An engaging Hollywood caper set during the 1980's pits a fashionable New York debutante against a hard nosed reporter who's had a bad day. I don't even know what to classify this book as -- thriller, romance, comedy, drama, whodunit, who's going to do it -- it has everything! I cannot wait to read the rest of Allen's work. And definitely put this on your summer beach reading list. You won't be disappointed. "...Regency Romance author Anne Gallagher

Buy this book if you love mystery, adventure, humor, spicy romance, female protagonists, sexually ambiguous confidantes, snippy rivals, reality-immune mothers, Feds who actually know what they're doing, reporters who don't, or the wisest garbage collector since "Dilbert". This is the first book I bought purely because I liked the author's blog post. Her writing gave me complete confidence that I would be in good hands, even way out of my normal genre. And it's probably the best story I've bought this year. My highest recommendation!...Trekelny.