Lynne Simpson

Many people who read my blog regularly are probably already familiar with Chekhov’s Gun, but for those of you who aren’t, here’s a quick summary. Anton Chekhov, the famous Russian playwright and short story author, once said, “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” I’ve often heard it paraphrased that if you introduce a gun in Act One it must go off by Act Three. The “gun” can be anything — a magical ring in a fantasy story, a dreadful secret someone is keeping, whatever.

As I was reading an old Carla Kelly Regency romance last night, I realized that she’d violated Chekhov’s Gun Dictum, and it prompted me to come up with an addendum, courtesy of a term borrowed from the incomparable Paul Stanley. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Love Gun Dictum. If problems with the hero’s penis are a major element of the story, then, by God, that bad boy had better “go off” by the end of the book. We don’t have to have a graphic sex scene or a long discussion about it, but we must be given some indication that there’s been a resolution.

In Kelly’s Miss Chartley’s Guided Tour, the story begins with the hero leaving the heroine at the altar, and all we know is that he woke up on his wedding day covered in blood and was too freaked out to go through with the ceremony. The heroine is given no explanation; he simply disappears. When we pick up with the heroine eight years later, she’s traveling to a new teaching post, but things get complicated when she rescues a young runaway from a Bow Street Runner who’s trying to catch the boy and return him to his evil uncle. The two of them flee into the countryside and meet up with a young Spanish girl and a wounded veteran from the Napoleonic War. What’s this got to do with The Love Gun Dictum? Heh. Well, the book goes on a long digression before the hero and heroine ever meet again. In fact, I wondered if the author might be going to set up Miss Chartley with Hugh, the veteran, but no such luck.

Anyway, the four of them travel together to seek refuge with the boy’s other uncle, who turns out to be Miss Chartley’s former fiancé, Matthew Bering. Of course, the big question on the reader’s mind at this point is how soon we will learn WTF Matthew was doing on the night before his wedding that caused him to wake up drenched in blood. We don’t have long to wait, which surprised me.

The hero tells the heroine that a group of his friends and acquaintances, one of whom just happens to be the nephew’s EEEVIL uncle, threw him a bachelor party and brought a fourteen-year-old prostitute for him to shag while they watched. (Aren’t you glad, ladies, that you aren’t living in Regency England?) Unfortunately, Matthew was unable to rise to the occasion, and when the girl laughed at him, he slapped her and made her bleed. He passed out after that, and the next morning, he woke up covered in blood, lying in bed next to the very dead prostitute.

The story up until that point had been very light and humorous, almost reminiscent of Patricia Veryan’s frothier works. When the hero dropped this little bombshell, I came very close to putting the book down. It’s not that I don’t like darker, edgier stories — quite the contrary — but it seemed such a non sequitur that I completely lost my immersion in the story. But morbid curiosity won out, so I kept reading.

It turns out that the hero is impotent, which he believes makes him unfit for marriage. He didn’t kill the prostitute, but his embarrassment over his impotence led to an ugly scene in which the villain killed her. The hero doesn’t remember many details of that night, however, and for years he has blamed himself for the girl’s death. The only reason he temporarily marries the heroine near the end of the book is because he believes the villain is going to kill him in a duel the next morning. (You don’t want me to explain all the twists and turns that led up to this, believe me.) When he returns from the duel alive, he tears up all the paperwork from their hasty wedding and tells the heroine she’ll be better off without him because he is unable to have sex with her.

Okay, so the love gun has become central to the hero’s and heroine’s future happiness. They LUV each other but are being kept apart because the gun can’t/won’t go off. On the night before the heroine is to leave his life forever, she goes to his bedroom and, in the space of a few lines, resolves everything. There’s no money shot, physically or emotionally. The gun which has been hanging menacingly on the mantel since Act One was mysteriously vamoosed sometime at the end of Act Three and we’re told — by a narrator or perhaps a stagehand — that the gun probably did go off, somewhere. Gah!

I know that there are no graphic sex scenes in traditional Regency romances, and I wasn’t expecting one here. But don’t introduce the guy’s penis as a central element of the plot and then run away from doing anything meaningful with it.