Torrid Wench (Kozy Books, 1962; DSK Enterprises, 1993)

A pretty fun one from ol’ Orrie about one of his pet themes: a woman going into the sex industry out of financial need and becoming exploited by men…and a lesbian in this case.

Barbie  is the typical Hitt heroine with big boobs and a tiny waist, working at a hash joint for little pay and dealing with the owner always coming on to her.  She lives with a loser guy, a good0looking grifter who loses too much money at the race track and is always seeking the next get-rich scheme. Why does she keep him around, give him money, pay his bills when he is broke? For the sex? Or perhaps to convince herself she is heterosexual…she had a lesbian encounter in college and for her it was the best sex she had ever had, and she does not want to face the fact she might be gay.

Her boyfriend lands a gig running bets at the track for well-to-do customers of a “gentleman’s club” that features strip shows and waitesses in skippy outfits. The heel convinces Barbie to get a job there, which means more money access for him.  Her former boss at the hash house is not pleased and he blackmals Barbie into sex, saying he will charge her for the theft of $5 from the register the day she quit. She gives in.

The owner of the club also wants her in his bed, as do a number of clients…and the owner is married to a rich woman who fundedthe club, who happens to be a lesbian that has her pick of the girls if they want to keep their jobs.

Then Barbie finds herself being set-up for the murder of this woman, hatched by her boyfriend and the club owner…

The book ends to swiftly, at eight chapters rather than Hitt’s typical 14-chaoter format; it feels cut by editorial hand to fit Kozy’s 50K word format.

The book was also reprinted in the 1990s by DSK Enterprises, a shady outfit, with ads for sex hotlines, videos and magazines…since there was no copyright holder, a quick and easy pirate reprint with a cheesy cover…it cannot beat the great GGA of the Kozy edition.

 

Four Women (Beacon, 1960)

A very fine one from ol’ Orrie, so much so that it read like the pilot episode of a TV show.

It is a multi-character piece, mainly centering on two men, Joe and Rube. Joe is a big handsome lug who wants to live an honest life but gets sucked into the syndicate world on Prince Street in New City…Prince Street is where all the prostitution, drug pushing and small time crime goes on. Rube is a guy with short man’s complex, hating big guys like Joe and the girls who like him. Rube has been pimping out Millie and robs other hookers at knifepoint. The local syndicate guy, Mike, wants Joe to find the guy robbing his ladies.

Then there is Ellie, who loves Joe, who won’t give Rube the time of day, who dodges the advances of the lesbian lady she works for at a dress shop, turning down Mike to be his main lady andgetting kidnapped for it.

Things wrap up too fast and easy but this is still a damn good vintage read. On the Hitt scale: 9.

Cabin Fever – Uni-Books, 1954

 

 

Ol’ Orrie’s third published novel, after I’ll Call Every Monday and Love in the Arctic, and a hard volume to find, as many Uni-Book titles are.  Unis were Universal Publishing’s pulp digests before the Beacon imprint, which lead with two Hitt books: Shabby Street and She Got What She Wanted.  The UniBooks format were large, magazine digest sized, 35 cents.

Cabin Fever is a seriously flawed narrative, but also a blueprint for many future Hitt hits: we see the seeds of The Cheaters, Dirt Farm, Two of a Kind, Violent Sinners, Sins of the Flesh, and others.

Danny O’Connor is your usual Hitt hero: a WW II vet, six foot three, broad-shouldered, womanzing. He’s less a heel than he is a chump for women. Yes, he jumbles three women: Tawny, the wife of an older man named Stone; Randi, a waitress; Sue, his ex-girlfriend wgho has been saving herself for their marriage, something Danny doesn’t want to wait for.  There is a cast of charcaters page:

 

Danny is on vacation from his warehouse job…and he is also getting away from Sue so he can cat around. He runs out of money fast so takes on a seasonal job of storekepper at the cabin resort place in the mountains, a job that Hitt had and a locale and job that pops up now and again in other Hitt books.

Within hours, he beds the owner’s younger wife, Tawny. She tosses himself at her, so what can he do when a hot bonde bombsehll does so? Of course, she has a plan: seduce Danny, get him to murder her husband, get half of the property and money…and her…but then her husband appraoches him to kill her and get a $10,000 payday.

Cain territory.

And of course he is being set up as a patsy by both, along with Tawny’s old boyfriend from her burlesque show days.

An interesting foundation for better books, but a disappointment in bad writing, bantering dialogue, and characters one could care less about.

Damn nice cover, though.

 

Panda Bear Passion – PEC Books (1968)

The most hard-to-find, sought-after Orrie Hitt title, next to Cabin Fever (Uni Books, 1954) and the Vest Pocket doubles, Panda Bear Passion is often called the Holy Grail of Orrie Hitt books — not for the story, mind you, but for the awesome cover.

Is the story any good? Well, it is better than all the other scattered Hitt books from 1965-1970, which I have noted tend to be incoherent and repetitive. Panda Bear Passion, however, has an easy-to-follow storyline with more sex than any Hitt book ever.

The main character is Frank Jennings, an insurance salesman on the debit job, quite familiar, just like the narrator of his first novel, I’ll Call Every Monday and a few others.  And like many Hitt heroes, he is jumbling three women, inclduing the one on the cover, a drunken woman who seems to get off better with her stuffed panda bear than with a mabn’s throbbing johnson.

The difference, and this was due to the market, is every one of the 11 chapters contains an explicit sex scene, unlike the usual Hitt where there is a sex scene every third chapter, a sex scene that is elusive…I doubt that Hitt wrote much of these sex scenes talking about hard cocks and bruised pussies, etc., and (like the 1970s Softcover reprints) they were penned by an editorial hand — PEC (Publisher’s Export Company) was a San Diego off-shoot of Greenleaf, distrubing many of the southern California sex novels and publishing their own as well.

A curious read, indeed, at the end of a fifteen year pulp career.

Trailer Tramp (Beacon, 1957)

Most of ol’ Orrie’s 1957 Beacons are pretty damn good, in some cases his best (The Promoter, Sheba, Pushover, The Sucker, etc) but this not the case with Trailer Tramp.  Such a great cover! Probably a reused UniBook cover like many were…and there is a stamp “Beacon First Award Novel” that seems to mean nothing, this is not Hitt’s first book and many late 1950s Beacons had this on the covers, probably a marketing ploy.

Also, I am not convinced Hitt wrote this one by himself; like his Roger Normandie and Charles Vern books and Beacons like Hiot Cargo, the style is uneven that telltales two writers going back and forth.

Basically, this is a plotless book, a soap opera about truly low class, row rent white trash losers and users in a trailer camp. Hitt, on his own, always had some driving if not cliched plotline — the murder scheme, the con game.  A woman named Nora starts using her trailer as a brothel and a legal battle occurs over the lease, and there is a knife fight between the handyman and the camp owner’s brother over a girl, but that is about it.

A boring book but the cover makes it collectable.

Inflamed Dames! (Novel Books, 1963)

Another one of ol’ Orrie’s social-political novels disguised as genre sleaze. It’s original title was Easy Women and it was also reprinted as The Love Seekers and Jenkins Lovers, part of Novel Books sneaky way of putting “new” product on th market but not paying th writer for an original work. None of the four titles have anything to do with the plot.

The story is about Harry Sharp, big business man and small town mayor, but he was not always so hot. He was a regular guy who studied engineering in college because it seemed like he could land a half-way decent job, but he really loathed engineering.  He went to work for a big company where he knew he’d never advance far, until he started to date the boss’ daughter and marry her, and when the boss died and his wife inherited the company, he was advanced to President. Then he decided to run for mayor of the small upper NY state town they lived in, Bolton, and press his political agenda.

See, Harry does not believe in the welfare state. This must have been the time when cities provided relief money, not states or the federal gov.  Harry wants to cut off all relief from men who don’t work for it doing city jobs like picking up trash, and women who have children out of wedlock.  The taxpayers agree but the jobless and poor think h’s out to destroy them.

Enter Emily, a 22-year-old woman with two small kids, both from different fathers who pay no child support. She goes from job to job but needs welfare money to help with her kids, and since she is unmarried and has two different fathers for her kids, she is subject to not getting checks anymore. But Harry meets her on the commuter train and shows interest in her sexually — he and his wife are no longer intimate, he has a number of lovers and call girls, his wife has a lover now, so why not…but is Emily going to fuck him to keep her welfare checks coming, or is she interested in him, or does she want to trap the wealthy young mayor into having a third child and getting his money?

Not the best Hitt but interesting in its straying away from the typical sleaze novel fare, and like most of his Novel novels, contains passages of political dialogue about fiscal conservatism and social responsibility.

Untamed Lust (Beacon Books, 1960)

This one, like many other Hitt books (Dirt Farm, Two of a Kind, Violent Sinners, Naked Flesh) is set on a big farm run by a sadistic old man married to a younger woman.

The usual Hitt motifs are present — a big and tall hero jumbling three women and a plot to murder the owner of the farm to get his wife and daughter.  Eddie, the hero, works mostly as a trapper, getting all the pests that run rampant on the land: snapping turtles, foxes, badgers, racoons…he actually feels bad for killing these creatures, but he needs the job.

The three women are:

Joan, the domestic, who is an old girlfriend and he’s still sleeping with her. She is in the process of divorcing her husband whose in prison and then wants to marry Eddie.

Kitty, or Mrs. Jennings, married to an old man in a wheelchair and hot to trot.

Carole, Kitty’s teenage daughter, who likes to hang out at nudist camps.

Carole seduces Eddie into seducing her mom so Eddie will testify in court that Kitty was unfaithful, on grounds for divorce; Carole will pay Eddie $5K for this.

Kitty wants Eddie to set a trap that her husband will accidentally stumble into and die. She promises a good chunk of the land and bank accounts, worth millions.

He only agrees because both women say they will claim he raped them and he’ll lose his job.

Despite these repeats material from other books, and the James Cain territory, Untamed Lust is well-written and a speedy, good read.

Torrid Cheat (Chariot Books #212, 1962)

 

This a fairly rare, hard-to-locate Hitt. Like Panda Bear Passion and Cabin Fever, we have looked high and low for this title; the unstoppable kind Lynn Munroe found one for us, and we were delighted with the tawdry cover.

Torrid Cheat is a curiously uneven novel from Hitt, and obviously there were deep editorial cuts: the book is a slender 128 pages, maybe 40,000 words.  It has 11 chapters, unlike Hitt’s usual 13-14 chapters and 50-60,000 words. About 3/4th into the story, we can tell there was a 10-15K word chunk sliced out by the red pen, making the jump uneven.

Rare, but alas not a remarkable story from Hitt, with a lot of his usual tropes: the younger woman marrying an older man with some money and property, and her scheme to kill him and get her hands on it. Usually, these Hitt femme fatales find a guy to be the patsy; in this case, she’s the killer and the guy figures out her murder plot.

The protagonist is Frenchie, a 19-year-old regular guy who works in a bottle factory during the work week and on the weekends, a p/t job at a gas station owned by a 50-year-old ,man, Pops.  He dates Pop’s 18-year-old daughter, Betty. Betty gets pregnant and they marry.

Pop’s recently re-married to a sultry redhead who is 28 named Bertha. On his wedding day, Frenchie gets seduced by Bertha and they carry on the affair for months.

One day Bertha and Pops go to the lake for a swim and he drowns. The whole thing seems suspicious. Yeah, his wife killed him, that much is obvious.

An okay read.

A good book for any collection as a rare item and a cool GGA cover.

Strange Longing (Chariot Books #1626, 1961)

 

A not-so-easy-to-find Hitt, reprinted as Female Doctor when Chariot Books moved to Los Angeles and became New Chariot Library.  Tells the story of a female vet who’s being blackmailed, she has to pay or else her lesbian secret life will be revealed and ruin her career and reputation.

Suburban Wife (Beacon #162, 1958)

All of the prolific softcore writers have a “suburban sins” type book, probably at the direction of the publisher since the dirty infidelities of those suburbanites, ever since Payton Place,  was (and still is, look at Desperate Housewives) a hot topic.

Orrie Hitt wrote half  a dozen with suburban in the title, and has a few others that are suburban-esque, like his Kay Addams’  novel, Lucy, and Twisted Sinners.

The first in line: Suburban Wife, and early 1958 title with a nifty Beacon template cover. This tale tells the yarn of Millicent Ford, a young desperate housewife whose husband, Andy, works in Manhattan long hours, sometimes weekends, and there are business trips.  A neighbor, Bill Ramsey, is married to Grace, a career woman who is also away a lot.  Bill and Millicent often take the same train and get to talking. They are both drinkers. They get together and drink. They start having an affair.

Millicent feels quite a bit of guilt until she discovers that Andy and Grace are often on business trips in the same cities, in the same motels…Bill has known all along that Grace has been unfaithful. So what they are doing ins’t so “sinful” after all. When Andy catches them, doing the hypocritical yelling, he’s cut down when Millicent informs him that she knows about Grace–so where the hell does he get off?

The story is also about alcoholism, as Millicent sinks deeper and deepers into needing a bottle of rye or whuskey for comfort, drinking recklessly all day and going into bars, which often leads to trysts, like one she has with an insurance agent who gets possessive of her after a one-nighter.

To stave off suburban boredom, Millicent often heads charity drives; she just did a successful one for the Red Cross, “borrowing” some of the collected money when she needs to, always putting it back though. She is approached by a local wealthy philanthropist who asks her to exec man a drive to build a rec center for the local youth, a place to keep them from joining gangs, doing robberies and rapes and other juvie crimes.  It’ll be a lot of money to handle, plus she will be paid a salary, rather than this being a volunteer effort.

The first problem is that money, mixed with her drinking, mixed with the impending divorce and the end of Andy’s money for her lax time, like drinking,  It is inevitable that she will embezzle or misuse the funds, a common set-up in Hitt’s books.

She tries asking for money from guys she sleeps with but that doesn’t pan out the way she hoped.

Enter the crime element and a murder, makes for a good read.