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Forgotten Books: Private Club – Orrie Hitt

Forgotten Books, hardboiled erotica, Orrie Hitt Comments Off

Dec 282012

I'm wrapping up Forgotten Books for the year with an old friend, Orrie Hitt. PRIVATE CLUB (Beacon Books, 1959, and as far as I know, never reprinted) is set at an exclusive hunting and fishing resort in upstate New York, just the sort of place where Hitt worked as a young man. He drew on that part of his life as the inspiration for a number of books, and this is a good one.

The story focuses on three couples: Fred Jennings, who owns a successful valve company, and his semi-frigid wife Sandra; drunken copper salesman Virgil Blanding and his slutty wife Lucy; and Eddie Race, the manager of the club and a typical Hitt heel, who's involved with beautiful young waitress Beth Collins. Well, you can probably plug these characters into the various plot equations as well as I can, although Hitt throws in a little lesbianism to spice things up. And as usual, the cover promises more raunch than the book delivers. The club is hardly the hotbed of orgies you might think. In fact, although the characters think and talk a lot about sex (when they're not boozing it up), they never actually get around to doing much.

Nothing in this book really surprised me. So why did I sit there avidly turning the pages to find out what was going to happen? Because Hitt was a master at getting inside his characters' heads and making the reader care about them. I can't put my finger on how he did it, but he had one of the most readable, compelling styles I've encountered.

Actually, I think I do know, not on a technical level regarding the prose but on a more emotional level. The reader cares about the characters because Hitt cares about them. Although he was capable of writing excellent crime novels, most of his books are about the sort of people he saw around him all the time: blue-collar workers, hustling salesmen, owners of small companies. What he saw must have filled him with the bleak despair that permeates his books.

Yet at the same time there's a lot of compassion at work. Most of Hitt's heels have some decent qualities, too. A part of them wants to do the right thing, if they can just figure out what it is and find the courage to do it. Eddie Race in this book is a prime example of that. Most of the characters in Hitt's novels, no matter how bad they are, have at least a shot at redemption. It's been theorized that the rushed, sometimes awkward happy endings in Hitt's novels were forced on him by the publishers, but after reading more of his work I'm not so sure anymore. I think maybe Hitt, by all accounts a very decent, happily married family man himself, possessed a deep-seated optimism that carried over to his characters. He wanted to believe that no matter how much emotional torment he put them through, by the end of the book they still had a hope of happiness. I think those endings, hurried though they might be because sometimes he was running out of the required wordage, may just be the true essence of Hitt's fiction.

Or maybe I'm just full of it, who can say? For our purposes, here's what you need to know: PRIVATE CLUB is damned entertaining and one of my favorite Orrie Hitt novels so far. Like I said above, it hasn't been reprinted as far as I know, and the copies available on the Internet are a little pricey. But if you ever run across a copy for a reasonable cost, I'd advise grabbing it. It's well worth reading.

"Unfaithful Wives" by Orrie Hitt (Beacon, 1956)

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Nov 192012

Unfaithful Wives by Orrie Hitt
Originally published by Beacon, 1956
eBook now available from Prologue Books

Unfaithful Wives is the title of the book, but it is only half of the story. From first page to last, Orrie Hitt’s 1956 novel is awash with adulterous, scheming, backstabbing, dishonest, and dissatisfied lovers of both genders. The book might sound salacious and sleazy—and I’m sure that’s what the publishers wanted—but the story that Hitt delivers is far more brooding. A doom-laden, blue-collar soap opera, Unfaithful Wives is heavy-duty noir on par with David Goodis, Gil Brewer, and the best of the classical masters.

The story is a daisy chain of infidelity centering around “top-flight grocery salesman” Fred Sharpe and his wife, Rita. He’s always on the road for business trips, and she’s stuck at home in rural New Jersey. Both of them are so dissatisfied and desperate that they seek out extra-marital affairs to fulfill the longing in their lives. Their respective lovers, it turns out, are just as philandering and two-timing. Murderous desire is in all of their hearts—and one of them can’t contain it. Soon, Fred and Rita find themselves the focus of a homicide investigation that tests the loyalties of everyone involved.

Hitt was a working class writer, and one of the hallmarks of his style is the way he evokes the blue-collar milieu with such striking and depressing realism. His is the workingman’s noir. No trenchcoats, no fedoras, no gats, roscoes, or bosomy blonde wisecracking secretaries. His characters aren’t Private Eyes. Instead, they’re a traveling salesman like in I’ll Call Every Monday, a “top-flight grocery salesman” like Fred in Unfaithful Wives, a TV repairman in Dial “M” For Man, or some other mundane profession if indeed they’re lucky enough be working (Hitt’s empty wallets ring truer than in most other novles). In Unfaithful Wives, people live in small towns and travel to small cities—there’s nothing “big” anywhere in this world. Even when characters steal money and go on the lam, it’s a paltry $8000—no small sum, even today, but certainly not the stuff that dreams are made of. Which raises a good point: Hitt’s characters don’t dream, or perhaps they have just run out of dreams to hopelessly cling to.

The key noir ingredient to the characters in Unfaithful Wives is that they feel trapped in their current situation. Jobs, marriage, finances, location—they’re all stuck in their same place because of one thing or another. “They weren't going any place. Christ, they didn't have enough money between them to get out of town. They were just a couple of jerks trying to run a dream into overtime.”

Characteristic of Hitt’s novels, Unfaithful Wives presents a character set seemingly living out the conformist American dream but who is, deep down, dissatisfied by such standard morals and traditional lots in life. Much like the contemporaneous Beat generation, Hitt’s characters are sick of the status quo, but unlike those young rebels, Hitt’s characters lack the mobility to change their lives. The people in Unfaithful Wives are old enough to have responsibilities but young enough to feel that their predestined humdrum lives are tantamount to eternal torture and damnation. Just look at the way that Hitt describes Fred and Rita’s marriage:

He didn't know. It was something that worried him, bothered him, ached down inside of him every hour of the day. They ought to be happy and they weren't They ought to argue and fight the way couples do, but they didn't He just went out on the road, selling groceries, making a nice living, and when he got finished with a trip he went home and they sat around looking at each other.

They’re so defeated they don’t even fight! Talk about being “down there,” even David Goodis’ lovers had enough spirit left for a good fight now and then. The people in Unfaithful Wives would depress even the lowliest of Goodis’ protagonists.

This was a fear against which he could find no defense—there was no gun to shoot, no logical story to tell, nothing. Here was a web being spun as if by a huge, invisible spider, a web that coiled around his mind and body and caught him helpless in its toils.

What one notices right from page one is a heavy mood of despair. When we first meet Fred, he wakes next to his lover, Sandra. Hungover and addled by guilt, he says, “I’ve got an idea I’m dead … I almost wish I was.” Throughout the novel, there’s never any pleasure in sex. Tears, remorse, anger, and self-loathing run rampant through Hitt’s bedrooms. “Only the darkness listened to their tears.” Similar to Harry Whittington’s sleaze paperbacks for Nightstand and other sleaze lines, the sex in Unfaithful Wives is bathed in oblivion. One bedroom encounter is described: “And then the walls of the room drove in on them, spinning them out into space, plunging them down into a canyon where the only sound was the slow, uneven crying of the girl beside him.” Hitt captures the dark side of ecstasy, when in the throws of passion we lose control of our thoughts and, instead of pleasure, we let loose all of our panic and paranoia. The prevalence of biting and bleeding during foreplay also suggests a vampiric quality to the relationship, reinforcing the notion that these aren't nurturing bonds and that the partners are draining the life out of one another, slowly killing them, taking and not giving.

Hitt’s description of Fred waking up next to Sandra shows just how nauseating and doomed even the best of these relationships are: “He opened his eyes, looking up at her, and suddenly he wanted to be very sick.” Fred hates himself, and he doesn’t even find the woman he is with attractive. There’s something almost suicidal about his attraction to Sandra—and this same self-destructive impulse can be found in all of the relationships in Unfaithful Wives.

“Bastard,” he said, looking at himself in the mirror.

He felt like one and he had known yesterday, driving up from Winstead, that he shouldn’t do it, that he shouldn’t be thinking about Sandra or any other woman except his wife.

One of the qualities I like about the characters in Unfaithful Wives is that not only do they know when they’re doing wrong, but they feel remorse. For the most part, it doesn’t stop them—but it does make them more human, more believable. Even the murderer soon forgets his/her [sorry, no spoiler alert here!] rage and settles into regret. Hitt’s people are so defeated they can’t even be good villains. Even in dishonor, they fail. There’s no success anywhere in this world. As Hitt puts it, “Sometimes a guy won. And sometimes he lost.” Simply and eloquently, that’s noir. And Hitt knows it as much as anyone.

Unfaithful Wives is a stunning surprise, even to an Orrie Hitt fan like myself. I loved I’ll Call Every Monday, but the emotional maturity and the depths of feeling in Unfaithful Wives reveal Hitt to be more than just a fine craftsman, but an author with soul, albeit a damaged one in true noir fashion. It’s a fast read (I finished it in a few hours), but it is sure to resonate for a long time to come.

"The Cheaters / Dial "M" For Man" by Orrie Hitt (Stark House, 2011)

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Nov 082011

Every time I look at my shelf, I’m thankful for Stark House Press. Greg Shepard and his colleagues tirelessly endeavor to find the hidden gems of American literature—the forgotten classics, should-have-been-hits that fell between the cracks, the critically misrepresented, and the underdogs that never got their due. Orrie Hitt is all of these and more, and now he joins Stark House’s esteemed roster that includes Harry Whittington, Gil Brewer, W.R. Burnett, A.S. Fleischman, Margaret Millar, and Robert Silverberg. This new anthology includes The Cheaters (originally published in 1960 by Midwood), Dial "M" For Man (originally published by Beacon in 1962), as well as introductions from Hitt's children and Brian Ritt, an afterward by Michael Hemmingson, and a complete bibliography of Hitt's work.

Half a century after most of his books were published, Orrie Hitt still carries the stigma of the “sleaze” genre. But, as Brian Ritt points out in his introduction, this “allowed him to portray a side of American life not dealt with in the mainstream media during the 1950’s.” Upon first publication, Hitt’s milieu might have been thought of as licentious, but today his characters just seem real, and all too relatable. They’re working stiffs sick of their day job, tired of their home life, and bored with their surroundings, and they resort to alcohol and sex to take their mind off the monotony and dreariness of their everyday life. Hitt is not an idealist, and his characters are as imperfect and morally bankrupt as the world they live in.

In The Cheaters, young lovers Clint and Ann leave their farm-town of Beaverkill, NY and wind up living in the slums of Wilton, known as “The Dells.” Ann works by day in a diner, while Clint spends his nights tending bar. Soon, he finds himself caught in a web of small-time vice that could lead to big-time problems. There’s the bar’s owner, a fat pimp named Charlie; his buxom, hot-to-trot wife, Debbie; and a corrupt cop with his eyes on Debbie, Red Brandon. When Clint sees his chance to dump Ann, grab Debbie and the bar, and get rid of Charlie and Red, he decides to put everything on the line…

Dial “M” For Man is about Hob Sampson, a twenty-something with his own TV business, a deadbeat business partner, and a frigid, virginal girlfriend. All that changes when he makes a house call on Doris Condon. Her husband, shady business tycoon Ferris Condon, stands in the way of everything Hob wants: he blocks Hob’s bank loan to improve his shop, and he won’t let go of Doris. Sick of his shop, his girlfriend, and his partner, Hob decides to clear out of Hawley, NY once and for all—but not without Doris, and not without exacting revenge on her scheming husband.

Both The Cheaters and Dial “M” For Man are finely crafted novels, blending squalor, suspense, and social realism. The world that Hitt resents is more recognizably human than in many of his contemporaries’ books. Hitt is like William Inge, but with less melodrama, and with more crime and depravity. And forget about the “sleaze” label—these two novels are 100-proof noir, as potent as any of the more celebrated stuff coming out from Gold Medal or Lion. Hitt’s characters are lost in their frustrated desires, unable to get anywhere new and unwilling to go back to where they came from. Instead of digging up and out, they only dig themselves deeper into the grave. Their motivations are the stuff you find sitting next to you on the bus, or behind you in line at the store—working man’s noir. Read this little excerpt from The Cheaters and see what I mean:

“Several times I tried calling the apartment but when I did he answered and I hung up, my hands shaking and my guts tense and tight. All I had to do was think about her and I was a wreck, a hopeless ghost of a man who was blinded by all of the love that was being lost. More and more I turned to the bottle, seeking from the bottle the answers to the thousands and thousands of questions that kept churning around inside of me. I didn’t find any answers. I got drunk and stumbling and I didn’t care whether I worked at the bar or not.”

One thing you can you say about Hitt’s characters: they really go to work. In both books, the day-to-day grind of the job is intimately detailed. Hitt is deeply invested in the notion of work as few authors are. There’s a lived-in, worked-in quality to Hitt’s novels that is unmistakably authentic—the tedium, the irritation, the slog, and the disappointment is utterly real. There’s the sense that his characters have to work for their dollar, for their booze, and for their rent. Not one aspect of daily life is overlooked or taken for granted. There’s a palpable sense of poverty, hunger, and destitution on every page. As Hitt writes in Dial “M” For Man: “Living with her would be constant excitement. Yes, living with her, giving her children—but how would I be able to pay the bills? Poverty, stark and real; she would not want that and neither would I.”

Real-world worries distinguish Hitt’s plots and give them their distinctive edge. He invests classic suspense scenarios with working class woes, and the result in both books is a story as fantastic as it is believable. On the one hand, Clint and Hob find themselves living out their big bosomed fantasies and their paranoid nightmares, but at the same time, they’re never fully divorced from the concerns of putting a meal on their plates or paying their rent. Call it noir neorealism with a little added sex—Orrie Hitt’s 1950’s make many novels of the time seem like vanilla ice cream in comparison.

Another aspect of Hitt’s novels that I love is his style. There’s a natural, unlabored flow that reminds me of Harry Whittington (though Whittington is, on the whole, much more intense). Hitt had a clever sense of humor, and he rarely resorted to clichéd expressions, instead creating his own distinctive style. For example, “She dripped sex like a leaky faucet,” (The Cheaters) or “She had a low voice, hot and sultry, the kind of a voice that could sell bathing suits in the middle of winter” (Dial “M” For Man). Even when Hitt is trying to be sexy, there’s frequently an underlying nuance of poverty and struggle, such as this line from The Cheaters: “She was the kind of a girl you could starve to death with and not mind it at all.” In fact, that is precisely the future that Clint sees for himself unless he can find a way to pay-off Red Brandon.

When it comes to plotting, Hitt doesn’t rush head-first into trouble, and instead lets the situations develop slowly. Both The Cheaters and Dial “M” For Man are more about the build-up than the pay-off. Don’t get me wrong, both have terrific and surprising finales, but Hitt dispenses with conclusions rather quickly. He’s more interested in how—and why—his character get themselves in such a rut. Two of the driving motivations are summarized by Hitt himself:

“I’ve got a bull by the tail here but I’ve got to hang on. If I let go now there won’t be another chance. There’d be just jobs here and jobs there and I’d end up floating from place to place, never earning very much and never being sure what I was going to do the next day.” (The Cheaters)

“How bored can you get and still live with yourself?” (Dial “M” For Man)

Hitt’s characters are as restless as they are in need of a rest. The male characters are afraid of commitment, and frequently realize that they’re no good sleazebags. As the narrator of The Cheaters admits, “I was making big money in The Dells but I was just as bad as the prostitutes who worked out of the bar.” The female characters, in particular, are ready to settle down, but they don’t want to settle for less than they feel they deserve. While many of the women are too easily forgiving of the men and too quickly accept the role of a martyr, Hitt never forgets the hardships they faced in order to maintain their independence. They’re smart, savvy, and world-weary from a very young age. Only the femme fatales—Doris and Debbie—come off as thinly characterized (but “fully” developed, physically speaking) archetypes. But these are also the characters Hitt spends the least time with—he’s obviously not interested in them, nor does he sympathize with those who exploit others for personal gain. His loyalty is with the underdogs, the losers, and the workers.

Two days ago, I was new to Orrie Hitt. Today, I’ve read three novels by him. Not only the two books reprinted by Stark House, but also I’ll Call Every Monday, Hitt’s debut. And sitting by my side is another Hitt novel, Shabby Street. Yup, I’ve been bitten by the Hitt bug, and I’m a happier readier because of it. On page one, I knew I would enjoy Hitt's work, and by the end of the collection I knew I had found a new favorite author.

Thanks, Stark House, and keep up the excellent work!

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Vintage Paperback Covers found at Orrie Hitt: The Shabby Shakespeare of Sleazecore.

"I’ll Call Every Monday" by Orrie Hitt (1953)

Avon, Frank Loose, Orrie Hitt, Red Lantern Comments Off

Nov 082011

The whole world dreads Monday, but insurance salesmen look forward to it. It’s the day when they collect payments from customers, and when they can catch housewives at home alone…

I’ll Call Every Monday, originally released in Hardcover by Red Lantern Books and in Paperback by Avon in 1953, was Orrie Hitt’s first published book. The story is about Nicky Wevaer, an insurance agent caught in a web of women. First, there’s Sally Allen, a local up-and-coming singer who is stuck on Nicky because he was her first lover. And then there’s the recently widowed Bess Walters, whose husband—a colleague of Nicky’s—hung himself after getting caught impregnating a young client and also defrauding his company with phony claims. And then there is Irene Schofield, a buxom blonde whose husband is a pornographer posing as an “artist.” Luckily, he’s dying of cancer. Unlikely, for Irene, he’s not dying fast enough, and he doesn’t have any insurance. But Nicky knows all the tricks of the trade, and for the right price—and the right woman—he could make anything happen.

The influence of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity is plain to see—how could any “adulterous insurance salesman” plot not be touched by Cain’s masterpiece—but Hitt doesn’t merely repeat the archetypical plot, nor does he mimic his forebearer’s style.

For one, Hitt throws readers deeper into the everyday life of a small-town insurance agent. We see the work at the office, the chitchat between co-workers, the late- night meetings at bars, and the wheeling-and-dealing. Hitt is working with a much larger, ensemble cast, and he is also much more concerned about developing a palpable sense of community within the novel. Social and economic networks have been central to each of the three Hitt novels I’ve read thus far (the other two being The Cheaters and Dial M For Man, both recently reissued by Stark House), and details of this sort are what makes his novels come to life, and makes them still relatable some sixty years after they were first published. Between all the co-workers, clients, spouses, adulterers, lodgers, and bar patrons, it really feels like there’s a whole town at work in I’ll Call Every Monday.

Stylistically, Hitt writes in a calm but confident manner. This is a slow-cooker of a plot that allows each of the characters to simmer until they’re red hot and ready to pop. Hitt doesn’t rush into complications, and at any given moment there are a number of different paths that the characters could take, which would send the story into whole new territories. This is one decided difference between Double Indemnity and I’ll Call Every Monday. One feels that there is never any alternative for Cain’s characters, and that they’re fated to be together “to the end of the line.” But for Hitt’s characters, the narrative feels a bit more open, which not only gives the characters a bit more freedom, but also makes them all the more reprehensible for their own downfall. Nicky isn’t a total patsy—he knows that most of the time he’s a low-down, horny scumbag, and he knows he passes over a potentially good relationship with Sally for a purely physical fling with Irene, whom he knows is hiding something from him, but he’s too busy juggling her figures to worry about that. Hitt’s male protagonists share a self-knowledge that reminds me of Day Keene’s characters—they’re not innocent victims of a dastardly femme fatale, instead they’re knowing schmucks who can’t keep it in their pants. And, strangely enough, that’s what makes them sympathetic and likable. We’ve all known someone like this at some point in our lives. Even Hitt’s femme fatales have this homegrown, small-town quality to them: their busts might be bigger than life, but their villainy certainly isn’t, and their motivations and actions are recognizable.

I also really enjoy reading Hitt’s turns of phrases. Instead of the usual “my knees were shaking,” Hitt describes Nicky’s reaction to seeing Irene like so: “My knees did things to each other.” What better way to convey someone as being dumbstruck than by, well, making them sound momentarily dumb. In a more subtle sense, there’s also the implication that Nicky isn’t even fully aware of what his body is doing when he’s around Irene. Another favorite line is, “My bank account was going down faster than a hand-dug well in dry weather.” It’s clever, precise, instantly visual, and very original. The water metaphor also brought to mind someone dying of thirst, desperate enough to do anything for just a drop of water—and that’s exactly how Nicky is acting, except it is sex, not water, that he wants. Nowhere in Hitt’s line does he talk about “desperation” and “thirst,” but it still communicates those feelings, even without the words. Being able to transmit ideas between the words is the mark of a skilled craftsman, and that’s what Orrie Hitt was: a terrifically talented writer.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading I’ll Call Every Monday. Hitt didn’t invent the “adulterous insurance salesman” archetype, but with Nicky Weaver, he certainly created one of its best incarnations. The plot is filled with colorful characters, and captures that vivid sense of homespun, working-class America for which Hitt is best remembered. All in all, it’s one hell of a first book. Mark me down as an Orrie Hitt fan—and now it is time to dig into my stack of his paperbacks that I’ve neglected for far too long.

If you’d like to read more about I’ll Call Every Monday, you should check out Frank Loose’s review, or read this piece over at Orrie Hitt: The Shabby Shakespeare of Vintage Sleazecore.