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Nobody names a novel The Man Who Reclaimed His Virginity and then hopes to hide its dramatic light under a bushel! Yes, it is a pulp-style title, in the old “sensationalist” manner, and yet it is  accurate. It is both bravura yet totally descriptive.

In his review of my “slice of life” story Mugged by Love, the superb novelist Jay Cameron Parker said: “His writing is sharp and engaging. Sometimes subtle and sometimes raw.” (See that review here.) Well, despite its aura of theatricality, my new novel The Man Who Reclaimed His Virginity has both subtlety and rawness in both title and tale.

It is, among various things, a story of how too much solitude can shape a person’s thoughts and affect his actions.

It is difficult, especially to a generally self-effacing person like I am, to trumpet one’s own work. I sometimes feel I might sound like a purveyor of patent medicines in an old western or something, but these days “getting the word out” is a necessary task in the life of a self-publisher–otherwise his or her work will vanish in the ocean of digital ink.

I especially hope my noir fiction and crime literature friends online will take a look at this short novel (142 pages) on Kindle, as well as peruse my various flash fiction pieces here. I’m following my own path in noir storytelling, more in the manner of the “noir without crime” template of the novels of Alfred Hayes such as My Face for the World to See, In Love, and The End of Me. These are dark stories about the realm of intimate emotions rather than acts of dangerous criminality.

These are the New York Review Books editions of Hayes’ memorable short novels.

Georges Simenon himself, in one of his standalone “romans dur” or “hard novels” did a noir tale without, as I recall, an actual crime in it: The Nightclub. (He also did a memorable nightclub-set mystery with Inspector Maigret known in the U.S. as Maigret and the Strangled Stripper and in Europe as Maigret at Picratt’s (the name of the nightclub).

This is the 1979 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition.

A friend of mine, a cardiologist by trade, said that my “slice of life” psychological stories are all about rejection, which on reflection I thought was an interesting and valid diagnosis of which I was not completely aware, except already in knowing that “rejection” was certainly one of many different themes I tackle. Well, doesn’t rejection often feel like Fitzgerald’s “3 a.m. of the soul”? As F. Scott put it: “In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” Isn’t that a frequent emotion in classic noir fiction and film?

Although I’ve made my living in erotica/porn/smut business (pick your fave term for it), and sometimes my psychological stories touch on erotic situations, pieces such as When A Woman Scowls, The Night I Got Off Easy, When She Became Real and Do You Remember Me, Lily? are not porn tales. In fact, with the publication of The Man Who Reclaimed His Virginity, available on Kindle, I have basically completed a 250-300 page volume of these “slice of life” stories. I may assemble them as a collection, to have them all together.

Here is an interesting angle on the novel. Originally I wrote its storyline as a flash fiction piece, which I did not publish because I decided it might make the basis for a good longer tale. But here it is now, in the original flash fiction form. Klein is called “Jenkins” in this early version; Margaret’s name is the same though, but originally envisioned as a warm-hearted blonde instead of the auburn-tressed manipulative amazon, Margaret Emilia Bortwell, that she becomes in the novel…

I developed the blonde for the novel as the sweet-natured antithesis of Margaret and called her Venus Marie, but her character was not part of the original story.

So here is the form in which the novel began:

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ON HER TERMS

Flash fiction by Irv O. Neil 

Jenkins felt like a speck on the busy road map of Margaret’s life, but her occasional friendliness to him sometimes made him feel like more; and this both elated and confused him. He was much older than she was and it wasn’t a question of him wanting, hoping, or expecting any kind of romantic relationship; but he wanted to know her better as a friend, if possible. She had been in a play in a small theater in lower Manhattan and he’d written a good review in one of the free local papers, and this led to an interview where he tried to give a boost to her as-yet fledgling career. He couldn’t deny to himself that he had sexual fantasies about her but he kept them to himself; the old goat mode did not appeal to him, however the yearning might persist. So, friendship was the aim. The irony was that if he had met someone like her when he was much younger, she probably wouldn’t have given him much of a tumble; a talented beauty like Margaret had many better options; but as an old man, a good knowledgeable writer and a spry enough seventy–someone recently at the website where he freelanced had said his gait was “youthful,” which pleased him–Jenkins offered her a few attractions that were palatable. 

How long would it take before her talent found the proper role, the astute producer, the best playwright? He’d known her for two years mostly from a distance, even though they lived in the same neighborhood; and he posted helpful things on social media about her and wrote online and print reviews of her latest appearances. He could see over those two years the progression of her skills and beauty and confidence, and could not help but wonder when his friendship would become superfluous to her, like a once-favorite song that now seemed tiresome.

It made him sad, and frightened, to think of this young woman who preoccupied his thoughts so much, but whose life was so rich with possibilities and events, unlike his own. How much attention could she possibly and realistically bestow upon him heading into the future? Not very much, he feared. He had that speck-like feeling again.

How many years on earth could he have left to know her? Oh how he wished he could live another forty years, just to see what she would be like then! But would her interest in him wane before his life did? He was startled by how much the couple of times they’d met for coffee, and the three shows and two films he had seen her in, and the one time he had interviewed her for a site, had so filled his consciousness with her image, voice, beauty, and especially her rich and distinctive laugh, which he imagined perfectly suited to any number of wonderful roles. Time was capricious, he knew, and he hoped his happiness wouldn’t be cut short too soon. He didn’t know Margaret well, really, but he imagined the getting-to-know-her-more, bit by bit, on whatever terms made her satisfied, was a lovely project he hoped to pursue for the rest of his life.  

The End

The story evolved considerably from this brief piece into a 142-page tale of insomnia, claustrophobic New York City living, a weird relationship involving rejection (of course), a subplot of flea market sales of vintage paperback books under the auspices of a booted Margaret in latex dominatrix gear, and the various games she and her admirer play (he now fully re-named Julius Caesar Klein): a rather complex drama which you will learn all about when I hope you will download a copy of The Man Who Reclaimed His Virginity right here. 

Thanks for reading!  

Holiday postscript! I want to wish everyone a very Happy New Year of 2026!  And thank you for perusing this blog, chatting with me on X aka Twitter, and reading my Kindle ebooks.

This past 2025 marked happy literary milestones as I got two pieces accepted at the terrific web magazine Punk Noir, which demonstrate that while I consider my new novel “noir without crime” I did indeed have some of my characters elsewhere do criminal things in these two brief flash pieces. First is “The Clown Inside Her” for the “clown” theme and following that is the untitled single-sentence piece in the “One Shot Kill” theme that followed. Here are the links.

The Clown Inside Her

One Shot Kill (scroll down to the middle and you’ll find my piece)

Thanks to editors Stephen J. Golds and B F Jones for selecting them and putting me in the company of so many fine writers!

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I created the picture of Venus Marie with the A.I. program at my stock photography account at depositphotos.com.

“On Her Terms” © 2025 Irv O. Neil