Orrie HittReviews

Pulpy meandering drivel. I wanted to read Orrie Hitt because his name kept popping up as an interesting Noir-ish tawdry take on modern living, but this one promises a bit of action, but delivers nothing much. Big tough drifter wanders onto a ranch and is hired as a hunter because the crippled man has a warped hatred of animals. Soon, the man's lusty wife and daughter are after this big sensitive galoof and succeeding for the most part in taking him down. Of course the lowlife wife wants her bad husband killed for the money and .... who knows what will happen. Actually it is all a very happy ending all around. nothing to the story though.

Yet another sleazy pulp classic from orrie hitt. He creates a sleazy dirty hopeless world There are no angels in Hitt's tales. There is only cold hard reality

Orrie Hitt has been referred to as the king of sleaze pulp. He wrote something on the order of 150 books from the 50s to the 70s. At the height of his writing career, he would churn out a book every two weeks, working 12 hour days. His books were all capped with racy, lurid, tawdry covers.

Yes, he has similar themes running throughout his work. The men are all con artists, grifters, shady characters that
could charm the skirts off any woman. The women in his books were lushes and tramps. And the men typically are juggling three women.

Lady is a Lush is a typical Hitt book. No one would mistake Chip Collins for a choir boy. He is a bitter, cynical guy who claims he married a no-good-tramp and, in one of Hitt's great descriptions, doesn't trust her as far as he could push a tractor trailer with two broken legs. Their marriage is bitter, nasty, and full of accusations and recriminations and Collins only sticks with it because he thinks Amy is going to inherit
some money. Collins is no great catch either. He is as sleazy and dirty as they come and has a mistress or two stashed on his trucking route.

Don't try to explain that you are reading Hitt because you suddenly remembered your eleventh grade English teacher recommending it. She didn't. You are reading this because you want to get a taste of the sleazy dime-store novels that were found in abundance in the fifties.
And, don't sit here and explain that your local feminist society is recommending this book. It isn't. It's a sleazy soap opera about a blue-collar guy who fools around. Nothing more.

In this particular novel, Eddie Boyd is out of work and locked out of his apt for unpaid rent. Eddie's life philosophy is that a guy lives once and takes what he can get. Joan, a childhood friend who is waiting for her divorce and who thinks Eddie will marry her, gets him a job as a
trapper at Wildwood Acres, a 2,000 acre estate. The previous trapper was fired because he got fresh with Jennings' wife and daughter.

Jennings had fallen from a horse and is now in a wheelchair. Of course Jennings' wife Kitty is a Lot younger than him, wears clothes that barely cover her, and has looks that could grace the cover of a girlie
magazine. Kitty decides she wants Eddie to join her swimming and when he refuses she threatens to tell her husband that Eddie made a pass at her. Uh oh. Kitty sounds like trouble.

Carole, Jenning's daughter is trouble too in much the same way. Eddie can't stay out of
trouble cause one of these three women convinces Eddie to get involved in murder. Another manipulates him into blackmail. Poor guy. He's actually one of Hitt's more decent protagonists. He's not a
swindler. The women in this book are the devious ones. All in all, a very worthwhile read, particularly if you have an interest in
the dime store novels of the fifties.

Brody is a sailor and he has to leave town so he heads out on the most
woe begotten tanker imaginable. He explains that he always intends to
bank his pay when he gets into port but it never works out that way. He always runs into a gal with a thirty-six inch personality and wakes up six days later with nothing. He tries to win his dough back by
gambling but winds up in fights. He's heading out of town as a third mate and ships engineer, but this ship is carrying more than just oil. It appears to be smuggling arms to South America. And a young girl with reddish blonde hair, Sheba, is involved.

What is a woman doing onboard? Is she the innocent young innocent she appears to be? None of the crew know where they are headed and there's no first officer
and only half the crew you should have. None of the crew have ever sailed with this captain before. What happens when Brody realizes that the captain is rendezvousing with the Soviets to turn over American
fighter jets? What can Brody do all by himself against a whole crew of armed conspirators?

A great pulp cold war adventure. It reads very easily. There's a lot of action right to the very end. I recommend this
novel for your reading enjoyment. It's very different from Hoyt's usual dime store sleaze.

In Hitt's world, the men are all con artists,
grifters, shady characters that could charm the skirts off any woman.
The women in his books are lushes and tramps. And the men typically are juggling three women, although in this book it's sort of reversed with underhanded sleazy Sheba. In typical Orrie Hitt fashion, all the men Sheba deals with, even the ones who seem decent, are trying to make her.
In fact, so do the women. Nevertheless, Sheba sells a boatload of cars and is promoted to sales manager. It is well written and quick reading. It was published in 1959 and it clearly was a different era before women's lib. Some of the material
would undoubtedly be approached differently today. Understanding its
place in cultural history, it's a good example of dime store pulp.

A 1963 sleaze-pulp story by Orrie Hitt, the so-called king of sleaze. Hitt's books are not sugary or filled with sentimentality. It's a cold harsh world in Hitt's books and men and women are going to do what they have to do to get what they want. This is not one of Hitt's best. It's missing some of the umph that some of his other books have, but its probably something you'd find on the newsstand racks in 1963.


This one is filled with sharp operators, frigid wives, welfare queens, bitter single mothers, and politicians. Hitt's attempt to combine politics with sleaze exploitation wasn't one of his finest moments, but remember this guy literally wrote hundreds of novels.

Orrie Hitt has been referred to as the king of sleaze pulp. He wrote something on the order of 150 books from the 50s to the 70s. At the height of his writing career, Hitt would churn out a book every two weeks, working twelve-hour days and chugging ice coffee at his kitchen table as he furiously typed.

His books were all capped with racy, lurid, tawdry covers. The men in his books are all con artists,
grifters, shady characters that could charm the skirts off any woman and the women in his books were lushes, tramps, etc. Lurid, salacious, scandalous at a time --1962-- when people would
hide such things in briefcases and in newspapers.

What was Hitt up to? Besides paying the bills. Scratch the surface and suburbia ain't what it was advertised to be.Jerry and Olive met at a party and married after three months. Although he works in the City for a sleazy Men's magazine featuring scantily clad young ladies, they move out to the new development in Clinton. Olive finds the town dull. Nothing to do but drink. She is bored
with Jerry and finds her neighbor Sally stimulating. Jerry finds his wife frigid and rides the bus instead of the train because he has his eyes on a lady who lives down his street - Betty. Rather
than head home, he maneuvers Betty into having drinks with him.

No one else In suburbia seems to be happy with their crappy jobs, their screaming kids, or their spouses. Fred claims he goes bowling with the guys every Friday just so he can sneak off to see Ruth while Harold stays late in the city where Sally assumes he's meeting some girl from the office.

Throughout this crazy soap opera, once you get past the salaciousness, you realize how utterly miserable most of these characters are. And, it's not just their romantic lives either. Olive's father borrowed too much and lost every penny and then some. Betty married a bum who couldn't hold a job and took a settlement from his rotten family to walk from their rotten marriage. Unlike some other Orrie Hitt books, there's no con game or scheme going on. Just people struggling with the middle class dream. Yes, it's dated in attitudes and mores and assumptions, but it's a scandalous
Dimestore paperback from the early sixties so whaddaya expect.

Orrie Hitt has been referred to as the king of sleaze pulp. He wrote something on the order of 150 books from the 50s to the 70s. At the height of his writing career, he would churn out a book every two weeks, working 12 hour days. His books were all capped with racy, lurid, tawdry covers. Yes, he has similar themes running throughout his work. The men are all con artists, grifters, shady characters that could charm the skirts off any woman. The women in his books were lushes and tramps. And the men typically are juggling three women.

This book is solidly in the noir category. It's as if Hitt swallowed up some of Gil Brewer's Florida pulps and mixed them in with Block's Killing Castro (which came a couple if years later). Our hero, Clint Walker, is a bitter, disillusioned guy whose wife left him for his brother and he turned to rum - lots of rum. "There was a time when my marriage to Rose had been like a cruiser, sleek and sharp," Clint explains. "All that was left from the marriage was the boat, and for two years that had been enough." "It was a hell of a life; a stinking life. You married one girl, thought she was everything you had ever looked for, and she was nothing but a tramp." How's that for bitter and unhappy? She was a woman, raw and inviting, but Clint knew she was as poisonous as one of the snakes in the Everglades.
After drowning his sorrows for two years, Clint's got nothing but a fast boat that, on the days he is sober, he uses for fishing charters. Clint rents the dock from Frank Stearns and his innocent young college- educated daughter Betty, who parades around in a black bathing suit. "She had a full smile, one that washed over you and made the sun seem brighter." He sees her as a sweet kid and feels guilty for taking advantage of her, but how could he help himself.

Vera and her father, George Gordon, come along and offer Clint a king's ransom for running guns to late fifties Cuba where a revolution is brewing. He doesn't like it, but after some thugs beat him senseless and make off with what's left of his money, what choice does he have? Vera was a lighter blonde than Betty, but then all comparisons stopped. "She came across the dock, the high heels if her black pumps making a lot of noise." Her yellow dress hides little. What Clint saw "was enough to drive a sane man out of his mind. This girl had been put together with one mold, just one, and afterward they had thrown the thing away." Clint had been to nightclubs and stag shows, but had
never seen anything like her. "This girl leaked sex all over the place like a leaky faucet."
Clint falls for her, throwing everything else away to help with the smuggling scheme and looking forward to the fantasy of running off to Mexico with Vera.

Here, you have politics, revolution, a sea adventure, a bitter divorced shell of a man, and you have a powerful story. You can literally feel Clint's hunger for money and Vera, even as you know he is sinking into a whirlpool he can't climb out of. This story is far more than just Dimestore trash. It is a story about someone down on their luck, whose dreams have been smashed, and who is not willing to be a sucker again.

Orrie Hitt is not for everyone. Remember, he was called the king of sleaze and the story has a lot of sexual innuendo.

Orrie Hitt wrote sleaze pulp in the fifties that bore lurid covers and racy titles. The men in his books were all conmen, grifters, and other types of sleazeballs. The women were tramps and lushes. Nicky Weaver stars in two of Hitt's sleazy masterpieces, "I'll Call Every Monday" and "Ladies' Man." Weaver had gotten burned before by women and by business and he was sour and cynical and would do just about anything for money. He thought women were "always on hand to drain you dry, leaving you ready to push down any road where you thought there might be money around the next curve."

After pulling an insurance scam in "I'll Call Every Monday," one that went sour real quick, Weaver heads into Chesterville in response to an ad for a radio salesman. "It looked like a lazy town, a dumb town," but he had nothing better going on. When he gets to the radio station, the appearance of the little yellow building "left him almost as cold as a streetwalker's heart." "To Nicky, it looked like a place in which it would be ridiculous for anybody to try to make a living." But, of course, that was before he met Marie, the owner of the station, having inherited it from her father and left saddled with his debts. She often sat in her office, drowning her troubles in a bottle or two of booze. Nicky "could smell her even before he saw her and after he saw her he couldn't say anything at all." "She was a white blonde with lips the color of fresh blood." "Her hips, as she walked across the office, rolled like they were fastened to her with ball bearings." But, he wondered if she would be another Bess, another Irene, "a glamorous agglutination of female flesh with the mind of a pickpocket." "He was hard, bitter inside and he belonged with the real bastards, the kind who'd swipe flowers off a grave to send to a wedding."

It's interesting how Nicky takes to running the radio station after a hilarious first night of playing records at the wrong speed and leaving his microphone off. Eventually, he comes up with a foolproof scheme to get lots of money and the hell with anyone who gets in his way.

How can you like such sleazy, dirty, conniving, bitter people? Orrie Hitt has a magic way of creating such characters out of whole cloth and reeling the reader in so that the reader finds them fascinating, finds their exploits and their dirty deeds fascinating. There is nothing soft or fuzzy about a Hitt novel and the lead characters could never be confused with white knights or fairy princesses, but there is a hard, gutsy reality about his writing. A Hitt novel is not for everyone and some will be put off by the sleaziness of the characters who aren't saints or angels and Nicky Weaver is watching every woman who walks by in a tight sweater and thinking how to put the make on her. But, as long as you know what you are getting into, you can settle back and enjoy this novel for what it is and the characters for who they are.

The title of “I’ll Call Every Monday” refers to the day of the week that insurance agents go around to collect the premiums and the day of the week that Irene Schoefield asked insurance agent Nicky Weaver to come over and collect from her, the day of the week that her husband went to New York City and left her all alone in that big house on the hill. Irene, of course, had “a set of hips that drove the temperature in the room up to about a hundred and twenty.” “I’ll Call Every Monday” is Orrie Hitt’s take on James Cain’s “Double Indemnity.” Why do we need to read a remake of that classic? Well, for one thing, this book is not a remake of “Double Indemnity” and, for the most part, has little to do with that earlier novel. In fact, for much of the book, the reader keeps waiting for the whole “Double Indemnity” theme to play out to its logical conclusion, but there are so many other things going on here. And, don’t assume you know how its all going to play out.

This is the first novel Hitt ever published and it is the first of two novels he wrote starring Nicky Weaver, the second being “Ladies’ Man.” Here, Weaver is a bit of a sleazeball, getting it on with a married woman, corrupting a young woman and breaking her heart, falsifying insurance policies, borrowing from collections. But, he is still a bit of a chump, still wants to do the right thing and still is moral enough that, when he sees that Irene’s husband has been selling photograph sets of her in her birthday suit at local bars, he hauls off and slugs the bastard.

Hitt specialized in writing about the working class and, here, the insurance agent Weaver, although a white collar salesman, is just another chump trying to make a living, bitching about all the stupid people he deals with and all the people who should be paying up their premiums, but always find excuses not to. Most of them are dopes, he explains, cause they think they are being cute, but they don’t know from nothing. Weaver, at one point, explains that, to sell insurance all you have to do is talk fast, so fast that the client has not way to keep up with you. In some ways, he is not a bad guy and, in fact, when another agent is up to his eyeballs in debt because he’s been taking care of his mistress instead of paying his bills, Weaver lends him money to get it together.

In typical Hitt fashion, the story is sleazy rather than noirish, but its good and it’s a fast read. There are some hilarious lines here that Hitt just slips in such as when Weaver rescues three suits from the cleaners. “They looked like they had been finished off with a carpet beater and a mop.”

Another Orrie Hitt dime store novel sleaze pulp masterpiece. Orrie Hitt has been referred to as the king of sleaze pulp. He wrote something on the order of 150 books from the 50s to the 70s. At the height of his writing career, he would churn out a book every two weeks, working 12 hour days. His books were all capped with racy,
lurid, tawdry covers. Yes, he has similar themes running throughout his work. The men are all con artists, grifters, shady characters that could charm the skirts off any woman. The women in his books were
lushes and tramps. And the men typically are juggling three women.

In this particular novel, Johnny Reagan works at the Hotel Shelly, which is little different from the town dump except it has a roof over it. Janet, who has an hourglass figure, works the hotel switchboard. Mr.
Conner offers Johnny a job selling insurance and, being an enterprising
young man, he jumps at the chance.

It's dark, dirty, sinister, and sleazy. The main character is as ruthless and underhanded as can be imagined and everyone just falls for his charms. It perfectly captures the feel and the attitude of thisshady grifter.

Bert is an underpaid (mostly unpaid) painter on the Collins farm. It is a boring life, but he is doing penance after his divorce and isn't in an ambitious mood. Although the nurse he met at a dance, who has a habit of nude sunbathing, is certainly intriguing. Bert's ex-wife has also followed him, and has taken a waitressing job in town. Mr. Collins is an SOB, who mistreats his daughter Norma, and then announces one day out of the blue that he has remarried and his wife will be coming the next day. Bert ends up having to pick her up. She--Sharon--turns out to be the bombshell of bombshells, and Bert becomes completely obsessed with her. Meanwhile, Norma finds herself in the family way after a dalliance with another of the hired hands. And there is a dangerous bull on the farm, and lots of machinery that breaks down, and a real shortage of beer money. Though filled with explicit (for the era) sex scenes, Hitt manages to tell a good story about some fairly real people. You'll probably guess the bad guy before the end, and you'll be turned off by the idea that, as his wife, Collins has the right to do pretty much whatever he wants to do to Sharon--who is denying him sex in turn for getting him to sign over half of his assets! As you can see, there is a lot going on here, and the book is probably 20% too long, but it has a satisfying ending, and you have to give Hitt a lot of credit for telling a pretty complex tale, getting in his required sex scenes, and having the whole thing hold together so well. Well worth a read if you have a need for nostalgic sleaze.½

This was a random selection from my free Nook ebooks. I thought this was a weird crime fiction novel. It is pure pulp fiction. It is written and set in 1956. The characters are very dated and classic. There are lots of characters, whose lives all intertwine. No one is faithful, not even to themselves.

To see my full review see my blog: http://adventuresofabibliophile.blogspot.com/2013/08/unfaithful-wives-by-orrie-h...

Another formulaic story by Hitt set in the Florida Keys, circa 1959. This one has even more sex than usual as the good-for-nothing protagonist, with only a fast boat to his name, becomes involved with both the daughter of the man he is renting dock space from and the daughter of a shady character running guns to Cuba. If that isn't complicated enough, his ex-wife comes back into the mix. Even when the protagonist does something decent, it doesn't make him any better. Apparently, though, this is the type of man the typical male reader of a book like this is supposed to admire--all day long he either makes love or drinks copious amounts of rum or whatever else is at hand. As in his other books that I have read, Hitt's writing is better than it needs to be.½

This is a sordid tale, undoubtedly quickly written, but for the most part well told. Clint has come to town with his longtime girlfriend and goes to work at a bar run by Charlie. Charlie of course has a beautiful wife with enormous breasts - pages are spent describing them - and there is a $150,000 insurance policy and a despicable corrupt cop in the picture too. The cop comes around every week collecting protection money from the bar owner, who lets prostitutes use the bar to ply their trade. In between the sex scenes, Hitt is still trying to tell a good, dark story, and he succeeds. Clint has a few qualms about the business with the prostitutes, but when the chance to buy the bar comes along, he takes it, and gets into a deeper mess than he could have foreseen. I won't say more, but if you're a fan of Hitt or this type of hardboiled novel, you'll enjoy it. Hitt's fictional world is like a more explicit, though slightly less perverse version of the world Charles Willeford created in Pick Up, the Woman Chaser, the Black Mass of Brother Springer, and other of his early works, with a protagonist you'll have a hard time developing much sympathy for.

Insurance salesman falls in love with a married woman who wants to take out a $50,000 policy on her no-good artist husband. No, this isn't a cut-rate version of Double Indemnity. Hitt leads us down a murky road as our salesman hero follows his hormones from situation to situation. The book has the required sex scenes and a few bad words that might have been an attraction in the 1950s but are more than tame now; however, it is the story that draws you in and keeps you reading to the end--and the ending justifies the time you have spent. This is not a throwaway book by any means. Although Hitt must have written it quickly, there is decent characterization, and you'll even learn something about the debit insurance business. As in the first book I read by Hitt, the protagonist's profession is an integral part of the story. Hitt's writing in the first book I read was good enough; in this one it is better. Very smooth, evocative narrative only marred every few pages by the obligatory pointing breasts. If you're into noir pulp fiction, you'll definitely enjoy this one.½

Hitt is known as one of pulp fiction's most prolific writers of really seamy stuff - this 1957 book tells the tale of Nicky Weaver, on the run from a disastrous liaison which resulted in two deaths and a lot of intense scrutiny, and badly in need of some money. He goes to work for a small town radio station selling ads for the young, beautiful, alcoholic, nymphomaniac owner, who inherited the place from her dad. Then we have the beautiful bookkeeper, and the even more voluptuous woman who holds a $23,000 note on the station she could call in at any time - and since the owner can't pay it, something has to be done. Nicky has a plan - which just gets more and more extreme as he goes along - he isn't a nice guy, although he can come across sympathetically at times when he takes time to analyze something. The book, aside from the cookie cutter sex scenes with their repetitive descriptions of thrusting breasts and the like, is pretty well written, and the story will hold your interest. It is reminiscent of Dan J. Marlowe or some of John D. MacDonald's dark, pre-Travis McGee work. But Hitt doesn't seem to have his heart totally in it and lets some interesting threads go unexplored while heading for a conclusion he probably had in mind all along. I'm glad I finally got to read this writer, since his books in used book stores tend to be more than the $2 or $3 I'm usually willing to pay for this sort of thing. If you're interested, check it out at www.munseys.com (SORRY - Site is defunct), where it is available in just about any format you could want.½