Review: The Will Darling Adventures

It is time for another review, this one about a trilogy of books: the Will Darling Adventures. After the last time I reviewed a book (“The Jane Austen Handbook”) months after buying and reading it, I thought I should definitely get around to it faster this time. So I finished the books and wrote the review.

 

The Will Darling Adventures include three novels by K.J. Charles: “Slippery Creatures”, “The Sugared Game”, and “Subtle Blood”. They’re set in the 1920s in Britain and include, as all K.J. Charles novels (apart from “Proper English” which has a female/female pairing) a male/male romance. In this case the romance between William Darling and Kim Secretan, which is of the slow-burn variety. It takes them all three books to get together properly. To be fair, though, they do have a lot of stuff to work through what with Will being a cold-blooded killer who is also a used books seller and Kim lying to people constantly while being a spy.

As this already suggests, stakes are high in the three novels as Will and Kim not only battle a secret underground organisation set on destroying the government and building a new one, but also the morals of their time when ‘gross indecency,’ aka. ‘having a sexual relationship with another man,’ could get you jailed for two years. Needless to say that an organisation set on destroying the government wouldn’t shy away from trying to use such a relationship against those on their trail…

There are other stakes to the romance as well. Will is a simple working-class man who changed severely during his time in the army and in war. He was a trench raider (part of a group going into enemy trenches to kill the soldiers in the dead of the night) and has killed many in war. It has made him cavalier about killing others if he has good reason, such as his (or Kim’s) life being in danger. Kim, on the other hand, is officially ‘Lord Arthur Secretan,’ second son of a high-ranking noble family (which is explored more in the third book). How can a privately-educated, well-spoken nobleman and a grammar-schooled, war-damaged working-class man actually have a successful and lasting relationship?

 

I needed three tries to read through the books. The first two times I started “Slippery Creatures”, I didn’t get through the first chapter - even though it does start with action, as Will is mistaken for his deceased uncle who was also called ‘William Darling’ and owned the bookshop before him and has some strange demands from people who talk about daffodils or claim to be with the War Office. The third time when I dug in and went through the first chapter, I found myself captivated by the story once I reached the second one - which shows that first chapters are not always an indication of how well you’ll like the whole book.

As a matter of fact, when I finally made it through the first book, enjoying myself very much as I followed Will through this strange situation, I immediately started to read the second one. “The Sugared Game” surprised me with an ending I wouldn’t have expected from the second book in a trilogy - it seemed as if the action plot of the story was finished. It was not, as I began to realize halfway through “Subtle Blood”. What started as a more personal plot for Kim - his surviving brother being accused of murder, which could put him in the ‘heir’ position and separate him from Will for good -, pivoted into the real end of the ‘Zodiac’ situation.

I found “Subtle Blood” hard to put down, especially at my usual bedtime, and ended up reading for over an hour longer than I would normally be up, just to finish it. I can’t say I regret it, although I horribly overslept the next morning because of it and woke with a slight headache. The book was totally worth staying up for longer.

 

At this point, I feel I have to add a warning, though. K.J. Charles writes male/male erotica, so the romantic relationship between Will and Kim is accompanied by an ample number of sex scenes featuring them.

K.J. Charles writes her sex scenes exceedingly well - while the physical actions are described in detail, the focus is not on the mechanical parts of having sex, but on the emotional ones. This isn’t just ‘two strangers meeting for a little fun in the dark,’ this is a story about two men growing closer and investing emotionally into that relationship as well. Will and Kim don’t just have sex to have sex - it brings them closer.

That even features in the plot - Kim is reluctant to have sex with Will when it’s just about distracting him or keeping him from going home already whereas he’s enthusiastic about having sex with Will when it’s just about the two of them. Despite being an excellent and almost habitual liar, Kim still has his standards.

 

At their hearts, all three books of the trilogy are spy thrillers. They have the experienced spy (Kim), the newcomer who is drawn into this world unknowingly, at least the first time around (Will), the mysterious enemy organisation (Zodiac), the secret organisation working for the government the spy is part of (Private Bureau), a host of thugs, dangerous situations, daring escapes, and some 1920s glamour.

The setting in the 1920s means that a lot of modern means are not available to our heroes. In the beginning, Will doesn’t have a phone in his own shop and he can’t drive a car because that’s not a standard in the 1920s. There’s no smartphones, no internet to do quick research, no spy gadgets. There’s only two people in the middle of a dangerous game who have to get by on their intelligence and their skills, be it Will’s ability to silently and quickly kill people or Kim’s ability to talk his way out of many situations with a glib lie or two.

I was surprised when the second book seemed to end with Zodiac’s leader killed and the organisation on the way to dissolution. I was also worried - with the action plot finished, would the third book I knew existed have a completely new action plot while finishing the romance one? Yet, no villain worth their salt is destroyed when you think they are and a secret organisation often is like a Hydra - you cut one head off and another takes over…

 

For a story set in 1920s London, the three novels are quite diverse. While both Will and Kim are white men (if not straight white men), there are others.

Will’s best friend Maisie Jones is a woman of colour, but not simply presented as the ‘token black friend’ at all. She has her own plot going on and becomes Marguerite Zie by the end - a Paris fashion designer who sells her clothes through the store of her passionate girlfriend Phoebe (who had a ‘business’ engagement with Kim before).

There are future lords and excellent high-society lawyers who are not white, too. Harry Mitra, the lawyer, is of Indian descent and at the same time a member of an exclusive club and a sought-after solicitor. George Yoxall is of African descent, a member of the same exclusive club, and a future lord, following his uncle who also happened to be Will’s commanding officer for a while and who, it is suggested, is black as well. The two men have no arc of their own, but they make it clear society in London, even high society, is no longer completely white.

Their ancestry also makes sense, as Britain is still an Empire at that point, only in the process of losing its status. There are many colonies and people from there are allowed into England as well.

 

I enjoyed reading the books very much. K.J. Charles’ writing style goes well with my tastes in writing, she is very good at researching details for her books, and her stories always have a lot of action in addition to the romance. Her sex scenes are always worth reading as well and they fit into the story as a such - it’s not ‘porn peppered in to titillate the reader,’ it’s part of the plot development. I liked the twists in the story very much, especially the ‘Zodiac is dead, long live Zodiac’ twist.

I also do have a creeping suspicion about a side character who turns up in the second and third book - DS, the head of the Private Bureau. From the description the first time Will meets him, he bears a certain semblance to a main character from one of K.J. Charles’ earlier books, “Think of England”. Daniel da Silva is a spy from a government organisation who makes up one half of the pairing. He is Jewish, has dark hair and a darker complexion, and wears glasses in the last scene of the story. He also has the same sharp tongue as DS (and, of course, the letters fit with his name, either just da Silva or Daniel da Silva). From the time between “Think of England”, which is set in the first decade of the twentieth century (1904), and the Will Darling Adventures, he could be leading the bureau by then.

 

If you like male/male erotica with a historical backdrop, spy stories, or just a lot of action in and out of bed, I can only recommend the Will Darling Adventures trilogy. If you can stomach male/male romance, and like spy stories and historical settings, you could always flip through the sex scenes, although it would be a shame. All three books are fun to read and will draw you in with great characters, good writing, and good plots.