There Came a Tyrant

There Came a Tyrant is a 1972 Mills & Boon romance by Anne Hampson, published as a 187-page paperback and recorded as romantic fiction. The book works the familiar material of the line at that period: a working woman, a man with authority over her, and a mutual antagonism that the plot has to dismantle.

Simoni's difficulty is stated as a pattern rather than an incident. Kent Travers is a pilot and therefore senior to her, and she finds him unreasonable; the copy also has her make avoidable mistakes whenever he is present, so the humiliation is partly her own and the novel has to handle both. She expects the arrangement to end when they both leave the airline. The airline is a working setting rather than a backdrop, and Simoni's efficiency everywhere else is not much use to her when the captain is in the room.

That expectation is what the book defeats, since their paths continue to cross after the employment does. Hampson wrote many novels for Mills & Boon in this period, and the setting is an airline rather than a country house, which was a common way of giving a heroine a professional life while keeping the couple in the same working space.