Harlequin authors have their own web pages, with photographs, blogs, news, bios, and email addresses so readers can get in touch directly. A few superstars number among the writers’ ranks. On her website, Nora Roberts (born Eleanor Robertson) lists more than 200 books she has written since 1981, including twenty-three between 1982 and 1984. Of these, 147 have been on the New York Times bestseller list. In 2007 alone, she had thirteen books on the list. The sheer volume seems obsessive.

Her zeal is matched by Harlequin’s readers, who may devour upwards of a book a day. “There is a strong bond between author and reader in the romance genre,” Shin says. It was this bond that Stephen King cleverly exploited in Misery. In the novel, the writer-protagonist kills off his popular heroine, Misery Chastain, prompting a deranged fan, menacingly played by Kathy Bates in the film version, to take offence. There are, presumably, Harlequin readers who spend a great deal of time in the fantasy world. Perhaps they’re floating through life in a blissful romantic cloud. Or they’re Kathy Bates, standing at the foot of your bed with a sledgehammer. King’s lesson, in any case, was clear: the writer can’t betray the reader’s trust.

For Harlequin, that trust is inscribed in editorial guidelines for each series that lay out the theme, the profiles of the hero and heroine, the acceptable amount of sex, and the number of words. The specs for the Desire series describe the hero as powerful and wealthy, “an alpha male with a sense of arrogance and entitlement. While he may be harsh and direct, he is never physically cruel.” The heroine, on the other hand, is “complex and flawed. She is strong-willed and smart though capable of making terrible mistakes when it comes to matters of the heart.” Other series are described as being “grounded in reality” or “heartwarming” or “what it means to be American,” or focus
on “breathtakingly charismatic alpha-heroes who are tamed by spirited independent heroines.”

Harlequin often responds to shifts in readers’ desires. Complaints are monitored (“Too many babies,” “The hero shouldn’t swear as much”) and adjustments sometimes made. Whatever else it is, the romance genre is democratic. The writing is editor driven, and the editors are reader driven. And what drives the readers?

For a while, they could seek only vicarious love in Harlequins — no sex. Now, some series and lines (Harlequin Presents, Silhouette, Spice, luna, mira, among others) have specific guidelines for “sensuality.” In the Steeple Hill series, which has religious themes, it isn’t acceptable for the unmarried hero and heroine to stay overnight in the same house without a chaperone. In the Desire series, one of the most adventurous of Harlequin’s lines, “She circled the engorged head, her fingers wrapped around his shaft and pulling slowly, rhythmically, along its length. She bent lower…”

These two opposing themes — more explicit sex, and religious romance — emerged, unsurprisingly, at the same time. The evolution of sex was a slow, consensual process driven by experienced writers who wanted more freedom, and by readers’ first tentative requests for more sex. According to Peter Darbyshire, a former English professor at York University, sexually explicit romances and what he describes as “a line of romance novels concerned almost solely with the dissemination of right-wing religious values” dovetailed during the ’90s. The religious-themed novels showed a “strong anti-feminist bias,” in his words, with the heroines embroiled not in romantic or sexual crises so much as crises of faith.

But sex, even in the most graphic series, is always secondary to and coincident with love. And what is love? There is an anthropological case that romantic love doesn’t exist, that it is a cultural delusion imagined by the West. Love grew out of the development of a leisure class with time on its hands, and an artisan class seeking to sell its wares. What love there is, is a by-product of sex. The marriage that follows is simply an agent of socio-religious control.

The argument that romantic love itself is a biological imperative, as fundamental as fear or anger, has its champions, though. Helen Fisher, author of Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce, has made that case, as have others. But if love didn’t exist, we would have had to invent it — and perhaps we did. The extraordinary success of romance novels seems to lie in their ability to manufacture, or at least uncover, a desire, then to satisfy it.

At the Powerhouse Casting offices in Toronto on an overcast Saturday, dozens of men have answered Harlequin’s casting call for “Authentic Heroes for Its Covers.” The company has requested real firefighters, police officers, and paramedics who are good looking and between the ages of twenty-five and forty-eight. “After 9/11,” Katherine Orr told me, “there was a huge reader response for men in uniform — men in control, taking charge. You know, the safety factor.”

Covers have always been an integral part of Harlequin’s marketing. They are known for “the clinch”: the heroine being held by the hero, eyes locked in a mutually meaningful stare. As part of Harlequin’s sixtieth anniversary celebrations, a retrospective of covers, titled The Heart of a Woman, is showing at a New York gallery. The ones from decades ago are surprisingly lurid, with enticing titles (Pardon My Body, Virgin With Butterflies, Brittle Bondage). All of the early books had illustrated covers, but by the late ’80s, most featured photographs, which are now sometimes treated to resemble illustrations — a hedge against too much reality. Harlequin shoots 120 covers a month, so the authentic men chosen today won’t be restricted to fireman poses. They could end up as cowboys, or powerful, ruthless millionaires. Some of them may be digitally aged so they look like older men, which Harlequin maintains is easier than finding actual middle-aged men.

With the exception of the gloriously inauthentic ET Canada television people, I am arguably the least authentic man here — though authenticity is an imprecise concept. Almost all the authentic heroes are buff, clear-eyed, square-jawed men with Hollywood smiles. Some have the thick orange colour that comes from tanning salons. Body hair has been sculpted, shaved, and plucked, and some of the precise haircuts have discreet highlights. In the audition room, the men are filmed, photographed, and interviewed in five-minute segments by a casting director and a team of art directors. The most promising are asked to take off their shirts, displaying a fair amount of ink. Tattoos are now featured on Harlequin covers, though they are usually Photoshopped on for maximum appropriateness and appeal (a winding, sensuous lizard on a shirtless cowboy, say, rather than the name of the model’s girlfriend written in dripping blood). “I just had a double hernia operation,” one of the firemen laments. “I’m down fifteen pounds of muscle mass. I’m a bit pale, too. I mean, I don’t want to reiterate. I’m a bit tired. I’m just not feeling that rosy.”

The judges’ decisions are instinctive, almost instantaneous, and almost always unanimous. Sometimes it’s obvious: a buff physique, hair like Fabio, a killer smile. Other times, it’s subtler, less quantifiable, something in the model’s brief monologue, a quality they like but can’t articulate.

The advent of firemen’s calendars, which date to the mid-’90s, has created a curious beast. Almost all the men at the casting call have posed for calendars for their local fire halls, and they have bloomed in that exhibitionist culture. At charity events, women line up for their autographs. A certain male power has been released. Most of these men have done modelling and/or TV work, and outside in the waiting room some speak about callbacks and pilots and casting calls, or chat with their agents on cellphones. In many ways, they are the perfect Harlequin creations: they have the beauty of male models but less of the toxic narcissism — genial family men grounded by a dangerous job that involves the fundamentally Harlequin notion of rescue. In these coiffed, understated, muscular, businesslike young men lie the dreams of 10 million women. If not these men specifically, then the tousled hair and washboard abs and everlasting love they are paid to represent.

In Surrender to Marriage, wealthy, powerful Jake Reilly returns to a Newfoundland village “to claim the one thing that still eludes him…” This thing is Shaine O’Sullivan, the fiery love he left thirteen years ago after a misunderstanding. The Harlequin formula for the first four books I read deconstructed to this: Star-crossed lovers are introduced in heavily expository paragraphs. One or both feels betrayed by something that happened years ago, and they argue and inch toward each other until they fall in love all over again and prepare for marriage.