Love at the Helm

Love at the Helm is # 163 in the Bantam series. This book was published in October 1982, but had an earlier publication in hardcover which is why we have the cover by Francis Marshall, who died in 1980. This is the last FM cover I have published by Bantam. Next post I will show other Marshall covers before picking up on the other Bantam Cartland books, which were illustrated by another artist.

This story is about Captain Conrad Horn, a hero from Trafalgar, whose next mission is to travel to Antigua to report on the American privateers and carry his distant cousin to her future husband. How she saves him and then he in turn saves her is the plot of this romance! Barbara Cartland was helped by the Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the Admiral of the Fleet and she designated the profits from this book to go the Mountbatten Memorial Trust. He helped her with the naval information on a few of her books and she was greatly saddened at his assassination.

Francis Marshall illustrates a beautiful cover for this book! We see our couple on board ship in handsome uniform and elegant dress! We can tell that they are in love and will have to solve the problems that keep them apart! Marshall does a brilliant job at showing the ship and all its details!

Next post I will show other Cartland books illustrated by Marshall, but published by different publishers! She was such a prolific author that different publishers in Britain printed her books! You've seen a few from the earlier posts in this blog: Corgi, Arrow, and Pan! I will begin to show others soon, so keep watching and enjoy!