Glenna Finley

Glenna Finley (1925-2013) was born in 1925 in Washington State; her father was a biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She spent her childhood in Olympia, Yakima and Seattle, and began her college career at the University of Washington, later transferring to Stanford University, where she graduated cum laude in 1946, majoring in Speech and Dramatic Studies, with a minor in Russian Studies. As a student intern, she worked with the newly formed United Nations in San Francisco. Months after graduating, at the age of 21 she moved to New York where she got married and started working as a producer for NBC’s International Division; in that capacity she had her own radio show about activities in Manhattan, which was broadcast to England.  She later worked for the March of Time and Life Magazine. Glenna’s marriage over, in 1950 she returned to Seattle where she worked as a publicity and radio writer, and in 1951, at the age of 25, she married Donald Witte, who was working as a photographer at the time. Their only child, a son, was born two years later. Glenna died of cancer at age 87 in 2013.

Her first novel was a detective story, Death Strikes Out, published in 1957, when she was 28. She only published a small handful in the 1960s—her only nurse novel, Nurse Pro Tem, was her fourth book—but beginning in 1970, when she was 55, she began writing two or three books a year for the next 15 years, through 1984, ultimately writing 45. Her forte was romantic suspense stories, and she was one of the best-selling authors in the genre, selling several million books in many languages. Her last book was published in 1993, when she was 68.

In the late 1970s she was under contract for Signet, completing a manuscript every three to six months, and it was this obligation, she declared in a newspaper article, that kept her going. “If I waited for inspiration, I’d be on welfare,” she said. “If I didn’t have a deadline to meet, I don’t think I’d write a single book.” To write her novels, Finley would pick a location, “someplace I’d like to go.” She would visit there to capture the setting, to meet interesting people who might be worked into the story, and to assure accuracy in her writing. She would start writing at 10 a.m., and would write at least three pages a day. One key feature of Finley’s books was that all of her books left bedroom scenes behind a closed door. “Sex makes a much better story,” she said. “However, my readers have good imaginations, so why not let them use it?’’ Another standard Finley relied on was the endings: “I have never written a book without a happy ending, and I never will,” she declared.

Remarking on the popularity of romantic novels, Finley suggested this was due to the times in which we live. “People want to escape from reality,” she said. “There are so many depressing things going on today. People are sick of bad news. Why should they pay $1.95 for a book that makes them feel even worse?” If books cost a bit more these days, Finley had the right idea—and the ability to produce the right stories for those times, and for these.