Beatrice Parker
Personal Information
Description
Thomas Elmer Huff was born on 08 January 1938 in Tarrant, Texas, USA. He graduated from Poly High School and from Texas Wesleyn College in 1960. For several years, he was a popular English teacher at R.L. Paschal High School, remembered as a spinner of first-person yarns and a resolutely independent soul. "He got peeved at the principal one day," recalls history teacher Zelma Rhodes, "and he up and quit." Single, he lived quietly in a plain, two-story brick home with his mother, Beatrice, in Fort Worth, Texas. To preserved his identity, he made himself as elusive and reclusive as possible during years. Long a dabbler at writing, Tom researched laboriously and wrote and rewrites with his typewriter in a tidy workroom. Published since 1968, during the first nine years he wrote under the female pseudonyms Edwina Marlow, Beatrice Parker, T. E. Huff, and Katherine St. Clair. "You just work like hell and maybe, if you're lucky, you'll make it," he said "I had to turn out three gothics a year to make a living." He also explained the use of female identities: "There's a certain mystique about this stuff, you see," he says earnestly "If those women who buy my books ever get the idea that a man has written them, it could put a block in their minds." In 1976, when he began writing historical romance novels, he created his most famous female pseudonym Jennifer Wilde. His first release, Love's Tender Fury, had 41 printings in its first five years and sold more than 2.5 million copies, and his second historical romance, Dare to Love, spent 11 weeks on the New York Times paperback bestseller list. His historical romances were noted for being written in first-person, from the heroine's perspective. Many of his books also featured multiple male protagonists, and "the man who first captures the heroine's heart isn't always the one who ends up with it." Curiously, about his romance novels he said "aren't the real Tom E. Huff. I don't take the genre seriously-but I take my work seriously. My goal has been to reach a point where I can write what I want to.The Jennifer Wilde thing will be over with," he sighs, adding as if in pain, "I don't relate to her at all." In 1980, he wrote a novel as Tom E. Huff, but he continued writing as Jennifer Wilde, and his previous novels were reedited in many cases under this pseudonym. Tom earned a Career Achievement Award in 1987-1988 from Romantic Times. He died suddenly of a massive heart failure on 16 January 1990 in Fort Worth, where he was buried.
Books
Betrayal at Blackcrest
Spiderweb of Passion. The great, grim manor of Blackcrest held many secrets for beautiful young Deborah Lane. London and safety seemed worlds and centuries away as she tried to discover what had happened here to her lovely cousin, whose face and name none in the house claimed to remember. Yet even as she tried to pierce the veil of fearful mystery, Deborah felt herself falling -- like her cousin before her -- under the spell of the powerful, strangely attractive, savagely sardonic master of the manor, Derek Hawke. A man for whom women were objects of vengeance for a wound suffered long ago...a man who mocked Deborah's desperate, futile fight against a hatred that had the irresistible power of love....
Wherever Lynn Goes
Rings of doom. The phone calls had started again, even after Lynn had the number unlisted. They were always the same, the same low, husky voice saying "Lynn, Lynn, it's Daddy." They were sick, someone's poor idea of a joke. Lynn's father had been dead for years. Then one night Lynn's aunt phoned, tried to warn her about something and was disconnected by death. The police said that her murderer was found dead, that there was no connection between the tragedy and the calls, but Lynn knew differently. Somehow, someway, someone was drawing her back into the past for dark mysterious reasons -- insidiously evil reasons designed to lead her to the brink of madness... and beyond death.
Jamintha
Young Jane Danver was coming home to a past she could not remember... to a guardian who terrified her...to a handsome, violent cousin who shocked her and filled her with desire at the same time... to an evil that had let her escape once but surely would not again... And in all the hostile world there was just one person to whom Jane Danver could turn for help--the beautiful, bewitching, yet fearfully mysterious creature called Jamintha...
Stranger by the Lake
New man at the manor. Pretty Susan Marlow had always loved Greenwood Manor and its crusty, delightful mistress, her aunt, Lady Agatha Gordon. But now, when Susan returned to the stately old mansion, all seemed utterly changed. There was a man at Greenwood now, a tall, powerful, breathtakingly handsome man. His name was Craig Stanton, and Lady Agatha had made him her permanent guest. She called him a genius, a man who would shed new light on the Gordon family history, and the only one in the world she could trust. But for Susan, Craig Stanton was something else... a man of strange powers who had woven a sinister spell over her aunt... a figure of mystery and dark and devious purposes... and a lover whom Susan was helpless to resist as he took her, trembling, in his arms....
Come to Castlemoor
Kathy Hunt came to Castlemoor when she got the news of her brother's sudden and tragic death. The shadow of Castlemoor fell ominously across the moors. Every soul seemed to live in terror. When Kathy found that her brother's life work - a study of bloody, primitive rites, once performed on these very moors - had disappeared, she vowed to find the manuscript and complete his book. But strange forces blocked her search. Edward Clark, the dark, handsome man who claimed to love her, assured her the danger was real and malevolent. Then she realized that the old fiendish rites were being reenacted... she was in the center of a circle of death... the intended sacrifice in a diabolical ceremony.