A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Tavern - Orrie Hitt

THE TAVERN was published in 1966, very late in Orrie Hitt's career. It also has some personal meaning to me, because I had a copy of this one before the fire but never got around to reading it. It may have been the only Orrie Hitt novel I owned at that time. I might have had one more, but I can’t remember for sure. For some reason, copies of his books just never showed up in the used bookstores around here.

This one revisits many of Hitt’s usual themes but also has some interesting differences. The protagonist is Hal Mason, a young man just out of high school who goes to work as a bartender at Mike’s Place, a rundown tavern just over the county line from the county where Hal and his friends live. You see, the drinking age in the county where Hal lives is 21, while in the next county, where Mike’s is located, it’s 18. So naturally, all the kids go across the line to Mike’s to get drunk. As usual in a Hitt novel, that’s not the only line they cross.

Hal’s youth and relative inexperience set him apart from most of Hitt’s protagonists, but he’s still worldly enough to be juggling the standard three women: Wanda, the good girl (one of many Wandas in Hitt novels); Gert, the slut with a good heart; and Tina, the stripper who’s married to Mike, the owner of the tavern. Of the three, Hal falls hardest for Tina, who is, of course, exactly the one he shouldn’t get involved with. Eventually, blackmail and murder rear their ugly heads.

Hitt has done all this many times before in his books, but the character of Hal makes THE TAVERN an interesting novel. He considers himself a heel-in-training, so to speak, but despite a few slips, he’s such a decent kid at heart that this book might almost be titled ANDY HARDY GETS LAID. Which brings up another point: other than the blonde’s outfit on the cover and the fact that Hal drives a Renault, there’s no sense that this book is set in the Swinging Sixties. It might as well take place in the Forties or Fifties, which gives it a certain nostalgic charm.

Other than an ending that seems a little rushed, as if Hitt realized he’d made his word count, THE TAVERN is a pretty good book, very readable and fast-paced. At this point, Hitt didn’t have many books left in him – his final novel was published in 1967 – and he seems to have mellowed slightly, but this novel still has plenty of drive to it. If you run across a copy, I recommend that you grab it. THE TAVERN is well worth reading, and I’m glad I replaced the copy I lost and finally read it.

(It doesn't seem like I've been reading Orrie Hitt novels for more than 15 years, but there's indisputable proof of that since this post first appeared in a somewhat different form on August 12, 2010. It's pretty clear that I'd been a Hitt fan for a while when it appeared, too. The photo below appeared the next day, August 13, 2010, with a link to a newspaper article about Hitt that doesn't seem to be available anymore. I love the picture, though. I look at it, and I just can't help liking the guy. It's time to read something else by him. THE TAVERN isn't currently in print, but plenty of his other novels are.)

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Wild Lovers - Orrie Hitt

This novel, a 1961 release from Kozy Books, is a typical Orrie Hitt yarn in some respects, but not in others. It’s a backwoods book, as you can probably tell from the cover, and sort of reminds me of some of Harry Whittington’s novels. It’s about the lives and loves of several people who come from a poor area in upstate New York known as Shanty Road. (There is, in fact, a sleaze novel by Whittington called SHANTY ROAD, published by Original Novels in 1954 under the Whit Harrison name. It would have made a good title for this book, too.)

Unlike the usual male protagonist you find in Hitt’s novels, the main character in WILD LOVERS is a young woman, Joy Gordon, who was orphaned at sixteen when a fire burned down the farm house where she lived with her parents, killing her mother and father. Left on her own, Joy moves into a shed that remains standing on the property and supports herself by selling eggs from the flock of chickens that’s almost her only possession of any value.

Almost, but not quite, because the property she inherited from her parents includes the only easy access to a lake which some developers want to turn into a hunting and fishing resort (another interest of Hitt’s). As the novel opens, though, the real estate agent in charge of the negotiations won’t meet Joy’s price. Actually, the agent is just trying to get her to go to bed with him, because in the five years since she was orphaned, she has grown up into a virginal, twenty-one-year-old beauty.

Helping out Joy is her neighbor, mechanic Pug Stark, who does meet the usual description of a big, burly Hitt hero. Pug comes from a real white trash family: his father refuses to work, and his sister is pregnant and has no idea who the father is. (Ah, the unwanted, unwed pregnancy, another favorite theme of Hitt’s.)

Then a stranger shows up, an artist from New York City whose family owns one of the properties along Shanty Road. He’s come up there to work and brought his beautiful mistress with him, and he’s a big, brawny guy, too. When he sees Joy, he immediately wants to paint a portrait of her – nude, of course – and his arrival changes everything, as Joy winds up juggling the three men who are interested in her, a neat reversal of the standard Hitt plot where the hero has to decide between three women.

That’s not the only twist that Hitt throws into the plot, as characters do things that take the reader by surprise and turn out not to be exactly what they appear to be at first. The ending won’t be any huge shock for Hitt fans, but it is pretty satisfying. The writing is good in this one, too, not quite as terse and hardboiled as in some of Hitt’s other books but with quite a few good lines.

WILD LOVERS is a good solid Orrie Hitt novel and very entertaining. If you haven’t read his work before, it would be a decent place to start, and if you have, you’ll want to read this one, too.

(How is it possible that I've been reading Orrie Hitt novels for more than 15 years? It certainly doesn't seem like it. But this post originally appeared on November 28, 2009, and WILD LOVERS wasn't the first novel by Hitt that I read, by any means. If you're interested in checking it out, there's a reprint edition available as an e-book.) 

A Rough Edges Rerun: Taboo Thrills - Orrie Hitt

“A Novel Book is a Man’s Book!” It says so right on the spine of Orrie Hitt’s TABOO THRILLS. That’s right, we return to the work of Orrie Hitt and it’s a good one.

First, some history. This book was originally published by Novel Books in 1962 under the title WARPED WOMAN. It was reprinted in 1963 as TABOO THRILLS, the edition I read. Then it was also reprinted in 1964 as WILMA’S WANTS. The folks at Novel Books, a Chicago publisher of soft-core porn and crime novels, must have really liked it.

Although the cover and the various titles make it sound like one of Hitt’s lesbian novels, it’s really not. It’s actually a semi-autobiographical yarn narrated by one Chet Long, a prolific author of what he refers to as “realistic” novels, by which, of course, he means the sort of Adults Only, early Sixties soft-core novels that this is. Chet lives in upstate New York (like Orrie Hitt), broke in by writing articles for hunting and outdoors magazines (like Orrie Hitt), and bangs out his books on a manual typewriter sitting at the kitchen table (like Orrie Hitt). The main difference is that while Hitt was a happily married man with a family, Chet Long is single and has a rich girlfriend, along with a number of other women on the side.

There’s not much plot here. Most of the book is concerned with a soap-opera-like romantic triangle involving Chet, Wilma (the rich, repressed girlfriend who hates the books he writes), and Sandy, a beautiful young free-spirited waitress who is much more suited to him. There’s also a peeping tom prowling the small city where they all live. (The peeping tom novel was another of Hitt’s specialties.) The plot just serves as an excuse for a number of lengthy rants against censorship and big government, both of which Hitt seems to have disliked equally.

But in the midst of all that are some wonderful bits about the life of a freelance writer, such as this comment from Sandy:

“I don’t get it,” she said. “I’ve read about writers and it seems crazy to me. You just write this junk and somebody prints it?”

I don’t know, of course, but I suspect that Hitt had a smile on his face when he wrote that paragraph.

Here’s a more serious passage I liked:

They say there’s tension in the advertising business but filling a blank sheet of paper is just as much tension. Your belly crawls when you can’t seem to do what you want to do. You struggle, you sweat – that’s nerves – you do the best you can, which is seldom good enough, and then you go to a bar where nobody gives a damn about what you do. You talk to men on the railroad, a retired lush who’s trying to stretch his Social Security check to the end of the month, some dame who’s got more kids than she needs and is knocked up again. You listen, buy a drink for somebody who can’t afford it – and maybe you take something about one, add it to the tragedy of another, and put it on paper. Or maybe the next day you’ve forgotten, lost in your own world because it is a world that is yours alone, since, as with all men, you are finally alone. Every man is an island, John Donne to the contrary. In the morning you make your coffee, read an out of town paper if it arrives on time, place your cup and saucer into the sink with assorted dirty dishes, and become a machine that spews words for readers you will never meet. You hope it’s a creative machine.

That’s not the most smoothly written passage in the world, but it’s got a passion and intensity to it that lifts this book to something more than sleaze, at least as far as I’m concerned. In another place, in talking about his writing career, Chet says something that reminds me of Robert E. Howard:

. . . people will suffer to accomplish what they want. Or perhaps it isn’t suffering so much as it is to have the guts to aim at a target and not be satisfied until they hit it. To many, mine wasn’t a very large target but it was one that many missed.

Finally, there’s another funny bit where Chet grabs a book off the newsstand at the train station so he’ll have something to read on a trip to New York City. He picks the book because the title intrigues him and doesn’t notice the name of the author, never realizing until he starts to read it that it’s one of his own novels, with his original title changed by the publisher. Given the history of this particular book – three editions in three years with three different titles – that’s a bit of inadvertent humor.

Unlike some of the other Hitt novels I’ve read, the ending of TABOO THRILLS is pretty believable and satisfying. Hitt evidently did some of his best or at least some of his most personal work for Novel Books, and I’m going to be on the lookout for more of those books. If you run across a copy of TABOO THRILLS (or WARPED WOMAN or WILMA’S WANTS), I think it’s well worth picking up and reading.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on May 22, 2009. I found an image of the cover of WARPED WOMAN, which you can see below, but WILMA'S WANTS seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. Irwin Shaw's story "Main Currents of American Thought" captures being a freelance writer better than any other piece of fiction I've ever read, but this Orrie Hitt novel comes close to the same level.)

A Rough Edges Rerun: Sin is a Redhead - Steve Harragan (William Maconachie)

Observant readers of this blog with a good memory [like since last Friday] may recognize this cover art. That's because it was used, with some minor modifications, on the cover of Orrie Hitt's novel PUSHOVER, which I wrote about a while back. That comes as no surprise, since the publisher of SIN IS A REDHEAD, Universal Publishing and Distributing, later published sleaze novels under the Beacon Books and Softcover Library imprints, and smaller publishers like that often reused cover art. (UPD also published a wider variety of paperbacks in the Sixties and Seventies under the Award Books imprint, including scores of the Nick Carter, Killmaster novels before that series moved over to Ace/Charter and eventually Berkley.)

I've finally gotten around to reading SIN IS A REDHEAD. Great cover, great title, okay book. "Steve Harragan", the author, is also the main character. Harragan the character is a former crime reporter who hit it big playing the ponies and retired to become a man about town/hardboiled amateur detective. Some websites refer to him as a private eye, but he's not, at least not in this book. In SIN IS A REDHEAD, Harragan is driving down the street in New York City when he spots the beautiful Flame Tilson. He makes her acquaintance, finds out that she's the girlfriend of jazz trumpeter Siggy Houston, and regretfully decides that there won't be any romance with the gorgeous Flame.

But then she calls on him for help, Siggy winds up dead, Flame disappears, and Steve (who, to be honest, is not the brightest guy in the world) winds up on the spot for the murder. So off he goes, galloping around the New York underworld trying to find the real killer and rescue Flame from the bad guys. Along the way he winds up in a couple of pretty diabolical death traps, which he barely escapes.

There's not much detective work in this book. It's more of a straight-ahead thriller, and while it's not particularly good overall, there are some nice scenes here and there and some surprisingly funny lines. It's written in that breezy Carter Brown style, and again, it's no big surprise to find that like Alan G. Yates, the author of the Carter Brown books, "Steve Harragan" the author is also an Englishman, William Maconachie. In fact, SIN IS A REDHEAD is actually a reprint of a British novel, REDHEAD RHAPSODY!, originally published by Hamilton & Company in London, probably in 1950, and reprinted in the States by Uni-Books in 1952. In the original version, both character and author were named "Bart Carson". The name was changed for the American edition, and the character was also given an eye-patch. All this information is courtesy of the top-notch British researcher and bibliographer Steve Holland, author of the indispensable history of post-war British paperbacks THE MUSHROOM JUNGLE. More details about Maconachie and the Bart Carson/Steve Harragan series can be found on Holland's excellent blog Bear Alley.

SIN IS A REDHEAD and the other Harragan paperbacks (which are actually digest size) seem to be pretty easy to come by, although some of them are a little pricey. [There are eight of them on Amazon as I write this, and the cheapest is $30, with prices going up to $195.] I'm not going to run right out and order the others [not at those prices!], but I found enough to like in this one that if I ever come across other books in the series I won't hesitate to pick them up if the price is reasonable.

[This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 11, 2011.]

A Rough Edges Rerun: Pushover - Orrie Hitt

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on March 27, 2009.)

PUSHOVER is the story of Danny Fulton, a small-time con man who, along with a couple of partners, specializes in a scam involving community histories and the Federal Writers Project of the WPA (the first time I’ve encountered that particular angle in a novel about grifters). Most of this yarn centers around Danny, who narrates the novel, putting his usual scheme into action in a small city in upstate New York.

Now, PUSHOVER is not without its flaws. There’s not much action, and in fact, not a lot happens in the entire book. The big twist near the end is pretty obvious early on, and the ending itself seems a little forced and doesn’t ring completely true to me.

So, why am I recommending that you read it if you come across a copy? Because Hitt does a remarkable job of capturing the grubby desperation of these people, especially Danny and his two partners, one a young, beautiful blonde who’s separated from her husband, the other an advance man and salesman who misses his wife and family. All of them seem to be teetering on an emotional brink, and so do most of the people they encounter.

But Danny himself is the centerpiece of the book, and he’s one of the most interesting characters I’ve run across in a while. He’s so determined that he’s a heel who cares only about money that even when he does something nice for somebody, which is surprisingly often, he has to rationalize it to himself by coming up with some rotten motive. Then, when he does decide to give up his career as a con man, settle down, and get married, you just know that it’s not going to work out for him. I don’t know if Hitt or his editor at Beacon Books titled this book PUSHOVER, but it’s an ironically apt title. The cover copy makes you think that it’s all the women in Danny’s life who are the pushovers, but the description actually fits him even better.

Of course, as with all the sleaze novels of that era, the cover copy also makes you think this book is a lot spicier than it really is. There’s actually very little sex in it, and most of what there is falls into the “sin, suffer, repent” pattern that’s also common to the genre. There are also quite a few nice lines, some funny, some poignant. Since this is the first novel I’ve read by Orrie Hitt, I can’t speak for the entire body of his work. Sure, he wrote a lot of books for not much money ($250 to $500 was the usual advance . . . which is really not that bad for that time period), but PUSHOVER, at least, is not the work of a hack. Hitt gives his characters enough depth to make them memorable and does so in prose that’s fast-paced and very readable, despite a few unpolished moments. I’ll be reading more of his novels soon.

Now for the other thing that intrigues me about this book: the cover art. It’s nothing special, really, okay but not spectacular, but as soon as I laid eyes on it, I said to myself, “I’ve seen this cover before, but on another book. And the guy had an eyepatch!” That nagged at me ever since the book arrived in the mail. I had a feeling that I had owned a book with the same art, and that it was on one of those early Fifties digest-sized novels published by Star Guidance, Croydon, Original Novels, etc. Long-time paperback collectors know the sort of thing I’m talking about. So a few nights ago, I sat down and started searching for those publishers on ABE and checking out the listings that included cover scans. I never found the one I was looking for, but that jogged my memory enough so that I remembered Uni Books, another digest line that happened to be published by Universal Publishing and Distributing, the same outfit that later published Beacon Books. Then a name popped into my head: Steve Harragan. I seemed to recall that was the name of the author (well, the pseudonym, anyway) as well as the main character. I searched for Harragan’s name, and up popped Uni Books #44, SIN IS A REDHEAD. “That’s it!” I said. I never read it, but I remembered having that book, and I was almost sure it had the same cover art as PUSHOVER, only the guy had an eyepatch.

Well, I mentioned this to my friend Frank Loose, and wouldn’t you know it, he has a copy of SIN IS A REDHEAD and sent me a cover scan. As you can see, it’s the same painting, only the eyepatch is there in the earlier version, just as I thought, and there are a few other modifications in the paperback version, such as the keyhole motif. The artist is George Geygan, a prolific painter of paperback covers. Steve Harragan, by the way, was really a British author named William Macconnachie, or something like that, a little Internet research reveals, and SIN IS A REDHEAD was originally one of those Mushroom Jungle books.

(And if you don’t know what I mean when I use the term Mushroom Jungle, you really need to check out this book by Steve Holland and this web page by John Fraser, which is part of a fascinating and much larger site.)

(I've gone on to read many novels by Orrie Hitt in the fifteen years since this post first appeared, of course, and I've enjoyed every one of them. Some more than others, of course, but I'm not sure Hitt was capable of writing a book that wasn't entertaining. An e-book edition of PUSHOVER is available now, if you want to check it out. A couple of years later I read SIN IN A REDHEAD by Steve Harragan, real name William Maconachie, and reviewed it. Maybe I'll rerun that one next week, although I'm trying to stick to 2009 posts for the most part, figuring fifteen years is long enough ago that there'll be a significant number of new readers for them. I hope.)

Trailer Tramp - Orrie Hitt

TRAILER TRAMPS, the new triple-decker collection from Stark House, has to have an Orrie Hitt novel in it, of course, and what better one than the similarly named TRAILER TRAMP? Published originally by Beacon Books in 1957, TRAILER TRAMP is Orrie Hitt near the top of his game, although there are some differences in it from his usual books, too.

For one thing, the protagonist of this novel, Joan Baker, isn’t trapped in a hardscrabble existence like many of Hitt’s protagonists. Instead, she’s a smart, hard-working young woman who runs a successful trailer camp established by her parents, who are now taking an extended vacation and have left Joan in charge. So money isn’t a worry as it so often is in a Hitt novel.

Which doesn’t mean that Joan is carefree. She has her personal demons to deal with. She was in love with a young man but after he tried to pressure her into sex and she refused (she’s a virgin), he turned to another girl to get what he wanted. But she still has feelings for the guy, and it doesn’t help when he starts working at the trailer camp.

Then a construction crew putting in a pipeline shows up and the boss of the job, Big Mike Summers, moves his trailer into the camp and Joan is immediately drawn to him. When she gives in to her feelings, she worries that she’s becoming a tramp. (Well, it’s right there in the title, although to be honest, Joan never comes across as particularly trampish.)

Other complications crop up, and although a lot of the book is domestic drama, it becomes a crime yarn as Hitt pulls off several nice twists, leaving the reader unsure of what’s going to happen almost right up to the end of the book.

I know Hitt worked as the manager of a hunting camp, but I don’t recall if he ever had any connection to trailer camps. He must have, because he does a great job with the setting in this book. As in so much of his work, the details of middle-class and lower-class life really have the ring of authenticity. His writing is sharp and the pace moves along at a nice clip. This is fine storytelling.

TRAILER TRAMP is in the top rank of the Orrie Hitt novels I’ve read. Along with TRAILER CAMP WOMAN by Doug Duperrault, it makes this new Stark House collection a solid two-for-two so far. That leaves LOVE CAMP ON WHEELS by Tom Harland, which I’ll be getting to soon. TRAILER TRAMPS is available in both e-book and print editions.

The Digest Enthusiast, Book Eleven - Richard Krauss, ed.

Interviews with Janice Law (Madame Selina series AHMM), Paul D. Marks (Bunker Hill series EQMM), and Jeff Vorzimmer (The Best of Manhunt).

Peter Enfantino summarizes 1954's final issues of Manhunt.

Vince Nowell, Jr. grapples with Beyond Infinity.

Richard Krauss spotlights Leo Margulies Giant of the Digests

Steve Carper dissects a Classic error.

Ward Smith quantifies Astounding's formats.

New fiction by John Kuharik, Vince Nowell, Sr., and Joe Wehrle, Jr. with artwork by Rick McCollum, Marc Myers, and Michael Neno.

Reviews of Homicide Hotel from Gary Lovisi, Tough 2, and Paperback Parade No. 104.

Plus nearly 150 digest magazine cover images, News Digest, cartoons by Bob Vojtko, first issue factoids, and more.

Cover by Rick McCollum, 160 pages, published by Larque Press.

The Digest Enthusiast--now in full color!--continues to be one of the very few magazines I read and one of my absolute favorite publications, bar none. This is a spectacular issue, and I haven't even finished going through it yet. Fans of the classic crime digest MANHUNT shouldn't miss this issue, with Peter Infantino's continuing series discussing the stories published there (I don't always agree with Peter's opinions, but they're sure fun to read!) and an interview with Jeff Vorzimmer focusing on his work on the great collection THE BEST FROM MANHUNT, as well as Jeff's other work with Stark House including the Orrie Hitt double for which I wrote the intro. Add in some fine reviews, a great article by editor Richard Krauss about Leo Margulies that brought back a lot of memories for me as both a reader and a writer, and plenty of other features, and there's no doubt that this new issue of The Digest Enthusiast gets a high recommendation from me!

Coming From Stark House: Warped Desires/The Strangest Sin - Kay Addams (Orrie Hitt)

WARPED DESIRE

It has to be this way every weekend, Laura said as we lay side by side. How can it be? My father will be home. After he has gone to sleep I can come to you. What if he should catch us? He won't catch us. We'll be smart. He's a sound sleeper but if that doesn't work out we can always take a ride into the country. I sighed and closed my eyes. This was my father's wife. And my lover....

THE STRANGEST SIN

Sharon Doyle felt dirty when she woke up in Jimmy Slade's bed, but that wasn't unusual. She always felt dirty after a night of passion in Jimmy's cheap room... Sharon owns a bar and too often ends up blotto at the end of the evening, letting Jimmy take her back to his place. Her neighbor Carl Evans is a nicer guy, but he won't make a move. Between them is Bert Robinson, the local racketeer who wants Sharon all to himself, no matter what it takes. But Sharon is tired of them. She finds herself more attracted to her bartender, Lucy, who keeps the local guys satisfied in a room upstairs. It's a lit-fuse situation, and all it takes is a single act of violence to set it off.

I wrote the introduction to this double volume from Stark House that will be out later this fall, and I'm proud to have done so. Both novels are top-notch tales from a great storyteller, and I give this collection a very high recommendation.

Forgotten Books: Sheba - Orrie Hitt

For the first Forgotten Book of the year, I’m turning to an old favorite author, Orrie Hitt. SHEBA was published originally by Beacon Books in 1959 with a great cover by Rudy Nappi and is available today in an e-book edition. The title character, Sheba Irons, is a beautiful young woman in a bad situation: she lives at home (a rundown house in the country) with her drunken, lazy father and brother and her mother, who’s too beaten down by life to ever stand up for herself or Sheba. The only glimmer of hope Sheba has is that she has a job, even though it’s only working as an office girl at a car dealership. And she has a boyfriend of sorts, a young tree surgeon, but he keeps pressuring her for sex and Sheba is a good girl, a virgin who’s determined to save herself for marriage.

Well, as you can probably guess, a lot of that changes during the course of this novel. Sheba discovers that she has a knack for selling cars (the fact that she’s gorgeous probably has something to do with this), she’s pressured into getting involved in a shady kickback scheme with a guy who runs a finance company, and she winds up not only losing her virginity but getting mixed up with several guys who are typical Orrie Hitt heels. There’s even a beautiful lesbian after Sheba before her rise to success and power (relatively speaking) hits the inevitable obstacles and falls apart. Since this is a Hitt novel, you can figure that things will eventually work out for Sheba, at least to a certain extent, but he puts her through the wringer before that.

While this book probably doesn’t belong in the top rank of Hitt’s work, due to a rather thin plot and the abruptness of the ending, it’s a solid second-tier novel that’s compulsively readable. I really raced through it and enjoyed it a lot. SHEBA is set in a small city called Mayville, and it occurred to me that many of Hitt’s novels show us what was going on in the seedier parts of those towns where Beaver Cleaver and the Andersons from FATHER KNOWS BEST lived. I love those shows, but I don’t mind seeing the Fifties from a different perspective now and then, too. Orrie Hitt delivered that perspective better than anybody else in the business.

Forgotten Books: The Widow - Orrie Hitt

This guy Orrie Hitt can really write, see? This book here called THE WIDOW, it’s about a tough guy named Jerry who gets fired from his job building a highway, so he goes to work washing dishes and sweeping out at this crappy café that’s got some crappy tourist cabins with it. It’s a lousy job, but Jerry’s okay with it because there’s this girl named Linda who’s married to the son of the old lady who owns the place, and she’s a real babe. Then there’s this other girl named Norma, and she used to work as a nude model, so you know she’s gorgeous, but she’s also really nice and would just as soon put all that behind her. So Jerry likes both of ’em and figures, well, why the hell not, he’ll just make a play for both of them and see what happens. But then Linda’s husband, who’s a hotrodder, wrecks his jalopy and kills himself, which means Linda’s a widow now, and you know how widows are, and at the same time Jerry finds out that the land where the café and the cabins are is actually worth a bundle, and if something was to happen to the old lady, hey, Jerry might be able to get his hands on some of that dough and get one or both of the girls to boot . . .

Well, you gotta read it to find out what happens, but this guy Hitt is good, I tell you, pal. You should pick up a copy.

Forgotten Books: Wayward Girl - Orrie Hitt

WAYWARD GIRL starts out about as bleak as any Orrie Hitt novel I’ve read so far. The protagonist, Sandy Greening, is a 16-year-old prostitute and heroin addict who lives with her drunken, slutty mother and is a member of the Blue Devils, the local gang of young hoodlums who are at war with a rival gang, the Black Cats. Sandy was raped by a neighbor when she was 14, she has to fend off the advances of her mother’s drug-dealing boyfriend, and when the leader of the Blue Devils kills a guy during a rumble, she’s hauled in by the cops for questioning in a murder case!

With all that going on, it’s a little surprising that when Sandy does finally get in trouble with the law, it’s a simple prostitution bust that gets her sent to a reform school. That reform school is a progressive one that tries to rehabilitate the girls sent there. At least it is on the surface, but the school has some criminal secrets of its own . . .

As you’d expect from a novel published by Beacon Books in 1960, WAYWARD GIRL gets pretty doggone lurid. And after a little bit of a slow start, man, does our old friend Orrie Hitt keep the pedal to the floor. This book races along and is hugely entertaining. Brian Greene, who contributes the introduction to the Stark House volume that reprints this novel and another Hitt tale, THE WIDOW, compares WAYWARD GIRL to a drive-in movie, and that’s pretty accurate. I can see it being filmed in gritty black-and-white.

What elevates it from the usual story like this, though, is the theme of sympathy for the underdog that runs through most of Hitt’s novels. He doesn’t sugarcoat things, and he doesn’t blame society for the characters’ problems. They bear the responsibility for their own actions and bad decisions. But there’s also a sense of understanding what led them to those actions and decisions, and Hitt seldom comes right out and condemns his protagonists. They usually find their way back to the possibility of happiness, at least. Hitt’s novels are like no others in the so-called sleaze genre, and while some are better than others, I’ve never read one that failed to leave me both entertained and emotionally moved. If you’ve never read his work, WAYWARD GIRL would make a decent starting place. If you’re already a Hitt fan, like me, you’ll want to grab this new reprint right away.

Coming From Stark House: Wayward Girl/The Widow - Orrie Hitt

WAYWARD GIRL

Sandy Greening loses her virginity at fourteen to a drunken neighbor. Her mother doesn't care. She's drunk herself all the time on cheap wine. So Sandy starts running with a gang, The Blue Devils, and that's where she first turns on to marijuana, and not long after, heroin. That's when she starts to sell herself to anyone with the bucks to pay for her highs. But the night Tommy asks her to hold his knife before they rumble with The Black Cats is the night that changes Sandy's life forever. A kid gets killed, and the cops put the finger on Sandy for information. And when she won't give it up the easy way, they set her up and go after it the hard way, all the way to reform school. And that's where Sandy starts to learn the real lessons of life.

THE WIDOW

When Jerry Rebner starts working for Mrs. Sprague as her cook at the Dells, he figures he knows what he wants Linda. Lush and ripe, Linda has everything Jerry likes in a woman, and more. Linda is married to Frank, Mrs. Sprague's shiftless hot rodding son, who widows her when he plows into a tree one drunken evening. Then Jerry meets Norma, sweet, virginal Norma, who used to pose as a nude model! Torn between the two women, and by the memory of his first wife, Jerry begins to drink. Then Linda comes to him with a plan. Mrs. Sprague's property is worth $50,000 to a development company, but she won't sell. Linda is all she has left, her sole heir. And those steps leading down to the cellar are awfully steep......

Orrie Hitt has become one of my favorite authors in recent years, and I take a little pride in helping to rekindle interest in his work through guest posts on my blog by Frank Loose and Brian Ritt examining his career. This upcoming double volume from Stark House looks great! I haven't read either of these novels yet, but Hitt's work for Beacon Books was some of his best. The Stark House volume is available for pre-order.

Orrie Hitt Video

Thanks to Brian Ritt for the heads-up on this! Orrie's now a video star. Can you imagine what he would have thought all those years, sitting in his kitchen banging away at his typewriter, if you told him his work was going to make such a comeback? I suspect he would have been happy about it.

Forgotten Books: The Sucker - Orrie Hitt

I felt like reading an Orrie Hitt novel since it had been a while, and I picked a really good one in THE SUCKER. It's written to the usual Hitt formula, but also as usual, he finds ways to change things up enough to keep the story fresh and interesting.

I thought this was going to be a car racing book at first—some of the back-story concerns how one of the female characters winds up in business with the driver responsible for the accident that killed her father—but instead it centers around a company that sells engines and engine parts to hotrodders, as well as a revolutionary design for one of those engines.

The protagonist and narrator is Slade Harper, the engineer responsible for that design, who's running a down-on-its-luck gas station that he won in a card game from a guy on a construction project in Iceland. The guy wound up blowing his brains out over an Icelandic girl, and when Slade shows up to claim the gas station, he finds the former owner's sister still living there and running the place. (You can't accuse Hitt of skimping on the back-story.) Anyway, Slade winds up working for a former race car driver and the beautiful daughter of the guy the driver killed in a crash (see above paragraph), and being an unscrupulous heel, Slade figures out a way to swindle them out of the company. But then he falls for the girl, and things get complicated...

Hitt's writing is really sharp in those one, with plenty of good lines and a pace that barrels along and an overwhelming sense of blue-collar angst. Slade Harper may well be the most unsympathetic Hitt protagonist I've encountered so far. Usually the main characters in these novels are amoral jerks (or at least they think they are), but deep inside they have a streak of decency. With Slade, the reader really has to wonder if that's going to turn out to be the case.

Hitt's "heroes" are usually torn between three women: the good one, the bad one, and the tragically flawed one. That seems not to be the case in THE SUCKER, as all three women Slade gets involved with are basically sympathetic characters. Or are they? Again, Hitt comes up with some nice twists. I've read enough of these novels to know who the protagonist is going to wind up with most of the time, but that question kept me in suspense all the way to the end, too.

Originally published by Beacon Books in 1957, THE SUCKER is available in an e-book edition from Prologue Books. It's a fine example of the thing Hitt did best: he wrote novels that are actually very small in scope, where not much happens and the things that do affect only a small handful of people. But in the lives of those people, those events are epic and earth-shaking, and nobody ever conveyed that emotion more powerfully than Orrie Hitt.

Forgotten Books: Pleasure Ground - Orrie Hitt

It had been a while since I'd read anything by our old pal Orrie Hitt, so I figured it was time. PLEASURE GROUND was published originally by Kozy Books in 1961. It's not one of the novels that's been reprinted in recent years, although it seems to me to be a good candidate.

Hitt wrote a number of books set on farms, including this one. Bert Forbes is a typical Hitt narrator/protagonist: a big galoot, not overly bright, not burdened with an excess of morals, but deep down a fairly decent guy. He's been hired by farmer Flint Collins to paint Collins's house and barn. Collins is a brutal skinflint who pays all his help cheaply and treats them badly, including his teenage daughter Norma. He's maybe the most despicable villain I've run across so far in Hitt's work.

Things seem to look up a bit for Bert when he meets beautiful Lucy Martin, who owns the farm next to the Collins place, and in true soft-core fashion he first encounters her when she's sunbathing nude next to a swimming hole in the local creek. But then Bert's sleazy ex-wife Emily shows up with a tragic story, and Collins, a widower, brings home a new wife, a beautiful, amoral bitch named Sharon, and things start to get very complicated and messy, including an unwanted pregnancy (a staple in Hitt's books), blackmail, and finally murder.

Read enough of Hitt's books and the nuts and bolts of his various formulas really start to show, and I've reached that point. However, even when you know what he's doing, he has a way of dragging you in and making you care what's going to happen to his characters. I think it's the sheer passion that he brought to his work. He believed in it, so the reader does, too. Although by all accounts he had a happy home life and a reasonably successful career, he knew the desperation of people pushed to the brink, sometimes by their own choices and sometimes by a cruel fate they can't control, and he conveyed those emotions with a lot of power.

PLEASURE GROUND is a good example of that. It's not without its flaws—it seems to me to go on a little too long, stretching out not quite enough plot for its wordage—but I certainly enjoyed it, all the way to the seemingly tacked-on happy ending that Hitt employed in most of his books. People have speculated that such endings were an editorial requirement, but I'm not so sure. I think Hitt believed in them, as much as in all the angst that comes before them. If you're a fan of his work, this one is well worth reading.

As a side note, another Hitt novel called PLEASURE GROUND was published two years earlier by Bedside Books, but I don't think it's the same novel. The description of it given by an Internet bookseller doesn't match the plot of the one I read except in its rural setting. But I've never seen a copy of the earlier book, only a scan of its cover, so I don't really know.

Orrie Hitt-inspired Musical

You never know what you're going to find in your email. This morning I heard from Niki Romijn, a Dutch musical theater performer who's written a show about a woman obsessed with the novels of Orrie Hitt, using the same title as one of those books, DIAL "M" FOR MAN. It's a little amazing to me that interest in Hitt's work has spread so far, and I'm proud to be part of the small circle of folks who helped start that resurgence. Here's a small excerpt from Niki's show:

Forgotten Books: Private Club - Orrie Hitt

I'm wrapping up Forgotten Books for the year with an old friend, Orrie Hitt. PRIVATE CLUB (Beacon Books, 1959, and as far as I know, never reprinted) is set at an exclusive hunting and fishing resort in upstate New York, just the sort of place where Hitt worked as a young man. He drew on that part of his life as the inspiration for a number of books, and this is a good one.

The story focuses on three couples: Fred Jennings, who owns a successful valve company, and his semi-frigid wife Sandra; drunken copper salesman Virgil Blanding and his slutty wife Lucy; and Eddie Race, the manager of the club and a typical Hitt heel, who's involved with beautiful young waitress Beth Collins. Well, you can probably plug these characters into the various plot equations as well as I can, although Hitt throws in a little lesbianism to spice things up. And as usual, the cover promises more raunch than the book delivers. The club is hardly the hotbed of orgies you might think. In fact, although the characters think and talk a lot about sex (when they're not boozing it up), they never actually get around to doing much.

Nothing in this book really surprised me. So why did I sit there avidly turning the pages to find out what was going to happen? Because Hitt was a master at getting inside his characters' heads and making the reader care about them. I can't put my finger on how he did it, but he had one of the most readable, compelling styles I've encountered.

Actually, I think I do know, not on a technical level regarding the prose but on a more emotional level. The reader cares about the characters because Hitt cares about them. Although he was capable of writing excellent crime novels, most of his books are about the sort of people he saw around him all the time: blue-collar workers, hustling salesmen, owners of small companies. What he saw must have filled him with the bleak despair that permeates his books.

Yet at the same time there's a lot of compassion at work. Most of Hitt's heels have some decent qualities, too. A part of them wants to do the right thing, if they can just figure out what it is and find the courage to do it. Eddie Race in this book is a prime example of that. Most of the characters in Hitt's novels, no matter how bad they are, have at least a shot at redemption. It's been theorized that the rushed, sometimes awkward happy endings in Hitt's novels were forced on him by the publishers, but after reading more of his work I'm not so sure anymore. I think maybe Hitt, by all accounts a very decent, happily married family man himself, possessed a deep-seated optimism that carried over to his characters. He wanted to believe that no matter how much emotional torment he put them through, by the end of the book they still had a hope of happiness. I think those endings, hurried though they might be because sometimes he was running out of the required wordage, may just be the true essence of Hitt's fiction.

Or maybe I'm just full of it, who can say? For our purposes, here's what you need to know: PRIVATE CLUB is damned entertaining and one of my favorite Orrie Hitt novels so far. Like I said above, it hasn't been reprinted as far as I know, and the copies available on the Internet are a little pricey. But if you ever run across a copy for a reasonable cost, I'd advise grabbing it. It's well worth reading.

Forgotten Books: Dial "M" for Man - Orrie Hitt

There I was, in the mood to read another Orrie Hitt novel, when what should arrive in my mailbox but an advance copy of the latest Stark House double volume, THE CHEATERS/DIAL "M" FOR MAN, by none other than Orrie Hitt. This book will be out in October, and it features not only the two novels but also a fine introduction by Brian Ritt (a revised version of his essay "The Sleazy Side of the Street", which first appeared on this blog), and an equally fine afterword and Hitt bibliography by Michael Hemmingson. As someone who played a small part in reviving interest in Hitt's work (along with Frank Loose, who produced a fine blog essay on Hitt's novel I'LL CALL EVERY MONDAY), I'm very happy to see these two novels reprinted and hope that the book sells well enough to warrant more Orrie Hitt reprints.

But in the meantime, I'm going to stretch a point and call Hitt's DIAL "M" FOR MAN a Forgotten Book, because the Stark House volume isn't out yet and this novel has been out of print since its original Beacon Books edition in 1962. Of the two books in the reprint volume, I chose to read this one first for a very personal reason: the protagonist is a TV repairman.


Now, some of you already know that my dad was a TV repairman for many years. In the early Fifties, sensing how popular TV was going to be and realizing there would be a need for people to work on them, he took a correspondence course in TV repair and then went to a trade school in Kentucky for six weeks to get some hands-on experience. He was already working in the aircraft industry and continued to do so for many years, but he also fixed TVs as a sideline, so I grew up around torn-apart TV sets, vacuum tubes, soldering irons, and more extension cords than you've ever seen in your life. (A bit of wisdom from my father: "If you ever fall out of an airplane, try to grab an extension cord. It'll get tangled and hang up on something before you hit the ground." He also taught me that if you take a TV apart, all the screws that came out of it don't necessarily have to go back into it, because "it ain't goin' anywhere.") I never really took to TV repair myself, although I worked for him for a while and got considerably better at it than the average person. I could diagnose and repair maybe half the problems I encountered.


Anyway, I could go on, but this is a Forgotten Books post, not an autobiography. At one time in Orrie Hitt's life, he also worked as a TV repairman, and I can tell you, he really nails that background in DIAL "M" FOR MAN. Dealing with the public, keeping up with the work in the shop and the service calls, the difficulty getting parts, trying to make ends meet . . . it's all there. I'm not sure anybody was ever better than Hitt at capturing the details of everyday life for struggling blue-collar workers.


Like a lot of prolific writers, Hitt would usually fall back on a specific set of plot elements, and that's true here. The protagonist is torn between two women, he struggles economically, there are forces beyond his control conspiring against him, an unwanted pregnancy crops up, the possibility of murder begins to look more and more appealing . . . The trick that Hitt pulls off consistently is to take these plot elements and work changes on them, which he does to nice effect in DIAL "M" FOR MAN. I've read enough of his novels by now that I knew where the story was going to end up, but I didn't always know how it was going to get there. Anyway, what makes Hitt's novels well worth reading are those little touches of everyday life and the sheer desperation that grips his characters as fate clamps down on them. If you want a true picture of certain segments of society in the Fifties and early Sixties, I suspect you're more likely to find it in an Orrie Hitt novel than in most of the mainstream fiction of that era. To see what I'm talking about, you can pick up this Stark House volume when it becomes available.


Heck, I'll bet you can even go ahead and pre-order it if you want to. Now, hand me that solderin' iron. Got a loose connection here on this resistor . . . or maybe it's that dang horizontal output tube . . .

Orrie Hitt News from Stark House Press

All right!  Two Orrie Hitt novels I don't have.  Check it out.

Forgotten Books: Summer of Sin - Orrie Hitt

For the last Forgotten Book of the year here on Rough Edges, we return to old reliable Orrie Hitt, with the 1961 Beacon novel, SUMMER OF SIN. Hitt’s narrator this time around is Clem Evans, the usual 6’4” protagonist. Clem is 22 and has big plans: he’s going to take over a swimming and picnicking resort on the local river for the summer and make enough money to buy a shop that sells cigarettes, beer, and dirty books. But his girlfriend, pretty and semi-wholesome Nan Gordon (she only puts out for him) doesn’t like the idea and thinks he should take the janitor job that’s open at the hospital where she works. They break up over the issue and Clem winds up getting involved with local bad girl Emily Stucker while he works to get the beach resort ready for the summer season. Another distraction arises in the shapely form of Gloria Darnell, the beautiful daughter of the woman who owns the resort (which she’s only leasing to Clem). Clem falls hard for Gloria, but obstacles keep cropping up in his path, including a knife-happy JD who has a grudge against him.


As you can see, it’s the usual Hitt formula with the hero/heel juggling three women. Clem is a little more of a heel than some Hitt protagonists, as he continually mooches money off the women in his life, but he’s not as bad as some and wants to do the right thing, he just can’t seem to figure out what it is sometimes. Common Hitt themes such as fear of pregnancy, dirty pictures, and lesbianism show up, too, although for the most part SUMMER OF SIN revolves around money: Clem’s desperate, grasping need for it and his inability to get enough of it. There are a couple of crime angles, including a murder and a blackmail plot, but neither of them really amount to much. The ending is a series of abrupt deus ex machina twists, as if Hitt realized he had gotten enough words and wanted to wrap things up so he could get on to the next book. (I know that feeling!)


So why, given all that, should you read SUMMER OF SIN if you come across a copy of it? Because nobody was ever better than Orrie Hitt at creating an atmosphere of sheer, gritty desperation. Take away the phony happy endings that were probably required by the publishers, and Hitt’s books are the noirest of the noir, inhabited by people who don’t have enough money or love or anything else, people who numb themselves with sex and booze in order to cope with their grinding unhappiness, people who go down the wrong paths knowingly because they can’t seem to find the right ones. Even the rich people in Hitt’s novels are flawed and miserable. SUMMER OF SIN doesn’t belong in the top rank of Hitt novels, but it’s well worth reading because it captures that small-town darkness so vividly, yet still manages to hold out a small sliver of hope, whether it’s really believable or just another trick of fate. I had a great time reading this book, just as I do with nearly all of Orrie Hitt’s novels.