The Devil’s Cub

I read The Devil’s Cub, by Georgette Heyer, on Friday and Saturday, mostly with my feet up in front of a fire. That felt right, and picturesque, but also necessary, since the heating system was off and the house took a while to get comfortable again after we got it turned back on.

I’m pretty sure this is the third time I’ve read The Devil’s Cub. It’s not one of my favorite Heyers. I wasn’t crazy about it the first time I read it, I liked it a little better the second time, and this time was a different kind of experience because I was reading it knowing I was going to write about it.

The Devil’s Cub is a sequel to These Old Shades, which is a pseudo-sequel to The Black Moth, which I could have sworn I’d posted about, but I guess not. In The Black Moth, the hero and heroine are menaced by Tracy Belmanoir, Duke of Andover, AKA “Devil.” In These Old Shades, Tracy has been transformed into Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon, AKA “Satanas,” but he’s the same person, temporarily transported to Paris. There he meets and employs a boy who turns out to be a girl. Eventually he marries her. You know how it goes.

The Devil’s Cub takes place about 25 years later. Justin and Léonie’s son Dominic, Marquis of Vidal, has something of his father’s bad reputation. He eventually makes London too hot to hold him, and his father orders him to flee to the Continent. He makes a pit stop to pick up Sophia Challoner, the girl he’s been planning on making his mistress, but here things go (more) wrong. His letter to Sophia ends up in the hands of her much more virtuous older sister, Mary, and she takes Sophia’s place to save her virtue, assuming Vidal will send her home when he discovers the switch.

He doesn’t. Instead, they fight a bit, take care of each other, and exchange some trademark Heyer banter, and get involved in some elaborate misunderstandings involving Vidal’s cousin Juliana and her fiancé Frederick Comyn.

I don’t quite know how to describe Heyer to people who haven’t read her before. She sort of standardized the historical romance formula, but non-historical romance fiction owes a lot to her, too. There’s a sameness to her heroes–sardonic but warmhearted–and her heroines–innocent but innately practical–and her high-society hijinks, but that’s fine. Everything is elevated by her sound historical research and her light, witty, warm writing. The Devil’s Cub is classic Heyer: a bad boy clashing with a girl who’s an outsider, a gambling-related subplot, everyone’s relatives all up in each other’s business. When I think of this book, I think of the middle sequence where Vidal and Mary are getting to know each other, but it turns out two quintessential Heyer scenes I really enjoy–an altercation in a gambling den toward the beginning and a bunch of characters chasing each other around France at the end–are in it, too. So what’s my problem with this book?

I think it’s Vidal. Heyer can write dangerous men, and she can write spoiled boys, but Vidal is an unsuccessful mix of the two. Like, sure, everyone is appalled by his scandalous behavior, but I was never sure why he was behaving that way, or what he hoped to achieve. Other Heyer men who behave badly have underlying trauma to explain it. I can accept the whole casually-shooting-people thing as a pose, but I don’t know what it’s all in aid of. And if it’s not a pose, we have bigger problems.

Anyway, as ever, I can’t read just on Heyer, so I’m probably going to reread These Old Shades next. What are your favorites? Mine are Cotillion, Black Sheep, Frederica, and Arabella.

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