SOUTH EASTON, MASS. — It was the height of the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s in New York City. The couple had found a beautiful apartment, filled with Art Deco trappings, right down to the frosted swans etched into the shower door.
You've worked so hard all day, Roy told Maddie: Why don't you just take a shower and I'll make us some dinner? Then, as she stood beneath the pulsing spray, Maddie saw him in his bathrobe, through the frosted swans. When Roy offered to soap her back, Maddie protested that his bathrobe would get wet. Oh no, Roy replied. The robe fell to the floor and he stepped in to join her.
When Mildred Riley read that scene from her book "No Regrets" at her over-55 apartment complex here, a woman in the audience gasped. Riley stopped, worried she had offended her neighbor.
But Riley's fan said it was envy she was expressing, not shock. "She said, 'I wish it had been me,' " Riley recalled.
In taking up romance writing about 20 years ago, Riley, now 91, tapped into a booming genre. Romance fiction boasts more than 51 million readers in the United States and generates more than $1 billion in sales each year because "things end well for the hero and heroine, despite everything they have to overcome," said Allison Kelley, executive director of the Romance Writers of America.
Over broiled scallops at her favorite restaurant in this community south of Boston, Riley said she had no grand plan to make a political, social or literary statement when she began churning out stories centered around black characters and significant periods in African American history. Nor did she realize she was venturing into a growing sub-category of romance fiction.
Rather, she said, "I wanted to write about people who look like me."
After 40 years in nursing, much of it spent working in psychiatric units, Riley signed up for some writing classes -- more as a way to fill time in retirement than as a strategy to launch a new career. Her first novel, "Yamilla," was published in 1990. It recalled a story passed down from Riley's great-grandmother, about a woman brought to this country from Africa to be a slave. But she refused to submit, insisting she had been born into royalty.
Another book, about an African American in the Massachusetts whaling industry, grew out of a weekend she spent on Nantucket with her late husband, Patterson, an Internal Revenue Service auditor.
