Golden Slippers

VICTORINE (380-pp.)--Frances Parkinson Keyes--Messner ($4.50).

When Author Keyes showed Victorine's first chapters to her British publisher, he came back with: "I am very much pleased with your mise-en-scene. However, I'd like it a little more bloodcurdling. Couldn't you have a murder in the rice fields?"

Author Keyes could not. Fiction, as she suggests in her preface, must not be completely fictitious, and murders are "not rampant or even frequent" in Louisiana rice fields. So, instead, Author Keyes has made her tale turn on a murder in a rice bin. The victim is a fictional cabaret singer named Titine Dargereux ("very good to look at, and the closer she came, the more alluring"). Cajun Titine titillates Rice Prince Prosper Villac, who "had her to himself beside a bayou" in return for a pair of gold slippers. So when Titine is found suffocated in the Villac rice mill, the gold slipper that sticks above the grain points accusingly at Prosper--and just at the moment that Prosper has got engaged to rich and beautiful Victorine LaBranche. Keyes fans will not be disappointed as they follow Victorine along a mysterious, lumbering course. Though most of the prose consists of what one character well calls "a potful of fancy-Dan wordage," there are many stretches of an astonishing Louisiana dialect, for which Author Keyes declares herself indebted to a lady friend (who has worked for the Opelousas daily World and has an "almost infallible ear for the nuances of local speech"). "I strive to please," Novelist Keyes confesses. To a striving author, Victorine should be worth its weight in gold slippers.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.