Veteran Affairs

Markus Ricci casts aside his parachute and backpack and lowers his buff-colored jumpsuit past the glistening slabs of his abdominal muscles. “Don’t go any lower,” a nearby voice says, “or Walmart will kill me.”

The word of caution comes from Kristine Mills-Noble, creative director of Kensington Publishing. She is watching a computer screen while Ricci gazes into the camera with a look that’s part wooing, part warning. In a downtown Manhattan studio, the Kensington crew is shooting the cover of Burning Up, the first in a new series of romance novels about smoke jumpers. In real life, these elite paratrooper firefighters wear a high protective collar attached to their jumpsuit. This worries Mills-Noble. “A fireman’s uniform is sexy,” she says. “That collar is not sexy. It looks like what vets put on a dog.”

Ricci wears less and less of the outfit as the shoot progresses, but accuracy still matters. Romance novels, Mills-Noble says, are all about the cover, and the cover “is all about the uniform.” If the details are off, the spell might be broken. (And if Ricci’s britches are too low, he won’t be casting any spells at Walmart.)

Getting the uniform right is becoming a bigger issue for romance publishers as trends in swoonworthiness change. For the past decade or so, vampires, werewolves and other phantoms have dominated the romance genre, but now industry watchers sense that the appeal of the paranormal paramour is leveling off. Stepping into his hip-skimming pants is a more macho hero, clad in fatigues, dress blues or, at times, a high protective collar. He’s a firefighter or a cop or, increasingly, a returning veteran–especially if he was with Special Forces.

“Readers are responding to real-life heroes, especially military and ex-military heroes. It just fits with the times,” says Cindy Hwang, executive editor at mass-market publisher Berkley Books. Harlequin Enterprises, the biggest name in the romance-book industry, published a series of 50 Men in Uniform novels in 2010 and this year followed up with the Uniformly Hot! and Heroes Come Home series. At Avon Books, which is planning a similar series in 2012, the in-house nickname for the subgenre is yellow-ribbon romances.

Whatever one might call them, these books are surging onto shelves. In November, Robyn Carr’s Bring Me Home for Christmas–about a woman reconnecting with her hunky ex, a returning veteran of the war in Afghanistan–hit No. 1 on the New York Times mass-market best-seller list. Out in early 2012, Suzanne Brockmann’s Born to Darkness features a Navy SEAL as its romantic stud of choice, as did Brockmann’s megapopular Troubleshooters series. Published on Veterans Day, the anthology SEAL of My Dreams collects stories by 18 romance authors inspired by a photo of the muscular, tattooed back of a Navy SEAL in Fallujah, Iraq, that appeared in the Times after the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

Often taking their cues from the headlines, romance novels are remarkably accurate weather vanes for changes in the pop-cultural climate. Vampires, for instance, were dominating romance before Edward Cullen had lost his milk fangs. Dark Fire, the sixth vampire novel in Christine Feehan’s Dark Series, hit the Times best-seller list in 2001, part of a wave of otherworldly romances that arrived years ahead of Twilight. And because mass-market companies crank out books at such a high volume (Harlequin releases 110 a month), the steady stream of sales data gives publishers a rolling sense of when and how tastes are evolving.

Those sales figures also show that the genre is exceedingly hardy in an economic frost. In 2010 romance books generated $1.36 billion in revenue; in the crisis year 2008, the recession bit into virtually every book-buying category except romance, making it the No. 1 category of a frigid year (last year it was No. 4). “As the financial collapse started, fewer people were buying hardcovers,” says Michael Norris, a senior analyst with Simba Information, which provides research and analysis to publishers. “But romance books are priced so low to begin with”–often under $8–“that fewer compromises needed to be made by the consumer.”

Some industry watchers believe the recession has rekindled the appeal of a rugged workingman ideal. “You won’t find many heroes in romance today who are in finance or any kind of white collar job,” says St. Martin’s Press associate publisher Jennifer Enderlin. “Readers want men who work with their hands and not with their minds.” When times are tough, a guy who knows the taste of sacrifice, suffering and duty is an apt fantasy. Romance author Lisa Marie Rice, whose Protector novels have featured killer boyfriend material in the form of ripped SEAL and Delta Force fighters, says, “If you have a man who’s stuck with you when bullets are flying, this is a man who will stick by you if you get breast cancer.” Or, presumably, if you lose your job.

The steady drumbeat of news about returning veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts also influences matters of the heart. “Women are seeing these men who fight for the love of their country and to protect their families,” says Gina Wachtel, associate publisher at Ballantine Bantam Dell. “All women are looking for that, particularly those in problematic relationships. It’s like a lifeboat.” These heroes promise strength, safety and military-grade sex. They also offer their heroines (and, by proxy, their readers) the opportunity to nurture a wounded, handsome, decent guy back to wholeness–as in Rogenna Brewer’s tale Mitzi’s Marine, wherein one point of the central love triangle is a gunnery sergeant who lost much of one leg in Iraq.

Battle-scarred reality, however, has its limits. For the most part, posttraumatic stress disorder, unemployment and other challenges faced by veterans are a no-go area for romance writers. And while these heroes have an everyman air, they’re strictly 1% in the context of their profession. The soldiers aren’t regular grunts; they’re Special Forces. The cops aren’t just cops; they’re elite ops. The firefighters are smoke jumpers, the kind of sooty daredevil Ricci channels for the cover of Burning Up.

Still, the uniformed men of contemporary romance are far more earthbound–and more accessible–than their vampire-aristocrat counterparts. Anne Marsh, the author of Burning Up, used to write about near immortal warrior lovers (the tagline of her website is “Sexy Paranormal Romance”). Then she switched. “The immortals were wonderful,” she says. “But the odds of you and I meeting that kind of man are pretty slim.”