Review: Ex-Virgin

Ex-Virgin by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One of the fifteen novels Orrie Hitt had published in 1959. (From the grave he says I see your nanowrimo and, I raise, all in!) This first edition is Beacon 267 with the painted cover art. The second and third Beacon/Softcover Library editions have lame photo-covers. I'm rating this a bit higher than it probably deserves because on a close reading I found enough "writing surprises" relative to some of Hitt's other books that made me think he wasn't just going through the motions. Sticks to his formula, for sure, and after 50 some books to his credit by this time he had the formula smooth as creamy peanut butter. The title suggests this is a good girl gone bad story. Kinda, sorta. Mary is the virgin who becomes the ex-virgin of the title. But not willingly and Hitt's rape scenes are some of his most explicit pre-1960 descriptions. Many ways to go with this review as Hitt recycles several plots and themes and character types from his earlier books and will do so even more in the 100 books that will follow this one. What struck me, though, was his character assassination of Ferry Street in this unnamed town which surely is a stand-in for Port Jervis, New York where Hitt lived for many years. "Ferry" is a stand-in street name. When I was growing up in Seattle we had "First Avenue" and "Pike Street." Dive bars, flop houses, hookers, pimps, and drug dealers. Hitt's world has Mary, Joe, Janice, Anne, and Sam. Five dollars gets a guy laid in this riverside slum. The sad tale here, however —and it's a noir tale—is that Sam has the world at his feet. He has Mary, the 41-26-36 figure girl that every other guy in town wants. The owner of the gas station where he works is ready to retire and willing to practically give the place to Sam. Yet . . . Head shake. Sam, Sam! Stay away from the bosses wife! You know he won't. And Hitt's morality play—teen sex, pregnancy, abortions—becomes noir as Sam slides down the slippery slope to oblivion. That's all top-notch, but unlike Whittington, Brewer, MacDonald, Hitt sticks to his grade school prose style, at which he was something of a genius, which is easy to miss until you've read enough of Hitt and a lot of the others. Not his best. Not is his worst. But I can steer you towards many better reads than this.

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Review: Tawny

Tawny by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Tawny, (Beacon B261, 1959), is a reprint of Cabin Fever (Uni-book 73, 1954) with a new title and new cover art. Cabin Fever was Hitt's third published book and it shows, with some sloppy writing in places. That said, we have here a cool dust-up at a summer resort in rural New York. Danny, our focal character and first-rate heel, manages to get drunk and rolled while on vacation. But he takes a job at the resort as a means to get back on the cash. He's quickly chasing after the owner's wife - the femme fatale character - in between chasing after the hostess and his late arriving former girlfriend. There are several other shady characters and everybody seems to have an angle to rip somebody else off. Danny is slow on the uptake, thinks he's in the driver seat, planning his own scam, but as they say about poker games, if you don't know who the mark is . . . All good fun if you put on the editorial blinders. Hitt's book Summer Hotel (Beacon B168, 1958) picks up many of these same themes a few years later and is more smoothly written. Tawny is the femme fatale character but the novel is not focalized through her, so it's one of those marketing bait and switches where the cover art and blurbs suggest one story but what you get is something else entirely.

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Review: Sheba

Sheba by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This one was awful. I've been willing to cut Hitt some slack in my other reviews of Hitt's novels because he did have a kind of genius for writing reasonably complex plotted novels using third-grade reading comprehension prose. But his "see Dick run" prose is incredibly lame in this one. Usually Hitt tunneled into some profession - radio advertising, insurance sales, etc. - and provided an interesting window into 1950s work/business. So reading Hitt usually provides a cultural anthropology window into that era. Not here. The setting is a car dealership and unscrupulous loans, but Hitt was completely going through the motions and didn't provide any deep glimpse into the business. Which was a big disappointment. And the rest is just embarrassing.

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Review: Too Hot to Handle

Too Hot to Handle by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another noir-ish plot with a vice angle, in this case prostitution circa late 1950s. A bit unique because it is narrated from the female protagonist's point of view. She drifts into prostitution because her husband isn’t making enough money and he is a “little man” and she is a nymphomaniac and anyway why not make money doing what she most enjoys? Ahem. Okay, if you can get passed that kind of character motivation - it is a pulp novel after all - it’s a decent tale of the ascent into crime and the inevitable fall.

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Review: Dolls and Dues

Dolls and Dues by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Hitt's books make for interesting cultural anthropology artifacts because he usually focuses on some occupation or business or a business-like scam and then immerses his protagonist in that world. Here we have a union organizer circa 1957. The target is the 16,000 insurance agents at a large insurance company, and Paul Jackson's task is to get all those agents to join a newly created union and then call a strike against the insurance company. When the agents are slow to sign up Jackson comes up with his brainstorm: host big parties for the agents and make sure there are plenty of hookers and booze. The agents start signing up in droves. Jackson hires a crew of good looking women and sends them on a road trip to towns where the insurance company has lots of agents. The union dues start rolling in. I will spare you the rest of the plot, but it involves greed and fraud and the eventual fall of Paul Jackson from his perch as President of the union. See, he has a problem with the dolls. He beds pretty much every woman he comes in contact with, although none of that is ever described, simply alluded to in a sentence. So plenty of sleaze but no sex scenes.

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Review: Sin Doll

Sin Doll by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Basic good girl gone bad plot. Cherry's motive is money and heavy hitting the booze makes her go further than she intended. Plus she's constantly berated with “you are no good, just like your mother, she was a tramp and put you up for adoption.” Next thing you know she is quitting her factory job and becoming the sin doll of the title by posing nude for 1950s era pornography. As with most of Hitt’s books he stays on the good side of the censors by omitting the sex scenes and skewing the narrative with moralizing. It gets redundant as she has the same don’t-be-a-bad-girl-be-a-good-girl arguments with her parents over and over. And her boyfriend wants to have the same argument over and over about getting married. Having to listen to all that, no wonder she drinks and has a lesbian affair instead.

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Review: Dolls and Dues

Dolls and Dues by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Hitt's books make for interesting cultural anthropology artifacts because he usually focuses on some occupation or business or business-like scam and immerses his protagonist in that world. Here we have a union organizer circa 1957. The target is the 16,000 insurance agents at a large insurance company, and Paul Jackson's task is to get all those agents to join a newly created union and then call a strike against the insurance company. When the agents are slow to sign up Jackson comes up with his brainstorm: host big parties for the agents and make sure there are plenty of hookers and booze. Yes, the agents start signing up in droves. Jackson hires a crew of good looking women and sends them on a road trip to towns where the insurance company has lots of agents. The union dues start rolling in. I will spare you the rest of the plot, but it involves greed and fraud and the eventual fall of Paul Jackson from his perch as President of the union. Oh, yeah, he has a problem with the dolls. He beds pretty much every woman he comes in contact with, although none of that is ever described, simply alluded to in a sentence.

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Review: Untamed Lust

Untamed Lust by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In between all the sleaze-noir rutting, what we have here is some of Hitt's most evocative writing. And where does his best writing show up? In his descriptions of Eddie out trapping animals in the woods. Fascinating that one of the rare times that Hitt's writing approaches literary quality is when he describes trapping turtles, otter, fox, and mink. Hitt is usually at his best when describing his characters at their work and he is at the top of his game describing Eddie in the woods. He is laughable, however, when he describes Eddie bedding down the three women in this novel with prose steeped in junior high sensibility. Hard to get too excited about this novel because its interesting characters and a good noir plot are obscured by Hitt's at times shallow writing.

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Review: Love or Kill Them All

Love or Kill Them All by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Writing as Nicky Weaver, this was Orrie Hitt's attempt at a hard boiled detective. Maybe it's not as bad as my one star would indicate, but there are so many better books. Why bother? The dialog is really bad, corny and full of non-sequitors. Dialog is usually a strength of Hitt's books. Not here. The plot is somewhat coherent, but Nicky Weaver's investigation isn't. Doesn't happen very often - didn't and don't want to finish this one.

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Review: Dirt Farm

Dirt Farm by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Classic Hitt. Clean prose and plenty of tension. Similar plot to several other of his books: drifter type shows up looking for work. This time it's a farm. There's too many women around for him to keep his mind on the job. Hitt does a great job using the dialog to show character, letting several characters hang themselves with their words. Would have been better if there were more action and less talking, however, and could have used more sex and more violence. Lost steam in the second half and the ending was also disappointingly anticlimactic.

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Review: Affairs of a Beauty Queen

Affairs of a Beauty Queen by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hitt's books from the late 1950s and early 1960s are interesting because, using the term somewhat loosely now, they are a kind of cultural anthropology. He frequently picked a business or some cultural practice and then showed its sleazy underbelly. Here we have beauty contests sponsored by newspapers. Not exactly a scam, but clearly a shady business practice. As Hitt describes it we have small town newspapers running beauty contests where local businesses sponsor a contestant and the newspapers feature pictures of the contestants along with ads for the businesses. The only way to vote is to go to the store in person to cast your ballot. The newspapers sell lots of ads and the stores report that business is booming. The winning contestant gets $500 and the Miss whatever city title and a chance to go on to the county contest and maybe the state and the national contest. In this book we have two city contests and two contestants and two sets of sleazy participants. The contestants are Lili and Cherry and most of the book is narrated in alternating sections from their POVs. What will they go through to win? Who will they bed? Who will take advantage of them? Will they win? Those are the plot elements. Throw in blackmail and attempted rape and there is just enough crime elements to create some edge. Decent writing, decent plot, some good cultural anthropology, but could have used more edginess.

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Review: The Widow

The Widow by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Orrie Hitt wrote 150+ sleaze-noir novels in the 50s and 60s. I've read more than 50 of them so far and the quality of the writing is quite varied. Not sure where this one will ultimately rank after I've finished reading all of Hitt's books, but right now The Widow is very close the top of the heap. Generally, his pre-1960 books are better written, and this is mostly because in the early 1960s Hitt was cranking them out assembly-line mode every couple of weeks and the quality of those books dropped off severely as he rarely made an effort to write from within the character as he did with his early novels. The Widow is the story of Jerry Rebner's decline and fall. When the novel starts he has just been fired from his job operating a backhoe because he punched out his boss. He's ready to leave town until he gets his head turned by a skirt he wants to chase. In the classic noir pattern, we sense that his doom is sealed at that moment. But how it happens is the story and Hitt does a great job of stretching that out in beautiful tease and deny mode. What elevates this novel in my ranking of Hitt's novels? His dialog is stinging back and forth shots on goal, frequently fulfilling the dictum of "using exposition as ammunition." And Jerry Rebner is haunted by the death of his wife in a car accident and there are several scenes where his torment is shown completely from within the character. He's a heel, but these scenes of torment humanize him in a way rarely seen in Hitt's novels (at least the ones I've read so far). And thus we feel his fall even though we can despise his choices. It does get a bit repetitive at times - the repeated tease and deny - and this plot (as many of Hitt's plots do) bares some similarities to other of his novels, but this is one of his best.

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Review: From Door to Door

From Door to Door by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One of the things I like best about Orrie Hitt's books is that his characters have jobs and he usually digs in and shows you what those jobs are like from the inside. The books were written in the late 1950s and early 1960s so his books are fascinating cultural anthropology. The job explored in this book is selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. Yes, it was as scammy an operation as you'd imagine. The first-person narration is by Les Drake, who manages one of the selling crews working small cities (less than 100,000 population) in New York state. He aspires to be state manager. One of his salesmen wants his job. And as the book begins Les is sleeping with Ellen, one of his salesgirls. Before too much longer she will be telling him that she's pregnant and has been lying about her age. So that's one set of plot drivers. The main storyline of the book, however, is that the owner of the company sends his daughter June to work with Les to get some field experience prior to taking over running the company. Les is not above telling lies to make sales, but otherwise he runs a clean operation compared to some of the competitors. June has other ideas. Sex sells. She recruits some girls willing to put out to get the magazine subscription. Complications evolve from there. Enjoyed this one a lot. Cool look inside the magazine subscription racket. Strong storyline with engaging first person narrator who has an edge to him. Plenty of biting back and forth dialog when the characters are in conflict. Loses a bit because of what is left out because of censorship-era editing. There's crime because of the prostitution angle and the scam selling techniques, but definitely not noir because of the ending.

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Review: Shabby Street

Shabby Street by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was Orrie Hitt's fourth novel and it's a serrated knife. Johnny Reagan is the first-person narrator and Hitt gave him a hard-boiled style and used it to show what a right bastard Johnny is. He has zero redeeming qualities - unless you count how hard he works at being a lying, cheating, thieving SOB -and he's proud of it. So this is a great little joy-ride with Johnny at the wheel. As usual with Hitt's books we get the inside look at some scammy business. This time it's insurance agencies selling crap policies. Johnny starts up a couple of agencies, each one to bail-out what he stole from the last one, so there's the plot driver of him constantly having to raise cash to replace money he stole. Then there's Janet and Julie and Beverly and Cynthia. The first two he wants, the third he marries, and the last is sort of his partner in crime. Plot complications galore as Johnny chases and juggles his activities with these four women. Really enjoyed the edginess in this one. It's kind of what was lacking in some of the other Hitt books that I've rated lower. Has the same corny metaphors, the kind that clunk up the other books, but the difference here is that the rest of the writing is clean and tough and driven by a strong voice.

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Review: The Promoter

The Promoter by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Intricately plotted noir that deserves to be rescued from the pulp remainders and see a wider readership. The protagonist, a freelance car magazine writer, makes a series of choices that enmesh him deep into the underground nude modeling/porn scene circa late 1950s. Hitt uses the plot technique of keep shoveling on trouble until the protagonist is buried and gasping for air and that keeps the pages turning.

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Review: Wayward Girl

Wayward Girl by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This is one of those Orrie Hitt stories that means to shock and titillate in the realm of juvenile delinquency, a common theme of the time, rather than the sexual obsession stories that he sometimes wrote so well. It tells the tale of a 16 year old prostitute who struggles with drug abuse, reform school, and mostly how she is forced into having sex, either for money, or under pressure from various unsavory predators - which turns out to be pretty much everyone else in the book. Rather than a sexy and fun book it ends up being dark and disturbing. At some point I began paging through the book to see how much was left. Not a good sign. Hitt often employs an implausible happy ending in his books that go against any noir sensibilities that the book may have had, and here we find another forehead slapper. An incongruous ending for this disappointing and depressing novel.

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Review: Call South 3300: Ask for Molly!

Call South 3300: Ask for Molly! by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If there was ever an Orrie Hitt book set up for one of his $300 abortion plot lines this was it, but not much of a spoiler to say no abortions here. Slade Martin is a hard charging sales director and Ann Frank is a secretary moonlighting as a prostitute. Hitt sticks to their POVs, alternating chapters, and actually does a deep dive (if not very nuanced) into their motivations and this gives the narrative a welcome edginess. The business is the manufacture and selling of TV sets, but Hitt does not explore that milieu with any depth, and that is a disappointment because one of the fun things about reading Hitt's books is that he typically provided a time capsule look into 1950s/1960s business. Not so much this time. Likewise with conventions. Despite the tease on the jacket copy, the convention aspect is barely shown. So don't read this expecting a take on conventions. Plenty of other vintage sleaze books to a better job of showing convention hi-jinks. And it would have been better with more of a noir plot as the prostitution angle doesn't get edgy at all. This is mostly a character study of two needy people. What do they need and will they be satisfied? Although disappointing in many ways, Hitt did more with character than usual, and that made it more interesting than some of his other books. And this was actually one of the few times that Hitt surprised me with the direction he went with the ending. The Beacon paperback is scarce, but there is now an eBook version available.

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Review: Cabin Fever

Cabin Fever by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Cabin Fever was one of Hitt's first books and it shows, with some sloppy writing in places. That said, we have here a cool dust-up at a summer resort in rural New York. Danny, our focal character and first-rate heel, manages to get drunk and rolled while on vacation. But he takes a job at the resort as a means to get back on the cash. He's quickly chasing after the owner's wife - the femme fatale character - in between chasing after the hostess and his late arriving former girlfriend. There are several other shady characters and everybody seems to have an angle to rip somebody else off. Danny is slow on the uptake, thinks he's in the driver seat, planning his own scam, but as they say about poker games, if you don't know who the mark is . . . All good fun if you put on the editorial blinders. Hitt's book Summer Hotel (Beacon B168, 1958) picks up many of these same themes a few years later and is more smoothly written. Tawny, (Beacon B261, 1959), is a reprint of Cabin Fever with a new title and new cover art.

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Review: Unfaithful Wives

Unfaithful Wives by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Published in 1956, I think this is one of Hitt's best books. I'd rank it along side I'll Call Every Monday and The Promoter. The story line revolves around Fred and Rita - married and dissatisfied - and the people they are having affairs with and the complications that ensue. Plenty of conflict and sex, with murder and theft also in the mix. The multiple POV narration moves effortlessly from character to character, each of whom is dissatisfied, striving, and edgy. Early on the plot is elusive, but this is a real strength of the novel because we are tracking along with these on edge characters, not sure what is going to happen, yet knowing that multiple fuses are lit and something is going to explode. The characters are explored in-depth and the language and psychology is more from within the characterization rather than being the shallow (and lecturing) rationalizations that show up in a lot of Hitt's later books. I read a paperback original, but there is an ebook edition from Prologue Books, so this is an easy one to get a hold of and read.

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Review: Pushover

Pushover by Orrie Hitt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Fund-raising scam artists go into small towns and "write" a book about the town's history as a fund-raising project for the police department or the churches or some other worthy civic cause. They sell ads and sponsorships to local businesses. And they sell, sell, sell the books, but mostly on the side, and keep the profits, plus everything else they can skim off the project. The worthy cause frequently makes next to nothing. On to the next town. That's the crime aspect, and Hitt does a great job detailing how these scams work. Funny thing is the scammers seem to work harder than most people do at legitimate jobs. The protagonist, mastermind of the scams, and our first-person narrator, is Danny Fulton, a self-described louse and jerk, and he lives up to that billing. He spends as much time woman chasing as he does running the scams and that leads to complications threatening to unravel his scam business. His troubles are self-inflicted and he'll deserve what he gets as the book heads to its conclusion. Except there is the matter of the last chapter, which almost feels tacked on. Without the last chapter you have a book that passes the censor test. With it, well, maybe crime does pay.

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