Call South 3300: Ask for Molly! (Beacon #176, 1958)#

Another early Hitt that has salesmen, call girls, booze and a con scheme to make big bucks.

The novel jumps back and forth between POVs with a man, Slade Martin, and a woman, Ann Frank.  Slade is lead sales manager of All-Channel TV, a manufacturer of television sets that employs 1200 people. Ann is a secretary there, and a former prostitute at Molly’s, a cathouse in the red light district; she still works there one weekend a month, taking calls from special clients, to pay rent on her apartment, which she could never do with her low-paying job.  But she likes having a normal job, rather than working full time at the brothel, which tends to get raided now and then by the cops.

She also has her eye on Slade — he’s handsome, looks like “a movie star,” and has bedded just about every woman working at the company.  he’s also an alcoholic and a liar — he’ll do anything for a big sale.  All-Channel does not have a “new” model to compete, especially with sets that have the revolutionary concept of a “remote control.”  All they have is a older set, and too many units — Slade is tasked to hock this set as their new model at a product convention.

The con is to get Mortimer Kane to make a huge order — Kane is one of the biggest buyers in the country, and when he buys, others follow his lead.  If Slade doesn’t pull in a big order, All-Channel could get out of business, and 1200 people could lose their jobs, and that would have a detrimental effect on the local economy…

From Door to Door (Beacon #304, 1960)

After the disappointment of Tell Them Anything, it was good to get back to the Hitt we best love — the tawdriness of a womanizer with his back against the wall.

This is about those nifty folks who go door to door, office to office, selling magazine subscriptions, and the prostitution that happens in that biz.  Les Drake is a unit manager working smaller New York State towns, who has the chance to become head of all of New York, where he can make good money.

Here is Les: “I’m six-two, weigh one-eighty, and I’m twenty-six years old.”  Your typical Hitt narrator/hero! He was double-crossed by his wife and busienss partner before — they ran off together when she got pregnant, cleaning out the bank accounts of the business and marriage, leaving him broke.  After a bout of booze time and near suicide, he got ino the magazine-selling biz and is good at it.

Les is till a hard drinker because he’s in a pickle: he’s been sleeping with a 19-year-old member of his team, Ellen, for quite a while; to him it’s just good sex, he has no intention of getting serious with any woman, not after what his wife did.

Until he meets 22-year-old June, daughter of the guy who owns Fairweather Productions, the magazine subscription service.  She’s engaged to a dork, and he knows he can have her.  She has joined the team to learn the footwork of the biz, because her father wants to reture and have her run the biz with her fiancee, soon to be husband. Seems the would-be husband’s father owns 51% of the company and there is no choice here.

Les eventually gets June into bed. She claims to be a virgin, she “kept her virtue” in college and she has no desire to have sex with her fiancee, or even marry him.  But she does want to run the biz.

Ellen isn’t too happy about June taking her place, so she blackmails Les: she tells him that she lied about her age, that she’s not 19 but 17, and she will put him in jail for statutory rape if he dumps her. Plus, she seems to be 2-months pregnant, so she wants Les to marry her.

This is a monkey wrench in Les’ new plans: to marry June and take over the company and run it with her.

June has other ideas, too.  She has found out that one of the girls in the team uses her body to sell high bulk subscriptions. She will get $50-70 orders for having sex with men, plus some extra on the side.  She’s an ex-beauty content queen who is angry at all men — she slept with all the judges and got nothing, so now she refuses to have sex without being paid.

June thinks this is the best way to increase sales, so she hires girls she finds in bars, girls who have sex or booze and money, girls who have dead-end jobs, come from poor family, come from broken dreams.  Soon their sales records sky rocket.

What’s Les to do?  He knows it’s illegal, they could get busted, but the high sales secures his new job as head on New York, and keeps June happy…

Ellen’s appendix ruptures and he finds out she’s not pregnant after all, it was a ruse.  And one of the girls gets busted by the cops, so Les and June are arrested, and the papers pick up the scandal…

Like all his Beacon titles, there is a moral ending: Les and June repent their sinful ways, get married, stop drinking, and after the scandal dies down, take over the business and have a baby…

From Door to Door is an interesting peek into what lower-class or uneducated women have to do to make money in the 50s-60s, and holds true now.  It’s so secret that the magazine subscription biz has been, was, and still is a good front for prostitution.  It generally lures in young people with no expereince or job prospects. I almost got sucked into doing such when I was a kid, among other crooked telemarketing schemes.

I was also sexually propositioned by a young lady selling mag subscriptions once.  Did I take her up on it?  Let’s say she was pretty, and let’s say I will not say what I did, and maintain my moral virtue on this blog. The point is: this stuff still happens.

You feel for these characters who can’t find better work, who know nothing else but fast-talking sales, who live day-to-day on what money they make that day, who go from one tawdry town to the next shabby street.

This is classic Hitt.