(Filling in for Diana Killian over the next month – keep your eyes peeled for me the next few Mondays here as well as every Monday on my own new group blog – Kill Zone – I’m Monday’s child now I guess!)

I was watching one of my favorite BBC series on DVD, North and South, and it started me thinking about what we look for, as readers and viewers, in our male protagonists and their relationships. The men that have drawn me in have been the ideal suitors: Rochester in Jane Eyre, Darcy in Pride and Prejudice Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Mr. Thornton in North and South, the gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and of course, in mysteries, Lord Peter Wimsey (if I kept going the list would be a long one!) But how many of them would have made the ideal fictitious husband? Are our fictitious men doomed once they become married?

Authors worry when writing a mystery series that once the two protagonists finally settle down and marry, that’s the end of all sexual tension in the books and, with a fizzle and a plop, the series is finished. That idea has me anxious because I know as a reader (and a voracious viewer of BBC series!) that I’m a romantic at heart. I want to see the hero and heroine find true love at the end - I want that resolution but do I want to see what happens afterwards? Would Darcy be quite as appealing with bad morning breath on the honeymoon? Imagine Heathcliff doing the dishes or Rochester burping his first born… Hmmm…you got to admit the sexual tension would be wilting. So how do authors manage to pull it off? As a reader nothing drives me crazier than an artificially drawn out courtship where it’s clear the author wants to drag out the ‘will they or won’t they’ ad infinitum. But what happens once you’ve got the ‘happily ever after’ – how do you recover from the morning after?

I confess I enjoyed Busman’s Honeymoon and loved being a fly on the wall with the newlyweds Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. I also enjoyed the later installments written by Jill Paton Walsh and as a mystery solving duo they seem to work well even after marriage. I have also read some of Anne Perry’s Inspector Pitt and Monk series and they both survive the marriage stakes, although, to be fair, I never sensed that the relationships in these books were ever in question. They weren’t books in which the romance or sexual tension (for me) was ever a driving force. But if it is, how do we keep that tension propelling the characters forward without dragging a relationship out or destroying it all once marriage rears its head? With my own books I’m terrified by the prospect that Lord Wrotham will turn into some boring middle-aged, married lord (never!) and I’ve certainly thrown Ursula a challenge at the end of the second book in the series, The Serpent and The Scorpion, to keep the tension bubbling along. I guess I also have the First World War looming on the horizon, but it would be a sad day indeed when the only way an author can keep the tension alive is by killing someone off!

So who do you think has made the successful transition from sexy love interest to the ideal fictitious husband?

Clare Langley-Hawthorne was raised in England and Australia. She was an attorney in Melbourne before moving to the United States, where she began her career as a writer. Her first novel, Consequences of Sin, has been nominated for the 2008 Sue Feder Memorial Historical Mystery Macavity award. The second in the Ursula Marlow series, The Serpent and The Scorpion, is due out in October 2008. Clare lives in Oakland, California with her family.