Dark Passion – Kozy Book #128, 1961

The title and the cover with the dancing African natives might seem a tad racist — then again, many 1960s sleaze book covers and titles are either a tad racist, sexist, and uncouth by 2010 PC standards.

This one is a tad different than your usual Hitt, too — instead of being set in upper New York State, a farm, carnival, backwoods or the Manhattan, it is set in a fictional East African country, Casabula…I say east because the narrator mentions it being near Togo.

The narrator is a reporter who once lived in Casabula with his diplomat parents, now dead. He knows the country, and once knew the current military ruler when they were kids.   He’s there to do a story on the new social reforms, the resistance fighting, and the general politcal turmoil in the Congo that was present back in the 1960s, and doesn’t seem to have changed much in current postcolonial times.

This sounds good and promising, but this simply is not Orrie Hitt’s territory; this is not the world he knows well and writes well about, so it doesn’t fly.  The book becomes convoluted,unreadable, and basically unbelievable and boring.

Another unfortunate miss for Hitt.