Lust Prowl (Lancer/Domino Books, 1964)

Ol Orrie’s fifth, and I think last, peeping tom novel was one of the handful of titles he did for Lancer Books’ Domino imprint in the mid-60s.  These novels were shorter than his usual 50-60K word fares, clocking in about 45K words crammed into 128 pages of small, hard-to-read type (hy do publishers think people find reading small type comfortable?)

Like The Peeper, his first peeper book, the narrator of this one is a journalist for a small town paper, reporting clandestinely on his own crimes:

Now as I sat at my typewriter, a battered Remington that ‘d had for several years, I grinned. Of course I banged away at the rumors for all they were worth, keeping everything in the rumor class, but I could have written the real story myself. Yes, I knew the real story, because I was the peeping tom. Me, Barry Warren, a husky fellow of twenty-five who lived for the coming of night, the lighted windows and the unguarded moments of an unsuspecting female. Then afterword, and seldom entirely satisfied, I’d live in a world of fear and torture and just about wanted to die. (pp. 5-6)

Another peeping tom who cannot escape his urges and, like many perverts, feels dirty after he gives in to his dark need, rather than being crass and slimy like John Belushi in Animal House…

He blames a girl from his teen years, his first peep:

Sally, lovely on the surface but a bitch underneath — she’d caused me to become what I was.  She was a symbol of frustration and regret, a creature which shouldn’t have existed, a symbol that ought to be destroyed. (p. 32)

In I Prowl by Night, the narrator is obsessed with finding a woman with a strawberry shaped birth mark on her thigh like the object of his first lust peep; in this one, the obsession is a small mole under a belly button.

This one is also very similar to The Peeper,as both narrators are reporters for a small town newspaper (Rosetown here) and writing about their own prowls.  Toss in some elements of Warped Woman/Taboo Thrills (puritanical editorials against sex and sleaze) and Pushover (writing historical booklets using archived manuscripts from the old Federal Writers Project of the Depression), Hitt covers oft-tread ground…

Yet Lust Prowl is written with a clam clarity; the writer may not be exploring new themes, but his prose is more confident, his characters more vulnerable and real in this 1964 text, opposed to books written in the late 1950s.

BArry Warren is 25 and has worked at various newspaper, has roamed from one small town to the next, prowling for peeps at night.  He marries Marsha, who operates a dress store in Rosetown, because he loves her but he also thinks maybe marriage will help him stop peeping into the windows…that doesn’t work and weeks after the quick wedding, the two are separated.

Barry constantly wonders what is wrong with him, why can’t he feel normal, why can’t he be a good husband?  He tries.  He keeps doing bad things, like stealing money from the paper’s till to pay back a debt, then having the theft blamed on another employee.

Of all of Hitt’s peeping tom book, The Peeper and Peeping Tom are the best. This on is okay, and on the Hitt Scale I give it a 7.5.

Pushover (Beacon, 1957)

Here we have ol’ Orrie firing on all pistons, at the top of his A-game.  While the usual elements are here — the heel juggling three dames, salesmanship and making money — the premise is not only unlike any other Hitt novel, but pretty damn unique. It’s not a sex or sleaze novel, not a crime novel…a con man novel?  A novel about a heel, about jealousy and revenge?

Danny Fulton heads up what is a borderline scam…they do offer a service, he and his team are not up-and-up about it and what kind of profit they actually make.  The game is the seedy side of publishing — offering up slapped-together books that cover the history of small towns or the police and fire departments in various towns, to be used as fund-raising means.  Danny and his cohorts play on the egos of people, their sense of place in history, and the notion that the “profits” will be used for charitable means, either for the fire department, the city’s social services, or churches.

This is what they do: they get an organization, such as the fire or police departments or a 4-H club or anything, really, to put up initial funds to get the book started.  Then Danny sells “ads” for the book for more income.  The people think he’s hard at work researching the history and doing a good academic job at it, but really he has one of his women — Madeline — in the town library, pulling out two decades old manuscripts commissioned through Roosevelt’s New Deal Work Project Administration, the Federal Writer’s Project.  That project, during the Depression, was designed to provide work for writers and academics during the Great Depression.

Established July 27, 1935 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) operated under journalist and theatrical producer Henry Alsberg, and later John D. Newsome, compiling local histories, oral histories, ethnographies, children’s books and other works. The most well-known of these publications were the 48 state guides to America (plus Alaska Territory, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.) known as the American Guide Series. The American Guide Series books were compiled by the FWP, but printed by individual states, and contained detailed histories of each state with descriptions of every city and town. The format was uniform, comprising essays on the state’s history and culture, descriptions of its major cities, automobile tours of important attractions, and a portfolio of photographs. The Federal Writers Project was funded and put to work, as a Public Works in and around the west coast, through Washington, Oregon and California.

FWP was charged with employing writers, editors, historians, researchers, art critics, archaeologists, geologists and cartographers. Some 6,600 individuals were employed by the FWP. In each state a Writer’s Project non-relief staff of editors was formed, along with a much larger group of field workers drawn from local unemployment rolls. Many of these had never graduated high school, but most had formerly held white collar jobs of some sort. Most of the Writer’s Project employees were relatively young in age, and many came from working-class backgrounds.

Basically what Danny and Madeline do is re-type the manuscripts they find through the local project archives, send them to a printer to reduce the type and print off 1500-2000 copies of the book, which they hand over to the benefactor organization to sell for $2.00, making around a fifty cent-to-one dollar profit.

What they don’t know is the actual price of the printing — Danny has jacked it up so he has a profit — and that Danny prints a thousand or more copies than told.  Before the organizations can go out and sell their copies, Danny and his crew quickly hits the streets or phones and sell the books to the town citizens and take off with what they make — maybe a few grand, but that went a long way in the 1950s.  Thus, when the organizations try to sell their copies, they’ll have a hard time because a lot of people already have the book…