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.