Vanessa Kelly: Bromance is in the air
Vanessa Kelly, author of How to Plan a Wedding for a Royal Spy, shares her love of the bromance … and how she went full-on bromance in her new release.
Vanessa: The bromance. Although the pop culture meaning of the term is fairly new, men have been hunting, brawling, drinking, playing sports and watching each other's backs for millennia. Given the dangers that faced the average male back in, say, the Middle Ages, having a loyal-to-the-death friend made sense — especially when facing enemies wielding deadly weaponry. Nowadays, male bonding is more likely to take place during less lethal pursuits like playing poker, tossing around a football, or engaging in marathon sessions of Call of Duty on a ridiculously wide-screen TV.
Bromancers often have platonically enmeshed lives on the professional level, too. Take, for example, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, considered by some to be the uber-bromance couple. Then there's the George Clooney/Brad Pitt combo, which more than one wag has described as Clooney's longest-lasting relationship (let's hope his marriage to Amal Alamuddin proves the smartasses wrong).
And we can all point to great fictional versions of the bromance like the iconic relationship between Spock and Kirk, which manages to transcend even death (thank God for Vulcan mind-melds). Or how about Shaun and Ed from Shaun of the Dead? Even after poor Ed turns into a slavering zombie, Shaun doesn't give up on him. Instead of burying a hatchet into his best bud's skull, which would be the smart move, Shaun sets him up in a cozy little tool shed in the backyard, where they can still hang out and (from a reasonable distance) play video games. That, my friends, is a stellar example of true manly love.
But I think the all-time-classic bromance is Sam and Frodo from Lord of the Rings. The movie version in particular is guaranteed to reduce even the most hardened cynic to tears. Sam's unquestioning willingness to risk everything to help Frodo is a pure and selfless form of love and the very definition of the bromance. Remember that heart-wrenching (and endless) scene on Mt. Doom when the world is exploding in flaming boulders and great rivers of lava? When Frodo tells Sam that he'd rather be with him at the end than anyone else, I'm reduced to mush every time.
But even though I'm a fan of the bromance, I'd never written one. In my current historical romance series, The Renegade Royals, with heroes who are the illegitimate sons of England's royal dukes, my guys tend to be loners. Not so with my new book, How to Plan a Wedding for a Royal Spy, which features a full-on bromance. The fact that I was binge-watching the TV series Strike Back while I was developing the outline for the book might have given me an extra nudge in the bromance direction.
OK, it gave me a big nudge, and if you've ever watched Strike Back, I think you'll understand why. The characters of Damien Scott and Michael Stonebridge, a pair of heroic British special ops agents, provided me with a lot of inspiration (the actors who play them are pretty inspiring, too). Seriously hot alpha males who are always there for each other no matter how many times their missions go sideways, as they invariably do, Stonebridge and Scott are classic bromancers and served as great role models for my own story.
The hero of How to Plan a Wedding for a Royal Spy is the tough-guy military spy Captain Will Endicott. Will's fellow agent is Captain Alasdair Gilbride, a charming rogue who, like Will, is the illegitimate son of a prince. The two men are very different, but they're the best of friends and always have each other's backs. As the war against Napoleon has ended, they face one last mission together — to spy on Will's former childhood sweetheart, Evie Whitney, who is suspected of committing treason against the Crown.
Once Will and Evie meet again after years apart, they're surprised to discover that their feelings for each other remain as strong as ever. This is a tad problematic since Evie is about to be engaged to another man — and, lest we forget, she might also be involved in planning a political assassination. Needless to say, complications ensue, leading to mayhem, attempted murder, and unfortunate wardrobe malfunctions resulting in hastily planned weddings to avoid scandal.
Clearly, Will is going to need the power of the bromance to help him out. Alasdair is more than up to the task, even if it means losing his best friend to the girl.
Something tells me, though, that Alasdair won't be alone for long!
ABOUT VANESSA
Vanessa Kelly is an award-winning author who was named by Booklist, the review journal of the American Library Association, as one of the "New Stars of Historical Romance." Her sensual, Regency-set historical romances have been nominated for awards in a number of contests, and her second book, Sex and the Single Earl, won the prestigious Maggie Medallion for Best Historical Romance. Vanessa's current series, The Renegade Royals, is a national bestseller.
You can find her on the Web at www.vanessakellyauthor.com.