The Naked Flesh (Kozy Book #159, 1962)

Of ol’ Orrie’s three nudist camp-themed novels, this is by far the best, albeit quite similar to the other two.

The protagonist is a fellow named Dutch, your typical Hitt hero type,

a big man, a couple inches over six feet, and he weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. None of that weight was fat. He was all new muscles and bone with broad shoulders and close cut sandy hair. As for being handsome he didn’t know [...] Most of the women thought he was a man atthe age of twenty-six and that, to Dutch, was what counted.  (p. 3)

He’s spent the last two years working in Iceland (!), having gone there to escape the pain of his girl, Penny, having gotten pregnant by another guy and marrying him…now he has come back to the States because his parents have passed and left him the 250-acre farm. He plans to fix the house up and sell the land, as he doesn’t want to farm to stay here in Cranston, NY.

Only Penny is a widow and childless now, her drunk husband having tried to take off with the kid and killing them both in an accident. Dutch takes from her what he “should have had” years ago…he is not interested in love or getting back together; he wants to hurt and humiliate Penny for what she did to him.  He does not forgive.

He has also met up with Cherry in a bar, a nude model who talks him into using his savings to turn his farm into a nudists camp, a new fad and craze, with a business guy (aka promoter or even pimp) she knows.  Dutch is too mesmerized by her and we know right off this woman is setting him for something.  But he goes into biz with her and the other guy…and, like the other two books, the nudist camp is a front for prostitution, catering to rich men and hiring hookers to wander around naked, who must be paid for sex.

Now, was this (is this?) true of nudist camps or was this Hitt’s fictional fantasy?  Never having been to a nudist camp or in the scene other than nude beaches, I wouldn’t know, then or now.  I imagine some camps were ruses for the sex trade.

Like the Kay Addams book, Hitt delves into the philosophy of the nudist, who

although not always accepted by society, was a person of firm and decent convictions. They held the sun in the highest regard but they respected it, too. The strength of the sun probed their bodies, brought them pleasure (p. 85)

as if they’re some primitive sun god cult.

Like Nudist Camp, Hitt also discusses how the naked body and sexuality differs culturally in Iceland than the puritanical U.S.

Penny knows Cherry is bad news but Dutch is hypnotized by her, letting her buy thousand dollar coats, squander money away. Penny works the food cart at the camp, naked, because she was fired from her job, but she also wants to keep her eye on Dutch — she still loves him even if all he wants to do is keep hurting her for her sins.

But Penny is the”goof girl” and Cherry the “bad woman” and for a change there isn’t a third woman in Dutch’s life, although he does have some one nighters at the top. We know, in the end, Dutch will see the light, forgive Penny, and marry her, but first he must be burned by the bad woman.

A good read, yet predictable. On the Hitt Scale, a 7.5.

The Man With Four Arms and Two Heads

On the back cover of several of ol’ Orrie’s Kozy titles (The Naked Flesh, Peeping Tom) is a small bio bit about the author, which reads thus:

When a person asks Orrie Hitt how many books he’s written, the question is very likely to be answered with a shrug. Strangely, it’s a truthful answer because he simply doesn’t know.

“I’m no adding machine,” he says. “All I do is write.  I usually start at seven in the morning, take twenty minutes for lunch and continue until about four in the afternoon.”

As for the number of copies of his books that have been sold, there is no accurate count.  The count, however, would reach up into the millions.  Some of his readers first saw his books in Korea or Germany or other distant places.

Born forty-five years ago [pub date: 1962], he is the father of four children and married to a woman “who understands me.”  His writing career began in high school when he started selling to outdoor magazines — at the same time, much to the dismay or his teacher, nearly failing an English course.

He has been writing novels for over ten years, going to Iceland to write his first one.

“I had a family,” he says.  “I needed the money from the job to support them while I was gambling on a future.”

Of course, this wasn’t his only job.  He has worked as a club manager, served in the army, and, as he puts it, “sold almost everything from life insurance to roofing.”  Once we worked on a ship and another time managed a mail order firm.

Today, Orrie Hitt does nothing but write an d he says he wishes he had four arms and two heads.

“But that’s impossible,” he adds. “I’m just an average guy.”

We wonder if he is.

Like the man with four arms and two heads.

Nudist Camp (Beacon, 1957)

This one was rather disappointing and I could not even finish it. I had high hopes for it, too, being a 1957 Beacon.

The story concerns 22-year-old Della, orginally from Keflavik, Iceland, the same city Love in the Arctic is set.  She came to the U.S. to study in college and married Ricky, a man with money and land he inherited from his father.  But Ricky is a notorious womanizer, he’s gotten their maid pregnant, and she cannot stand having sex with him.  He divorces her, leaving a few ares of land and some money.

She rents the land out to a New Jersey-based nudist camp, much like the Kay Addams  book, with similar situations of a con.

The writing and action is dull, the characters flat and boring. This was not Hitt at his best — maybe he was writing about the subject at Beacon’s insistence, rather than writing about topics he preferred and loved — salesmen and their women, young girls modeing for pictures, peeping toms, etc.

Beacon re-cycled the cover from the early 50s Woodford/Thompson first version of Male Virgin — adding in a fishing pole –

My Wild Nights with Nine Nudists! by Kay Addams (Novel Books, 1963)

The third in the Kay Addams memoirs “as told to Orrie Hitt,” following The Autobiography of Kay Addams and My Secret Perversions.

The spine shows a different title: My Nudists Nights. Novel reprinted it in 1964 as Nocturnal Nudists.

Seems the guys at Novel liked the “as told to” format, with a woman speaking, to their male writers — a number of Con Seller titles are like that, and one by Jerry Goff, Autobiography of a Pervert!

It’s several years after we last left Kay when her young step-mother and her new husband had been plotting to murder her and her father and get the family money. That didn’t work.

Now, Kay’s father has passed and she has inherited a large amount of money, which she has been blowing, the house and the summer home with lots of acres.  A fast-talking real estate agent, Barney, also a casual lover, has talked her into selling the house and leasing the summer property to a brother and sister who want to open up a nudist resort/camp/reservation, and then take her money and invest in buying a small radio station in Port Sands.

Kay is 25 now, the scars from the lesbian lover who slashed her at the end of the first book are almost gone, and she still has her figure: 42-19-36.

Although she is allegedly “cured” from her lesbianism, she still secretly admires and desires women, like Ella, the girl at the radio station who moves in with Kay…

Pleasure Ground (Bedside Books #819, 1959)

The second book by Hitt titled Pleasure Ground — this is different from the Kozy Books Pleasure Ground.

‘Tis another one of Hitt’s backwoods novels, similar to Ellie’s Shack: it’s about poor white trash living in a shack near a lake, land that isn’t theirs, owned by an old fellow who died.  His daughter, Sandra, went out to Hollywood and appeared in a few movies.  She has returned with her older, 51-year-old husband (she’s 23), a TV producer who lost a lot of money in the quiz show scandals, to fix up the family house and sell the property — which means all the poor shack folk around the lake will have to leave.

The narrator is Eddie Miller, a 21-year-old who is 6′4″ like most Hitt heroes.  He lives in a shack with his no good drunk father named Crab, who blowshis monthly disability check on beer and booze, his wearied mother, and his bombshell sister, Gloria, 19, who sometimes makes money posing nude for an artist, like many Hitt women do.

Eddie makes money picking berries, like Ellie did in Ellie’s Shack, and fishing for eel and catfish at the lake.  He has a girlfriend, Cindy, who is bugging him for marriage and a baby; he eludes her because he has no desire for marriage, she’s just a girl to hang with, fish with, and fuck with.

He has his eyes set on the starlet Sandra, whom he meets at the lake, sunning in a red swimsuit. She hires him to paint the house for $1 an hour. He takes the job because he thinks, husband or not, he can get somewhere — “It’s not every day you get to make a girl whose been in the movies,” he muses.

The opening chapter has a fellow from the finance company looking for payment for a loan Eddie’s father is late on — similar to the opening of Sheba. Right off we know this family has some problems, like Hitt’s white trash families always do.

The third woman for Eddie — remember, the Hitt hero almost always juggles three gals — is Beth, Sandra’s secretary, a five foot tall hellion dwarfed by Eddie’s six-four frame.  One finds it a tad disappointing that Eddie does not care for oral love:

She clung to me, whispering things I didn’t understand, and her fingers hurt as she dug into my hair.  She tried to push my mouth down to her breasts and after she had done that she was as wild as they come.  She made an attempt to push my head lower and when I wouldn’t let her do that she said some men did.

“I’m not some men,” I reminded her. “I take my sex straight.” (p. 54)

Say what?!  Is this just backwoods hillbilly fear of the vagina, or was our pal Hitt a prude?  Surely Eddie would not say “no” to a blowjob, but it would be rude and selfish of him if he took it.  We’ll never know, because even that is more sexual detail than we usually get in a 1959 paperback (and I do wonder if it was added in my an editor).

As for Sandra, when he tries to kiss her one day in the car, she stops him and says they have to wait until the time is “right,” when she knows it means something.  But we know this dumb hick has to be getting the set-up: first Beth warms him up, and there’s the talk about Sandra’s husband being worth $200K in life insurance should be croak, double indemnity if an accident,  and how he drinks all day and is overweight and the doctor has warned him.  We have seen this patsy set-up in other Hitt books and even other noirs, much like Jerry M. Goff’s excellent Wanton Wench! And as it is with many men in these books, money is a greater seduction than the women who talk them into committing homicide:

Jesus, it was a lot of money, more than I coukld imagine. This was going to cost the insurance compay plenty [...]When I was done with him I could do anything [...] Four hundred thousand dollars.

No more poverty. No more wanting the things I couldn’t have. No more needing her and being able to own her, to strip her naked and take her body to me, giving her my love. No more being careful with her. I would be rolling in money and I’d give her a child as soon as I could. I would see her grow fat and I would love her because she grew that way. (p. 158)

Meanwhile, his sister is pregnant and the guy who did it refuses to marry her, saying someone else did it, like the “artist” she poses for; he has found some pictures of her for sale, in sets — similar, again, to Sin Doll, I’ll Call Every Monday, Campus Doll, Naked Model, Nude Doll, Party Girl, The Promoter, and many others where the picture racket is involved.

Mainly, Pleasure Ground is very similar to Two of a Kind, or maybe it’s the other way around, as Two of a Kind was published a year later. The patsy set-up and the truth about the evil vixens’ sexuality is the same — that’s right, he’s being set-up by a lesbian!

This is Hitt’s only title with Bedside Books, which paved the way for 60s-style sleaze.  They also, reportedly, had a bad habit of not paying writers, which may be why Hitt didn’t sell them any other books — or, perhaps, Hitt couldn’t sell this one to his usual 1959 markets, Beacon and Midwood, because it was too much like previous titles.

The elements here appear in plenty of Hitts: the younger woman marrying the older man thing, the nude model racket, the insurance scam and murder plot, the pregnant sister, etc.

On the Hitt Scale, a 7.5, points for good writing, minus for traveling the pleasure ground always stomped on.

Call South 3300: Ask for Molly! (Beacon #176, 1958)#

Another early Hitt that has salesmen, call girls, booze and a con scheme to make big bucks.

The novel jumps back and forth between POVs with a man, Slade Martin, and a woman, Ann Frank.  Slade is lead sales manager of All-Channel TV, a manufacturer of television sets that employs 1200 people. Ann is a secretary there, and a former prostitute at Molly’s, a cathouse in the red light district; she still works there one weekend a month, taking calls from special clients, to pay rent on her apartment, which she could never do with her low-paying job.  But she likes having a normal job, rather than working full time at the brothel, which tends to get raided now and then by the cops.

She also has her eye on Slade — he’s handsome, looks like “a movie star,” and has bedded just about every woman working at the company.  he’s also an alcoholic and a liar — he’ll do anything for a big sale.  All-Channel does not have a “new” model to compete, especially with sets that have the revolutionary concept of a “remote control.”  All they have is a older set, and too many units — Slade is tasked to hock this set as their new model at a product convention.

The con is to get Mortimer Kane to make a huge order — Kane is one of the biggest buyers in the country, and when he buys, others follow his lead.  If Slade doesn’t pull in a big order, All-Channel could get out of business, and 1200 people could lose their jobs, and that would have a detrimental effect on the local economy…

Love in the Arctic (Red Lantern Books, 1953)

Now that I have read about half of Hitt’s body of work, I decided it would be educational to look at his first novel — what I will assume is his first novel.  Love in the Arctic was published the same year, 1953, as I’ll Call Every Monday by Red Lantern Books; which one was issued first is unknown, or maybe they came out the same time.  Love in the Arctic, however, reads like it was written first.

From Brian Ritt’s biographical essay:

In order to support his family, he had to curtail his writing career for the next 6-8 years, taking a variety of odd jobs which barely paid the bills. He sold life insurance, roofing and siding, and frozen foods to stores. He worked for a local automotive firm and marketed a new type of sparkplug. He worked for a local radio station as a DJ and ad salesman. Altogether, he worked between 15 to 17 jobs, all the while pining to pursue the passion he felt he was born for.

“Oh, I might’ve done a few short stories which didn’t sell but I’m not counting them,” Orrie wrote. “A book was in the back of my mind and I was unable to shake it.”

And then the Iceland cometh.

Iceland???

Yes, Iceland.

“My next stop was Keflavik, Iceland, working at the airport hotel and, again, the pay could’ve been better,” Orrie wrote. “However, I found in Iceland what I wanted. Once I had learned my duties there was plenty of time to write. And this time it was a book.”

Hitt worked at the airport hotel for a year, and by the end of the year he’d written two more books.

[NOTE: In Arctic, someone mentions a former employee with so much free time, he wrote five novels while there.]

Throughout that year, Hitt had submitted all three books to his agent in New York. The agent’s responses, one after another, were discouraging; he claimed the books were unmarketable. It must have seemed like sophomore year all over again. But, as Hitt did with the old schoolmarm, he ignored his agent’s advice and got right back to work. But instead of pounding the typwriter keys, this time he pounded the pavement. He went back to New York and “made the rounds of publishers myself, receiving encouragement but no contracts.” Hitt did find one taker–a “vanity” publisher who wanted Hitt to pay them to publish the book. (He turned them down flatly.) Finally, he found a legitimate publisher who wanted his book and, “A few days later I had a royalty contract.”

The third book mentioned is Teaser, published in 1954 by The Woodford Press.  The dedication if for Hitt’s agent, noting that no one else would touch the novel.

Woman Hunt (Beacon #192, 1958)

I’m starting to notice that ol’ Orrie’s novels from 1954-59 tend to be excellent and original, before he started repeating situations and themes from 1961-64.

Woman Hunt sucks you in from page one — Bill Masters, mid-30s, is an encyclopedia salesman who makes good money — enough to keep him and his wife, Cynthia, living decently in an apartment and a summer lake cabin, to give his mother $75 a week and his lazy younger brother a few bucks.  He also agrees to pay $1200 for surgery his ex-girlfriend Donna’s son needs. He cannot escape from Donna’s lure, and memory — they were lovers as teenagers and drifted apart when he went into the army; she had another man’s child and broke his heart.  Old wounds open up whenever he sees her (she lives in the same building as his mother) but he often winds up having sex with her, especially after agreeing to pay for th surgery.

Basically, he knows that everyone just wants money from him — his mother, his brother, his ex.  His wife wishes he made more money.  She gets $6,000 a year from her father’s life insurance annuity; she shares none with Bill.  He has a $100,000 life insurance policy on her, one of the reasons why he is plotting her murder. The other: she has been cheating on him with a lot of men, including a guy from a rich family that she threatens to marry after she divorces Bill.

In a way, this calls to mind Raymond Carver’s short story, “Elephant,” about a successful writer who family hounds him for his new-found wealth: kids, ex-wife, mother, brother, they all want a piece of his pie and feel they deserve it.

Many Hitt Titles Yet to Read

Ellie’s Shack (Beacon #159, 1958)

Here we have probably one of Hitt’s most white trashy backwoodsy tawdry novel, and yet for all its sleaze, we also have one of Hitt’s closest books to actual fine literature — that is, this novel could have been published at the time by any good mainstream house in hardcover like Viking or Scribner and found a literary audience, the kind that read Carson McCullers or William Falkner.  Seriously.

Well, half-seriously. It does succumb to some of the Beacon paperback conventions that hurts it more than helps.

Like many Hitt novels about young women victimized by the sexism of the 1950s, Ellie Rose is surrounded by such degrading circumstances  and poverty that there’s little chance for her ever to climb out of the pit of profiling that is a Pond Girl, a backwoods slut — she’s 19 and built, like any Hitt girl, but didn’t go beyond two years in high school to stay iome and help care for her ailing mother, Belle.

The family lives in a literal three-room plywood shack that may not last another winter.  Elle lives there with her mother and her stepfather, Ducky, and stepbrother, Jake.  Both stepfather and his son have been after Ellie’s body for years, when the mother “ain’t a-lookin’.”  The two men bored a hole in the wall to watch her undress in her room, but she found the hole.  She figures this is all par for the course at Bass Pond.