Sin Doll

The covers above are the 1959 and 1963 editions.  There is a 1971 photo cover edition that I will skip posting.

Still not sold on being an Orrie Hitt fan, but close.  I have a few more here to read, and I have ordered some with great covers and titles, like Love Princess and Tramp Wife.

Sin Doll is one of Hitt’s young-woman-exploited-in-the-50s books.  Cherry lives in a small town, is 20, has adopted parents and dreams of New York or Hollywood — anything.  She can sing and she has a killer body.

She also has trouble making good money — she has a $40/week receptionist job at a photo developing lab and sings several nights a week at a cafe for $15/set.  She needs at least a grand or two in the bank to move to NYC.

She loses both jobs and all she can find is factory work.  Her ex-boss at the photo lab lets her in on his real business: he takes nude pictures of women, and makes stag reel films, for buyers. He says he can pay her $200 week to pose nude.

She has other problems: the buy who has been bugging her to marry him forced sex on her without a condom, so she would get pregnant and forced to marry him, stuck in this town.

She does the photos…she drinks to deal with it…she becomes an alcoholic…she has a lesbian affair with another model/stripper, and she styarts sleeping with the photographer, her married ex-boss who wants to get a divorce and marry her.

Then they all get busted by the police for lewd acts of sin.

True to Beacon Books, there is a happy ending where she and her boss/lover learn that they must reprent from this sleazy sin, and when he gets out of jail, she will marry him and have his babies.

Sometimes these quaint cheesy happy endings are funny — they come out of the blue, like in Loren Beauchamp’s Connie or Sheldon Lord’s April North. People who hardly know each other fall in love and run off to the chapel and live good mid-American Christian lives after wallowing in the gutter of filth and sin.  Ah, the 1950s.