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.) 

Flesh Fix - William Kane (Ben Haas)

Political corruption, blackmail, bribery, and multiple murders all figure in the plot of FLESH FIX, a crime novel masquerading as sleaze as so many of those softcore books are. Ben Haas’s writing is smooth and fast, as always, and kept me flipping the pages in this tale of a formerly honest reporter trying to regain his self-respect after being roped into a crooked politician’s inner circle. And to be fair, there actually is quite a bit of sex in this novel, and it’s fairly graphic for 1964. It’s a good yarn and I enjoyed it.

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.

Object of Lust - Mark West (Charles Runyon)

Charles Runyon is one of those writers who isn’t very well-known, but his work is quite well-regarded by those who have read it. I think Ed Gorman is the first person I recall who told me how good Runyon’s novels are. Runyon wrote mostly crime and mystery fiction (including ghosting three non-series novels under the Ellery Queen name) and science fiction. In the early Sixties, he also wrote three soft-core novels for Softcover Library (the successor to Beacon Books) under the name Mark West.

The third and final of those novels is OBJECT OF LUST, originally published in 1962 and just reprinted by Black Gat Books for the first time since then. Like many of the soft-core novels from that era, it’s actually a crime/suspense yarn. Set at a lake resort where well-to-do families have vacation cabins, it seems at first that the protagonist of this novel is Lewis Leland, a young ex-GI who teaches waterskiing to the wives and teenage daughters of those wealthy families. He saves one of those wives, beautiful Marian Morgan, from drowning one day and falls for her. He sets out to seduce her and almost succeeds, but they’re caught in the woods by a couple of kids before they can complete the act. Marian panics and won’t have anything more to do with Lewis.

That’s when we realize that Lewis is actually crazy, a sociopath who has killed before—and will again as he starts stalking Marian, determined to have her for his own even if he has to kidnap and rape her.

While this is going on, we also get a look at the affairs of various unhappily married couples, including Marian and her lawyer husband Dee. The people who are staying around the lake are a pretty degenerate bunch in some ways, indulging in plenty of drinking and adultery, but Runyon pulls off the neat trick of getting the reader to sympathize with them. Despite the sordidness of the situations, some of them actually come off as pretty likeable.

Not Lewis Leland, though. He’s easily one of the creepiest villains I’ve encountered in fiction, and that makes the last fifty pages or so of this book race by in breakneck fashion. I couldn’t turn those pages fast enough. OBJECT OF LUST is a slow burn most of the way, except for an occasional shockingly abrupt outbreak of violence, but when it finally takes off, it really takes off.

It occurs to me that what Runyon is doing here is taking a standard Gold Medal type of plot and turning it on its head in many ways. Lewis Leland would be the protagonist of a Gold Medal novel, and Marian Morgan would be the femme fatale. He does a great job of this reversal, too. His writing is top-notch, with excellent characterizations and observations on life reminiscent of John D. MacDonald. Some of it is genuinely unpleasant to read because of how evil Lewis is, but that just raises the stakes. The sex scenes are a little more graphic than in most books from that era but still pretty mild by the standards of what came later. Overall, OBJECT OF LUST is a really good book, a well-written page-turner that deserves a new lease on life. I’m glad Black Gat is reprinting it. You can order the paperback on Amazon.

Forgotten Books: Lust Grave - John Dexter

You never know what you’re going to get when you start one of these books, especially when it was published under a house-name. There’s no telling who “John Dexter” was on this book. It hasn’t been attributed to any of the usual stable: Block, Westlake, Silverberg, etc. And based on the quality of the prose, it wasn’t any of those guys. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad.

Also with these books, you could get almost any sort of story, from the darkest noir to screwball comedies (although most of them lean toward the hardboiled/noir side). All you can really count on is that there’ll be a number of lengthy, highly euphemistic sex scenes.

LUST GRAVE, published in 1964, is one of the dark, noirish books. Corrupt, sociopathic Bull Chapman, who works as a cop in the small city of Adamsville, Missouri, prowls the local Lover’s Lane looking for couples he can prey on. He intimidates the young men into abandoning their dates, then rapes the girls and frightens them into keeping quiet about it. He sniffs out cheating wives and blackmails them into having sex with him. It’s a good life for a monster like Bull, but then he makes the mistake of targeting the wrong couple: pre-med student Richard Bristol, who just wants to settle down and marry his high school sweetheart Laura Dale. Although they intend to wait for marriage to sleep together, they get carried away one night in the woods, but before they can finish, Bull catches them and proceeds with his usual brutal assault. He figures he’ll get away with it the way he always has.

But in this case, Richard and Laura decide to get even with him. And the best way to do that is to kill him . . .

Of course, being a couple of typical small-town, mid-century American youth, planning and committing a murder isn’t necessarily easy for them. And in this type of novel, things always go wrong.

Whoever John Dexter was in this case, LUST GRAVE really moves. Like most of the books from this publisher, it has the narrative drive of a rocket. I was really flipping the pages to find out what was going to happen. The prose is kind of unpolished at times, and the author drags in some sub-plots that are there mostly to pad out the wordage and provide an excuse for more sex scenes, but there are long stretches of the book that read like a second-or-third tier Gold Medal novel. The plot doesn’t play out exactly like I thought it would, either, which is always a bonus. And as is also usual with books like this, LUST GRAVE provides a nice window into everyday life for the middle and lower class in the late Fifties/early Sixties era. You can almost imagine a slightly older Wally Cleaver or Bud Anderson getting into the sort of trouble that Richard Bristol does.

As I often say about books like this, LUST GRAVE is no lost masterpiece, but it is a highly readable, entertaining yarn that I raced through in a day. If you ever come across a copy for a reasonable price, it’s worth reading.

Forgotten Books: Her Cheating Heart - Lloyd Kevin (Harold G. Sweet)

I admit, I bought this book mostly for the great Tom Miller cover (that's my copy in the scan), but I was also curious about the author. “Lloyd Kevin” was the pseudonym of Harold G. Sweet, who published about a dozen stories under that name in the Western pulps during the Fifties and another handful under his real name. There’s not much information about him on-line. According to a newspaper in San Bernardino, California, in 1953 he was a civilian employee at Norton Air Force Base and had written a novel under the Lloyd Kevin name. However, HER CHEATING HEART, published by Monarch Books in 1962, appears to be the only Lloyd Kevin novel that exists, and I couldn’t find any under the Harold G. Sweet name. Did Sweet write this book in the early Fifties but didn’t sell it until a decade later? Or did that book mentioned in that newspaper article fail to sell at all? A little biographical blurb in HER CHEATING HEART refers to Lloyd Kevin as being the pseudonym of a “well-known author of Westerns and contemporary novels”. We may have to chalk that up as editorial hyperbole, or else Sweet was writing under other name (or names) I don’t know about, which is certainly possible.

All that being said, how’s the novel itself? Well . . . kind of a mixed bag. This is a “down on his luck drifter finds trouble” yarn. That plot has been used many times, so the appeal in a book like this lies in how well the author handles those traditional elements. The protagonist in HER CHEATING HEART is Trigg Melnor, and I have a mixed reaction to that, as well. Trigg is a good, tough, Ennis Willie-style protagonist name; Melnor doesn’t have a lot of punch. But anyway . . . Trigg hitches a ride to a big construction project in Arizona where an old friend of his has promised to get him a job. The government is building a giant missile base, and Trigg has experience operating heavy machinery. All the workers live nearby in a trailer park, and Trigg’s old buddy Hutch expect him to stay with him and his wife Joy. Trigg didn’t even know Hutch was married, let alone to a beautiful, hot-to-trot redhead who immediately falls for him.

But wait, that’s not all. The boss of the construction project, Kirby Breckline (a much better name), is an old enemy of Trigg’s, and he’s involved with Joy as well. Then there’s Breckline’s scheming wife Eunice, and a possibly sinister Italian with a secret and an agenda of his own.

With a set-up like this, I kept expecting HER CHEATING HEART to turn into a noirish crime yarn, but it never really does. There’s an attempted murder, but it’s not the focus of the plot. For the most part, this remains a domestic drama all the way through, concentrating on Joy and the three men who are involved with her. The problem is that Joy is a really bland character with almost no personality, so you have to keep asking yourself why these guys want her in the first place. She practically disappears from the pages in the scenes she’s in.

However, the book does a pretty good job of depicting blue-collar construction workers and the early Sixties setting. Trigg isn’t a very likable protagonist, but I did wind up rooting for him, at least a little. There are some poignant scenes and a very occasional touch of welcome humor. The plot lurches along and comes to a sort of satisfying climax. HER CHEATING HEART isn’t a book you want to go out and search for, but if you ever come across a copy at a reasonable price, it’s not terrible. I know, that’s about the faintest praise I can offer.

It does have that really good Tom Miller cover, but you know the old saying about not judging a book by it’s cover. That’s true here, only the opposite way around from the usual meaning. The cover is probably the best thing about HER CHEATING HEART.

Forgotten Books: Frisco Flat - Stuart James

See, I thought this book was about an apartment in San Francisco. Nope, not at all. It’s set in California, but that’s about the only thing I got right. Frisco Flat is actually the name of the small town where Frankie Cargo grew up. (And isn’t Frankie Cargo a great name for a protagonist? I wonder if he’s related to Clutch.)

At any rate, Frisco Flat is on the coast, with farms to the east and the Pacific to the west, so it’s both an agricultural town and a fishing town. Frankie grew up there, the son of a fisherman, then went off to the Korean War, and when it was over, he knocked around various places for six years before finally returning to his home when he gets the news that his father has died.

We’ve all read enough of these books to have a pretty good idea what’s going to happen. Frankie quickly runs afoul of the local law and discovers that sinister things are going on in Frisco Flat. For one thing, his father was murdered. The local big shot tries to buy the fishing boat Frankie inherits, and when Frankie refuses to sell, the boat is vandalized. The beautiful brunette who’s moved into his house is a hostess in the local honkytonk and also the mistress of the corrupt sheriff. There’s a beautiful rich blonde who wants to help Frankie, but can she really be trusted? His best friend from childhood and the other fishermen in the area are counting on him to break the hold of the bad guys who have moved in and taken over, so he can’t just cut his losses and leave.

Unlike most of the authors who wrote for Monarch Books, Stuart James seems to have used his real name on this and the eight other novels he wrote in his career: three movie novelizations from the Sixties, three hardboiled sleaze novels (this one and two for Midwood), also in the Sixties, and three thrillers in the Eighties from Bantam. This information is from my friend David Spencer, who has read and collected them all. Why the long gap in the middle of his career and why he didn’t write more, I have no idea. It’s a shame, because based on FRISCO FLAT, he was pretty darned good. The plot in this one is fairly standard, but as I’ve said many times, the appeal of a book with a traditional plot lies in how well the writer handles those elements. James does a good job. This book is a little better written, a little more literary in places, if you will, than many of the hardboiled novels from that era.

On the other hand, while FRISCO FLAT moves along well, it doesn’t have quite the same sort of propulsive storytelling you find in books by Harry Whittington and Gil Brewer, for example, nor does James have his plot as tightly under control as, say, Day Keene usually does. Unless I missed something, he never completely resolves one of the main plot points. But hey, Raymond Chandler didn’t know who killed the chauffeur, either. I enjoyed this one enough that I won’t hesitate to read the other couple of books by Stuart James that I have on hand.

Now, a word about that cover. When I first looked at it, I thought that maybe Tom Miller had painted it, because it reminded me of covers by Miller on some of the other Monarch Books. However, this one isn’t on Lynn Munroe’s checklist of Miller’s covers, and I trust Lynn completely in such matters. Also, FRISCO FLAT was published a couple of years earlier than Miller did most of his work for Monarch. So I don’t know who painted this cover, but it’s a really good one anyway.

Forgotten Books: Gutter Road - Don Elliott (Robert Silverberg)

As we all know, many of the soft-core “Adult Reading” novels published in the Fifties and early Sixties were really hardboiled crime novels spiced up with a number of flowery, euphemistic sex scenes, while the rest of the book was written in a much tougher, grittier style. GUTTER ROAD, a 1964 Sundown Reader by Robert Silverberg writing as Don Elliott, is a perfect example of this. It opens with the protagonist, a slightly dissatisfied with his life, 38-year-old bookkeeper named Fred Bauman, driving home one rainy night in New York City when he stops to pick up a beautiful young female hitchhiker.

Bad mistake, Fred, as anybody who’s ever read a vintage paperback could tell you. Before you know it, Fred is involved with a blackmail scheme and up to his ears in trouble. Like the ripples from a rock thrown in a pond, his problems spread out to include his wife and his hot-to-trot teenage daughter. There’s a subplot about a down-on-his-luck real estate developer who is also mixed up with the blackmail ring. Things look bad for Fred, but as we also know . . . they can always get worse.

And they usually do in the soft-core books by Silverberg, who turned out some of the bleakest novels in the genre. These aren’t feel-good yarns, but what they are is fast. GUTTER ROAD has some of the smoothest, page-flippingest prose I’ve come across in a while. (If page-flippingest isn’t a word, it ought to be.) I really raced through this one. I would have been okay if the crime element had been played up a little more and some of the sex scenes given fewer pages, but Silverberg knew his audience. GUTTER ROAD has never been reprinted, as far as I know, but if you ever run across a copy, it’s not pretty but it is worth reading.

Forgotten Books: The Twisted Mistress - Ennis Willie

The telegram finally caught Tagger on a dismal morning-after in a New Orleans brothel.

That’s the opening line in Ennis Willie’s excellent hardboiled mystery novel THE TWISTED MISTRESS, published in 1963 by Merit Books and, to my knowledge, never reprinted. And if you can read that and not feel compelled to keep flipping the pages, you’ve got more self-control than I do.

Tagger is Lash Tagger (Willie’s protagonists always had great names). Years earlier, as a runaway from the orphanage where he was raised, Tagger was taken under the wing of Alex Beaumont, a textile mill owner who had worked his own way up from hardship to riches. Beaumont has a son and daughter of his own, but Tagger almost becomes like a son to him as well, until a falling-out between them causes Tagger to take off on his own when he’s a young man.

Now several years have passed and Tagger is broke, but the telegram changes all that. Beaumont is dead, and Tagger has to return to the town where the mill is located for the reading of the will. When he gets there, he finds that not only has he inherited a third of Beaumont’s fortune, but Beaumont has given him control of the business as well and charged him with preventing the takeover of the mill by a ruthless competitor. Needless to say, Beaumont’s grown children don’t like this arrangement at all. The situation becomes even more complicated and dangerous when Tagger discovers that Beaumont was murdered, and when he starts poking around in that, somebody paints a target on his back, as well.

Oh, and there are three or four beautiful women involved, too, all of whom are attracted to Tagger whether they want to be or not, and some of whom probably can’t be trusted . . . but I probably didn’t have to tell you that.

THE TWISTED MISTRESS is just an enormous amount of fun for a fan of hardboiled, slightly sleazy crime and mystery novels from the early Sixties. Willie’s prose is so smooth and fast-paced that it’s a joy to read and you wind up flying through the pages. There was a time I would have read this in one sitting, I’m sure, and even though I can’t do that now because I don’t have as much time to read, I still got through it quickly. Lash Tagger is plenty tough, not exactly likable but certainly easy to root for. Maybe the women all fall for him a little too quickly and easily, maybe the plot could have used one more twist, but that doesn’t matter because this is a book designed to be gulped down. I wish I could tell you to go out and buy a copy, but like I said above, it’s never been reprinted and like all Ennis Willie books, it’s a little hard to come by and a little pricey if you do. But if you ever see a copy, my advice is to grab it.

By the way, I realize the cover says TWISTED MISTRESS, but the spine and the title page add THE, so that’s the title I went with. And unlike the titles of some of the books of this type from this era, the title actually does have something to do with the story. The cover also says “Adult Reading”, but don’t let that fool you. There’s sex in it, but very tame and mostly off-screen.

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.

Forgotten Books: Pandora's Box - Jack Pine

It's a set-up right out of a Gold Medal novel: A beautiful, amoral young wife. A brutal older husband. A strapping young hunting guide, greedy and not as smart as he thinks he is. A fortune in loot dating back to the Civil War. Classic stuff.

But PANDORA'S BOX isn't a Gold Medal by Gil Brewer or Charles Williams. It's not even a Beacon or a Midwood by Orrie Hitt. Instead it was written by someone using the pseudonym Jack Pine and published by Pendulum Books, a small Atlanta-based publisher in the late Sixties that specialized in sleaze novels. And if any book ever deserved the label "hardboiled sleaze", it's PANDORA'S BOX.

The Pandora in question is Pandora Lockwood, a beautiful redhead who seduces hunting guide Mike Dawson into helping her and her husband Nick recover a treasure buried in a collapsed mine shaft in the Idaho mountains. The plan is that once they have the loot, Dawson will kill Nick Lockwood and he and Pandora will share the money. That's just the beginning of the plot, though. A beautiful underage girl just out of reform school also figures in, as do a couple of hapless flunkies recruited to help dig out the treasure. Before you know it, everybody is scheming to kill everybody else and wind up in sole possession of the money, but before they can do that, they all have to have sex with each other, too.

This is a somewhat awkward amalgamation of noir novel and pornography, and the frustrating thing is that there's a pretty good novella buried among the exceedingly crude and graphic sex scenes. Handled differently, this could have been a Gold Medal, and a decent one, too, because "Jack Pine" could write. There are clever lines throughout, some groan-inducing puns reminiscent of the Western series Edge by George G. Gilman (Terry Harknett), and a surprising amount of black humor interspersed with all the bleak nihilism. Plus a twist ending that's not really surprising but is still effective.

I used to know who Jack Pine really was. I believe his name was Sherman Smith, or something like that. I can't find anything about him on the Internet now. But he wrote more than a dozen novels for Pendulum Books, all of them evidently with crime plots. Any recommendation I give to PANDORA'S BOX would have to be a qualified one – it certainly won't be to everybody's taste – but if I ever run across another novel by Jack Pine, I won't hesitate to pick it up.

Forgotten Books: Passionate Amazons - Harry Barstead

Talk about finding little gems in unexpected places! I picked up this volume in Half Price Books’ nostalgia section because it looked like an early Sixties sleaze novel from a publisher I wasn’t familiar with, All Star Books. There’s no author’s name on the cover, and when I opened it up, I saw that it was written by somebody named Harry Barstead (“author of MALIBU NYMPHS”). Never heard of him. Now, judging by the title, PASSIONATE AMAZONS, and the cover copy, you’d think it’s a novel about bisexual women, right?


Nope. PASSIONATE AMAZONS is a collection of short stories. In fact, some of the grubbiest, most hardboiled, noirish crime stories I’ve read in quite a while. And they’re pretty well-written, too, as well as populated by some vividly drawn lowlifes.


Start out with “Tropical Heat Wave”, which is set in the world of greyhound racing in Florida and has the standard noir plot of the rich old guy, the beautiful young wife, and the horny, not-too-bright protagonist. The plot won’t surprise you, but the writing is lean and fast and evocative.


“Too Hot for Him” is about a guy whose wife abandons him and their three-month-old son. When her father dies several years later, the narrator keeps a promise he made to the dying man and goes looking for her. What he finds isn’t pretty. You’ll probably want to shower after this one.


“No Good in Bed” is the weakest item in this collection. It’s not actually a story at all, but rather a mock-sociological essay about the sexual habits of the average American female. There are a few funny lines in it, but it really doesn’t amount to much.


“65 Men and a Girl” takes place in the cell block of a county jail somewhere in the South, where the jailer stages fights between the inmates every Saturday night, with the winner getting a visit from a local prostitute as his prize. Pretty sleazy stuff, with a twist ending that’s effective, if not all that surprising.


“I Saw You!” is a short, twist ending story about a cheating wife. Again, not too surprising, but well-written.


“Without Shame” is the story of a couple of young lovers who are trying to make it on the nightclub circuit as a dance team. Not the most noirish set-up, admittedly, but it plays out that way.


“Look But Don’t Touch” ventures into Orrie Hitt territory with a Peeping Tom who sees a lot more than he bargained for.


“Prisoner of Lust” is an amnesia story in which a young woman wakes up with a husband she can’t remember and a murder charge hanging over her head.


“Sex Down South” is the longest story in the book, a novelette about a Southern family that comes apart at the seams on one fateful night. Plenty of lust, jealousy, alcoholism, and murderous madness in this one. This is Tennessee Williams territory, although on a much lower but still effective level.


Rounding out the book is “Rent Money”, a really bleak story about the lengths a young wife goes to in order to keep a roof over her and her husband’s head. Like most of the rest of these yarns, it’s pretty unpleasant, but it packs a punch.


This collection was published in 1962. I don’t know if the stories appeared originally in lower-tier men’s magazines from that era or if they were written specifically for the book. They’re good enough that I had to wonder if we might know the author better under some other name. So I did a little investigating on the Internet, and it turns out that “Harry Barstead” was really Jack Jardine, a Los Angeles-area science fiction fan in the Fifties best known as Larry Maddock, the pseudonym he used on the four Agent of T.E.R.R.A. time travel novels published by Ace in the Sixties. Was “Harry Barstead” a deliberate corruption of “hairy bastard”? We can only speculate, of course, but it seems plausible.


I liked PASSIONATE AMAZONS quite a bit. Jardine could spin a good hardboiled sleaze yarn in addition to his SF. The chances of you coming across a copy are pretty slim, but if you ever find one at a reasonable price, grab it. The Harry Barstead books go for a lot of money on ABE, but over and above that (and much more important, to my mind), it’s well worth reading.

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.

Orrie Hitt Article

This is purely a wild coincidence, but I've found out there's an article about Orrie Hitt in today's edition of the Port Jervis, New York newspaper (Hitt's hometown).  You can read it here.

According to the article, he died in 1975, not 1967, as I stated in the previous post.  But I think his last novel was published in 1967.  That must have been what I was thinking of. 

Forgotten Books: The Tavern - Orrie Hitt

It’s been a while since I read an Orrie Hitt book, so this seemed like a good time. THE TAVERN was published in 1966, very late in his 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 – I believe he died 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.

The Trouble With Tramps - Michael Hemmingson

If you frequent this little corner of the blogosphere, you can’t have missed the resurgence of interest in the work of Orrie Hitt over the past couple of years. Probably nobody has read more of Hitt’s novels during that time than Michael Hemmingson, and certainly no one has written more about Hitt’s work than he has, having started an entire blog devoted to the subject. So there’s probably no one more qualified to write an Orrie Hitt pastiche novel than Hemmingson, which is exactly what he’s done in THE TROUBLE WITH TRAMPS, recently published by Black Mask Books.

Set during the Fifties, the era during which most of Hitt’s best books were published, THE TROUBLE WITH TRAMPS is narrated by Jack Card, the sort of working man/would-be writer/part-time heel that Hitt often used for his protagonists, right down to the six-foot-two, hundred-and-ninety-pound physical description. Jack is involved with three women: his wife Kay, with whom he’s trapped in a seemingly loveless marriage; teenage tramp Lucy, who’s pregnant by him; and Eve, the beautiful, amoral woman who’s married to a rich, much older husband. Jack really isn’t a bad guy, but he’s made some bad choices that keep getting him deeper and deeper in trouble.

If you’ve read even a few Orrie Hitt novels, you’ll recognize several of his favorite plot elements in the previous paragraph. Hemmingson doesn’t stop there, either. There’s also a peeping tom, a murder plot, a little social commentary, and some stuff about the publishing business. No lesbianism or hunting camps, though.

I think for a pastiche novel to work, it not only has to echo the work of the original author but also possess some strengths of its own. THE TROUBLE WITH TRAMPS succeeds on that score. The prose is lean and punchy, even more so than Hitt’s, and the story races along very effectively. Heel that he is at times, you can’t help but root for Jack, and while a familiarity with Hitt’s work certainly increased my appreciation of this book, I think most readers who enjoy Fifties-era hardboiled sleaze would enjoy it even if they’d never read anything by Hitt. THE TROUBLE WITH TRAMPS doesn’t quite have the same level of raw passion that Hitt brought to his work, but if you’re a fan there's a good chance you'll like it.

Beacon Covers

Here are the covers for those books listed in the house ad in the previous post. Anybody know who Adam Rebel, J.T. Pritchard, and Jay de Bekker really were?

It's Good for What Ails You

Usually the sleaze publishers were pretty serious about everything, but this house ad in the back of Orrie Hitt's TEASER (Beacon, 1956) displays a little touch of whimsy. You may have to click on the image in order to read it.