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.

 

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.

Carnival Honey – Kozy Book #143, 1961

Unfortunatewly, another disappointing Hitt — you get confused about what’s happening and why, and you don’t care for the characters.

The “honey” is young Anne Crawford, college student, whose father travels with a carny but doesn’t want her in the life.  When he has a heart attack, she joins up and becomes a striptease dancer in the girlie show.

She hooks up with carny hand Clint…

Is this the the same Clint and Anne who ran away from the carny life in The Cheaters?

It’s just not a good read, although over at Anna’s Blog, she liked it.

On the Hitt Scale, a 3.

Devil in the Flesh (Valentine Books, 1957) aka Sins of the Flesh (Kozy #94, 1960)

1957 was a busy year for the Shakespeare of Sleaze — four books with key in hardback and half a dozen with Beacon, and Devil in the Flesh with Valentine, a short-lived hardcover house that also published ol’ Orrie’s Hotel Woman.

The Valentine copy I have is beat-up and without a dust jacket and is 204 readable pages; the Kozy has a nifty cover but cram,s in tiny print into 160 pages 60,000 words of text.

It’s a backwoods novel populated by white trash hillbillies with more violence usually found in a Hittsville Tale, told by a big strapping six foot two guy, Shad Albright, who owns a piece of farmland by a lake that this rich woman, Sheila, having inherited her father’s estate, wants to buy — a new dam will be built in the area and she knows the government will eventually pay over top dollar for the land rights.

Shad has just done a few years in prison for embezzling money at a finance company he worked at, money he didn’t take, and always figured his tramp wife, Lynn did (we later learn it washer brother who did it).  he wants nothing to do with Lynn.  Back home at the farm, he has sparked a romance with a hot swamp girl, Rita, and he wants to marry her, but first he must divorce Lynn, and she won’t grant him that divorce.

He has troubles with the local thug, who has had a yen for Rita for years, and is working with the rich woman, Shelia, to force Shad to sell his land to her.

Shad won’t budge; not that he wants to keep the farm, he just doesn’t like people telling him what to do. he’s had enough of that in prison while wrongfully incarcerated. He’s a stubborn guy.

Like many Hitt heroes, Shad has sex with three women in the book — Rita, of course, and his wife when she reduces him, and with Sheila, his enemy, against his better judgement.  Hitt writes what is perhaps his most detailed, poetic and romamtic sex scene in all of his novels…

She twisted in my arms, and the smell of dry hemlock needles was strong and hot.  My lips bruised her mouth, making her moan. I unbuttoned the blouse and shoved it asid. My hand went down over her body, exploring the mysteries of her flesh…

“Oh, Shad! Shad!”

It was hell hearing it, the way she spoke my name, sort of hopeful, yet afraid and, perhaps, just a little but ashamed too.  She was a nice girlm a riverbank girl, and she’d never been anywhere at all. She belonged to me; every throbbing cell in her wild and hungry body belonged to me to do with as I pleased. It was a good feeling, knowing this, but it was also somewhat frightening. It would never be enough. There had to be something else.

“I love you,” I whispered huskily.

She came to me, her mouth parted, her body mine all mine […] I don’t know why, because there wasn’t any good reason for it, but at that moment I felt as though I were up on Slide Mountain and had slipped off the edge of one of those high cliffs and shot down into a yawning, empty gorge that knew no bottom or sunlight.  I grabbed for anything, everything, and as I fell, hurtling toward the violent, uplifting earth that must be somewhere beneath me, I let out a long, agonized groan that ended in almost a sob.  I seemed to cling there in the darkness for a moment, wondering if there would be more, and hoping, with a terrible, awful ache, that this glorious furious sensation would never stop. And then I was going down again, all the way down, and the darkness in the gorge became light and the light became love. I struck the ground, driving deep into it, and my love exploded into the earth because, in the end, all light and love becom earth. (pp. 11-12)

Make what you will of these metaphors…

There are a few twists, when we don’t know who really is the bad woman and who is the good women, or if the three women in Shad’s life are a bit of both…then in the past 50 pages comes a murder mystery, or two murders, with one suspect after another that it becomes a little hard to follow and some of the events seem rather implausible, like a crazy James Ellroy mystery…

On the Hitt Scale this gets a 7.8.

Nude Doll (Kozy Book #182, 1963)

Another novel dealing with one of ol’ Orrie’s favorite themes — young women posing naked for the camera arts nudie pic racket, $5 a set.  The female protagonist is another Lucy, and she’s a backwoods farm girl on the edge of the swamp and bogs, with no mother and drunken louse of a father who raises white mice for the experimental lab market.

I need to keep a count of how many of Hitt’s heroines, villains, and femme fatales are named Lucy.

Was this because of the popularity of I Love Lucy at the time?

But this one is a little different than the others, a slight cut above the rest.  The story of Lucy Sanford  is a sad and somber one — when we meet her in Chapter One, she is living with a married man and woman, Anne and Ted; she’s the wife’s lover, a rich woman, and her husband is a failed novelist with big, non-commercial ideas. He doesn’t seem interested in sex, only his arcane ideas for grand novels.  They own some resort cabins along the lake in Oakville called Perks Landing.  How did Lucy get here?  She looks back…

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.

Many Hitt Titles Yet to Read

Pleasure Ground (Kozy #142, 1961)

This Kozy is a far better novel than Wild Lovers, both published around the same time.  Hitt seems to be at his best when writing first-person, rather than jumping POVs in third, though he does have some pretty good third-person books, like The Strangest Sin.

This one had a semi-backwoods/rural farm setting, with the typical big man narrator, Bert Forbes, a laborer who wanders from one job to another.

I was twenty-five years old and a nobody. A nobody who had been kicked out of one foster home for something I shouldn’t have done. A nobody who had married another nobody and who supported a child who carried my name but didn’t have a drop of my blood. (p. 11)

He’s a lot like the narrator in The Widow or Two of a Kind or Peeping Tom...a hired hand trying to get by.

He’s working at the Collins Farm, dubbed Lonely Acres, painting; he’s no good with cows and other farm work, he’s made this clear, though his cranky boss, Flint Collins, keeps pushing farm work on him.  He hates Collins, but it’s a job — Collins is 50, somewhat wealthy, and used to getting what he wants.  “I always win,” he says.

Flint is awaiting the arrival of his new bride, twenty-year-old Sharon.  Orrie Hitt certainly had a hair up his arse about older men marrying young women, as this situation happens a lot, and the older men are never painted in a good light.

And then there’s the women, always the women…

Wild Lovers (Kozy #145, 1961)

James Reasoner recently reviewed this one at his blog, so I decided to give it a gander here. It’s one of ol’ Orrie’s backwoods novels, Erskine Caldwell territory with perhaps a tad of Faulkner, and I have not yet discussed any of those, but will soon — such as Ellie’s Shack, Pleasure Ground, and Untamed Lust.

Reasoner suggets this one could have been titled Shany Road and he’s right, and would have been a better title, since all the action pretty much takes place along Shanty Road in Mechanicsville (a town in several Hitt books), the slum area of the poor, the day laborers, the loose girls who sell what they have for booze, food, or money.  All white trash tramps and heels, really, like Pug and Joy.

Joy lives in a shack. Her home burned down in the past, killing her parents; she gets by with her chickens, selling eggs to passerbys and in town.  She’s 22 and the usual Hitt gal with a 38 inch bust and 19 inch waist. She’s also a virgin — she “dates” Pug, a 21-year-old auto mechanic and gas station attendent, but she refuses to sleep with him, she refuses to be like all the other girls on Shany Road, like Pug’s pregnant sister who has no idea who the father is.

A corporation wants to buy Joy’s property; they have been buying land around the lake for some big project. She has refused the $20K offer, waiting for more money, while the guy from the company keeps trying to make her, suggesting they go to a hotel and seal the deal.

Everywhere she turns, men  come on to her and she thinks they are all pigs.

Along come Slim, a big man, an atist, son of the local rich family.  He’s come back to the house and farm with a girlfriend from New York, Cherry.  He takes a yen for Joy, and offers her $20 a day to pose in the nude for his paintings, more for photos — once again, Hitt delves into the nudie pic racket.

Like all of Hitt’s novels with a female protaginist, the girl gets sucked into taking her clothes off (and more) because she needs money.  She certainly does not want to marry Pug and get stuck in the small town for the rest of her life.  Pug is okay, but she doesn’t love him.  He gets frustrated one night and takes Joy by force, pops her cherry by rape, something that happens in a number of Hitt books, like Sin Doll or Campus Tramp. After, Pug is ashsmed of himself and Joy says he’s lucky she doesn’t have him arrested.

Posing for Slim, she feels desire and since she’s no longer a virgin, she sleeps with Slim — the day after her rape!

There’s also Slim’s girlfriend, Cherry, who is turning into a lush and playing around with.  It can all only lead to bad shit.

This one, unfortunately, is not as engaging as Hitt’s usual work.  The characters are not that interesting or redeeming, and the situations predictable and over-used in other Hitt books.  Why should we care about Joy?  She’s not too bright, she has no future beyond Shanty Road, and she doesn’t really fight off Pug’s forced sex much, as if she expected it to happen one day.  The fact that she sleeps with Slim the next day makes her no less a Shanty Road slut than any other.

On the Hitt Scale, a 6.5.