Midnight
Given a character or two and a situation , the beginning of one of those romances is , or was , pretty likely to be something like this : `` It was a black night . Heavy clouds had obscured the setting sun and now , as the clock in the great stone tower boomed twelve , the darkness was pitchy . '' That is a good safe beginning . Midnight , a stone tower , a booming clock , and darkness make an appeal to the imagination . On a night like that almost anything may happen . A reader of one of my romances -- and readers there must be , for the things did , and still do , sell to some extent -- might be fairly certain that something WOULD happen before the end of the second page . After that the somethings continued to happen as fast as I could invent them .