Virgin With Butterflies

Had a pretty sleepless night, so I read the first chapter of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and finished most of my second Harlequin Romance, Virgin With Butterflies by Tom Powers. This one was a little hard to adjust to initially, as I was expecting another hard boiled detective story, but after I got used to the voice, I really enjoyed it immensely.

The narrator is an unassuming, naive cigarette girl who falls into trouble quickly. She tells her story in a ruminative (rather than narrowly narrative) manner, pitching from" the present" plotline into a related back story on a regular basis, but always giving clear signals as she moves from present to past and back to present, and never losing the thread of her story. She speaks in an uneducated manner, and a part of the charm is that she is so glib about what she is saying. This passage, for example:

"He was a Presbyterian minister and I hadn't ever met any ministers so I got interested like I say. But after starting to tell me one night in a park about predestination, he kept burying his face in my neck instead of telling me more, and it seemed like his hands were predestined to do a lot of exploring. So I quit seeing him and I never got to be a Presbyterian."

She also has a gift for unique observations, such as this one: "[The coffee] was black and sweet and strong enough to go out and work for a living."

And how about "Roddy['s] . . . little boy's eyes [were] going around the curves of me, fit to skid into the ditch."

Tom Powers is also capable of effortlessly shifting into high gear, such as when he has an old man say to our intrepid heroine, "What is safety? . . . In this world it is one thing we should not seek. Being safe is not as important as being right, and if we die for what we know to be right, is it not better than living for what we know to be safe?"

All in all, a very excellent read. I may have to see what else this Tom Powers fellow has written. Or maybe not. According to Wikipedia (from whence all blessings flow), he was primarily an actor, and they do not even list him as having written any books. Interesting side-note: he was born in Owensboro, Kentucky (on July 7, 1890--which is how I know it's the same fellow). Well, the Harlequin bio page says he wrote some other stuff, so I'll have to look harder.

I have since broken my agreement with myself and already purchased two more of the remaining Harlequin Vintage Collection items (I had a coupon, what can I say?), so I am now about to set forth upon my reading of You Never Know With Women by James Hadley Chase, and then it's Kiss Your Elbow by Alan Handley. And the remaining two . . . surely there'll be another discount coupon soon, right?