Suburban Wife by Orrie Hitt (Beacon #162, 1958)

All of the prolific softcore writers have a “suburban sins” type book, probably at the direction of the publisher since the dirty infidelities of those suburbanites, ever since Payton Place,  was (and still is, look at Desperate Housewives) a hot topic.

Orrie Hitt wrote half  a dozen with suburban in the title, and has a few others that are suburban-esque, like his Kay Addams’  novel, Lucy, and Twisted Sinners.

The first in line: Suburban Wife, and early 1958 title with a nifty Beacon template cover. This tale tells the yarn of Millicent Ford, a young desperate housewife whose husband, Andy, works in Manhattan long hours, sometimes weekends, and there are business trips.  A neighbor, Bill Ramsey, is married to Grace, a career woman who is also away a lot.  Bill and Millicent often take the same train and get to talking. They are both drinkers. They get together and drink. They start having an affair.

Millicent feels quite a bit of guilt until she discovers that Andy and Grace are often on business trips in the same cities, in the same motels…Bill has known all along that Grace has been unfaithful. So what they are doing ins’t so “sinful” after all. When Andy catches them, doing the hypocritical yelling, he’s cut down when Millicent informs him that she knows about Grace–so where the hell does he get off?

The story is also about alcoholism, as Millicent sinks deeper and deepers into needing a bottle of rye or whuskey for comfort, drinking recklessly all day and going into bars, which often leads to trysts, like one she has with an insurance agent who gets possessive of her after a one-nighter.

To stave off suburban boredom, Millicent often heads charity drives; she just did a successful one for the Red Cross, “borrowing” some of the collected money when she needs to, always putting it back though. She is approached by a local wealthy philanthropist who asks her to exec man a drive to build a rec center for the local youth, a place to keep them from joining gangs, doing robberies and rapes and other juvie crimes.  It’ll be a lot of money to handle, plus she will be paid a salary, rather than this being a volunteer effort.

The first problem is that money, mixed with her drinking, mixed with the impending divorce and the end of Andy’s money for her lax time, like drinking,  It is inevitable that she will embezzle or misuse the funds, a common set-up in Hitt’s books.

She tries asking for money from guys she sleeps with but that doesn’t pan out the way she hoped.

Enter the crime element and a murder, makes for a good read.

The Twisted Ones by Andrew Shaw aka Lawrence Block (Nightstand Books #1543, 1961)

A clever early Nightstand from a very young Lawrence Block bends toward self-reflexivity, what later would be called postmodern fiction.

The narrative concerns three people: Dave and Nancy Schwemner, 34 and 29, and a girl who lives down the street, Lucy King, 16.

Dave is no longer sexually attracted to Nancy; he married her when she was 19 and delighted in her youthfulness, which she has lost.  He wants a young girl for a lover, a teen girl; he has come to terms with what sexologists now coin as Ephebophilia — the male adult attraction to those in the 14-19 age range. (Another Shaw, Lust Damned, focuses on this theme.)

Nancy knows her marriage is on the outs. She recalls a lesbian experience she had in her teens.  Her friend gives her a Fawcett novel, Strange Are the Ways of Love by Lesley Evans, Lawrence Block’s first novel in 1958.  Then she has sex with her friend — and while she was ashamed, she knew this was what she was, or liked.  Nancy wants to explore this hidden third sex side of herself.

Nancy is the neighborhood babysitter and she has boys over but never lets them go all the way.  She would if any of them were forceful enough to take her, but she finds high school boys too mamby-pamby to be men. She needs a real man to take her maidenhood.

Dave hears about, and visits, a fat Greek pimp in a New York cafe that he hears can provide any sexual perversity for  a price: from threesomes with twins, sadistic women who will torture a man or masochistic women who let men beat them, to ten year old vixens who will give a man fun all night.  Dave isn;t interested in a girl that young, but he does tell the pimp he’d like a girl n the 13-15 year old range. The pimp provides him with a 14-year-old Nephrida, of Egyptian blood, to quell Dave’s inner need.  It’s only for a moment, because Dave finds he needs to have young girls all the time, perhaps one as a mistress or wife.

Nancy meets a shop owner in town named Roberta, nickname Bobby, and Nancy knows the woman is a secret lesbian (Block has used the Robert/Bobby lesbian type in one of his Jill Emerson novels).  She makes her move on Bobby and Bobby asks, “How did you know what I am?” Nancy knows.  They have their affair, but Bobby is more afraid than Nancy.

Lucy heads into Manhattan to find a real man in a bar.  She finds a guy who says he will “teach” her the ways of sex, but she has to do everything he asks, no matter what. He shows her a porno reel of a woman with two men first, so she will see what to do.  He takes her virginity, a bloody and painful event, then makes her perform oral and anal sex (hinted at, really, for the time of writing) and she leaves disgusted with him, herself, and sex.

Block/Shaw then has the narrator, the author, step into the picture as commentator of these lives, sort of the way Rod Sterling did in Twilight Zone, or that Kurt Vonnegut did in his early postmodern novels.  Shaw clinically examines these three people, noting that each has a twisted need, but is it bad? Cannot sinful desires lead one on the road to happiness, the way de Sade pontificated  that if one had a need for debauchery, to embrace it and be who you are? “That which is natural is not always good. That which s good is not always natural.” (p. 189)

So one day Dave and Lucy cross paths on the street and they see each other’s need: he for a teen girl and she for a man who will treat her right. They get together and in a motel they have wonderful sex and fall in love.

Dave tells Nancy he wants a divorce. She’s okay with this. She runs off to the Village with Bobby and Dave marries his teen lover, much to the shock of her parents.

Do they live happily ever after? Seems so.

A fun read.

Reed Nightstand reprinted it in 1973 as The Unashamed.

Lust Demon by Don Elliott aka Robert Silverberg (Sundown Reader #376, 1966)

This s a novelized version of a short story in Illicit Affair by Mark Ryan. Common practice of the prolific writer: if you have no new ideas, expand an old short story.  So the story is basically Chapter One of Lust Demon.

Opens with a man named Carter driving from San Francisco to L.A. on the coast.  Half-way, he spots a naked woman sunning on the beach. He stops to talk to her.  Her name is Judy.  She’s gorgeous, built, athletic, blonde, tanned. She seems to be a free love type of the era and soon he has his clothes off and they’re fucking on the deserted beach…she suggests a swim. They go out, and she clamps her muscular legs around him and pulls him under the water, drowns him, and leaves his body to sink.

In the story, that’s all we get, a sorta cautionary tale about you never know what strangers will do, hinting at maybe the girl is some sort of demon siren out to get passing men. In the novel, we learn of her motivations: Judy simply hates all men, and she uses their own desires for her against them, and kills them.

She was raped at sixteen by her own brother, a haunting memory of incest.  She was raped two years later when she got drunk in a bar, still in despair about the disgust of the first rape, and a kindly middle aged man who helps her then rapes her, too.

In college, she decides to get revenge by making men fall in love with her and then breaking their hearts; making them grovel at her feet and crawl on their knees. Then she meets a man she actually falls in love with, thinks she will marry, and then he does the same to her: after three months, he kicks her out. He has his own revenge issues with women.

Several years later, she crosses paths with this man and invites him to her secluded cottage in the hills near the beach.  It’s a romantic night but she has revenge in her heart and kills him, and drags his body to the ocean.  The next two men she kills in the ocean. Carter was her fourth.

Thus far, the men have been reported missing or deemed suicides, but she wonders if the cops will ever get wise to what she is doing…

Everyone sees her as a quiet if kooky blonde hermit who makes pottery to sell to tourists.  Nearby in a cottage are two lesbians she sometimes has a threesome with.

One day a man is waiting at her door. She fears he might be a cop. He says his car broke down and needs to use a phone. This and that, he spends the night. The sex between them is rough and violent — he can match her moves, smacks her around, draws blood, and they both like it.  Without being too graphic, Silverberg deft handles the scene where Judy muses about biting his willywhacker off as she fellates him:

Abruptly, she brought her teeth into play. She kept her lips over them while she was caressing him, but now she pulled her lips back and let her sharp, white little teeth close in on him. Slowly, she brought her jaws together, a fraction of an inch at at a time. She knew that it must be painful for him. But he didn’t say a word, not even a murmur.

Judy took her mouth away from him. She looked up and saw him studying her with interest.

She said, “I’ve hot very strong jaws.  One good snap — whose the boss then?” (p. 150)

She hears a news item on the radio about a man on the run who murdered his wife and another man, and the description of the man fits her new lover, as well as the make of his car.  He admits he’s on the run. She tells him about her murders. She thinks she has found a kindred soul because she is not the lust demon — he is, the violent sex they had is nothing like she’s ever had, and everything she always secretly wanted.

This is the sort of psychological sexual horror that became popular in the 1980s. Silverberg, like Lawrence Block with his Shaw title, The Sadist, was ahead of the trend curve here.

It’s a good, swift read. Recommended, as most Silverberg Elliotts, Eliots, Beauchamps and Challons are.

Many of the latter books Silverberg wrote for Cornith in 1965-67 tend to be on the kinky, S/M and violent side, perhaps a foreshadow of the type of dark, sexual SF he produced a few years later.

A 1966 book — we are amazed whenever we read a book the same year we were born, thinking this little paperback was out there on the stands when we were just an infant sucking on our  mother’s teat.

Unfaithful Wives by Orrie Hitt (Beacon Books #126, 1958)

An excellent Hitt novel from early in his career — in 1958, he published, with Beacon,a number of sleazecore gams: Pushover, Sucker, Sheba, The Promoters, Wayward Girl, and this one. (Others, like Hot Cargo, which seemed to be composed with a co-writer, were not as good.)

Unfaithful Wives is a multi-character story. At first, we wondered if this was an actual Hitt-penned book, perhaps a collaboration, because it has 26 short chapters rather than Hitt’s usual 13-14 5,000-word chapters. The writing style is pure Hitt, however.

The tone reminded us of a famous book about the same era and problems, Revolution Road — the failure of the American Dream in the 1950s, the ruse that marriage leads to happiness, that mundane work trumps chasing your dream. All the characters in this dark novel are sour, depressed, lost and in pain for dreams never realized.

Fred is a regional grocery sales rep who hates the woman he’s married to, Rita. He has affairs. One woman, Sharon, that he just left is later murdered and the police finger him for it.  Rita wants to run away with the man she is having an affair with, Norman, a penniless jazz musician. Rita takes out the $8,000 from the bank her husband was saving and talks Norman into running away with her, but he dupes her and takes the eight grand to run away with the woman he’s in love with, June, and June has her own agenda. An angry young man, pissed that the world never works in his favor, killed Sharon, because he sees her as a worthless slut.  Two other women come into Fred’s sphere: Della, a sexy act singer in a hotel bar that gets duped by a man who claims he can take her to Hollywood and be on TV, and June, the widow of an old army friend of Fred’s…meanwhile, Rita finds a way to get him pinned for the murder and get back at Norman for deserting her, only to meet her own karmic end…

The back cover states: “One slut deserves another.” A bit misleading, or all the characters sluts? There’s only one unfaithful wife here.

Like all multi-character narratives, we never spend enough time with any one character to get to know them or care for them, or hate them, so the story relies on choices made by one that can affect all.

A bit different from Hitt’s usual type of books, this makes for a refreshing read of the dead pulp author.

The Wheel of Passion by Charles Verne aka Orrie Hitt and Joe Weiss (Key Publishing, 1957)

Orrie Hitt, with (we believe) Joe Weiss or someone else, used the pen name Charles Verse twice: Mr. Hot Rod and The Wheel of Passion, the pen Roger Normandie four times, and possibly Fred Martin with Hired Lover. The Key Publications books all came out in 1957 and were in hardback.  The telltale signs are alternating chapters with different writing styles, hardcore S/M spanking scenes, and sections in italics.  The language is a tad more racy than that in the paperbacks.

The Wheel of Passion covers territory that Hitt would later re-vise in Carnival Girl, Carnival Honey, and Carnival Sin.  Yes, the narrative is set around a carney, focusing on Bunny,  a terribly gorgeous redhead with a 38-inch bust, whose father owns a carney business and has kept her shielded from that life, sending her to private school and raising her in a upper-middle-class community. Her father has just run away and married one of the carney dancers, a woman half his age, so is incommunicado; the carney manager comes looking for him, frantic because several routes are in dire financial need.  Bunny decides she needs to jump in and help the family business.

Sounds like the exact plots of Carnival Honey and Carnival Girl..because all three books are the same story, but The Wheel of Passion is the first.

So Bunny jumps in, she becomes a dancer, she has lesbian encounters, she sleeps with the manager, etc.

An okay book. Mr. Rot Rod was the better Charles Verne.

Honey Gal by Charles Willeford (Beacon Books #160, 1955)

In the mid-1950s, just about every title from Beacon was listed as “First Award Winner” whatever that was.  Here, again, we have a cover that has little to do with the text — from this cover, and the title, we’re lead to believe this may be a steamy farm or backwoods tale, when the novel is far, far from that.  It is another quirky offering from Willeford about identity, fraud, and lost dreams.

The narrator is a middle-aged man in Columbus, Ohio, who works as an accountant at a milk company and is married to a dull wife.  In quiet secret, he wrote a novel called No Bed Too High and sold it to the second publisher he mailed it to.  He got a $250 advance and publication in hardcover, but the novel did not do too well or make him famous.

Still, it’s a way out of this droll life, and the novel encourages him to dream of a new life, and against his wife’s desire, they move to Florida where he tries to write a second novel but nothing is there.

He wants out of this life of failure too. he feels like a hel for letting his wife down.  He sees an small item in the morning paper about a monestary in Orangeville that will close down due to money matters. he thinks there might be a magazine article in this, so he takes the train, only buying a one way ticket, already knowing in his heart he won’t return to his wife and their life.

He discovers that the monestary is run by a con man who has re-defined his life, much like Jay Gatsby.  The narrator sees that he can do, so he joins the outfit and becomes a monk, and later a Reverend, going ouit top do God’s work.

He, a white man of the cloth, is sent to Harlem. Looking at the cover art again, is the dark-skinned woman not tanned or Mexican but supposed to be black?

Like Willeford’s other first-person sociopaths that feel no remorse in their deceptions and lies, , this one plays at being righteous, leads prayers when he does not believe in God, and marries teenagers whom he has made feel guilty for their sinful sex out of wedlock.  He has eschewed his two previous failures of a life, and now has this…but his past, and the life he abandoned, have a way of finding him.

In some ways, this novel is akin to the absurdity of Albert Camus, and the narrator likes to reflect on Kafka and Russian tragedies in comparison to his life.  Here, again, is a book that could have been categorized as awork of literary merit, at the time, rather than a cheap paperback with a cover and title that does not fit the  fine words on the pages.

Honey Gal isn’t as good as Pick-Up or The Woman Chaser, no, but we highly recommend it and if you have never read Willeford, now is a good time.

Nude Model by Orrie Hitt (McFadden-Bartell, 1970)

This is the last original novel Orrie Hitt published before he passed away.  He once again goes to the pet theme of an attractive, uneducated young woman who can only earn money with her good looks. Meg, the model, is a bit of a dupe — she was making good money as a fashion model but she has gained a few pounds in the wrong places, she is not rail thin as the agencies need. So she turns to modeling for magazines and doing stag films, all the while supporting her heel boyfriend who is supposedly going to college and constantly needs money, she thinks for school but he has a gambling problem and debts to settle.

Hitt doesn’t explore anything new or unique here, repeating a number of past books, but, unlike his later 1960s titles, it is cohesive and straight forward — books he published after 1964 all seemed to be uneven and sloppy.

So, with this last book, we reflect on the career of Mr. Hitt: starting off with a handful of well-written novels in 1953-54, a good number of excellent novels from 1958-1960, tapering off into repetition and sloppiness from 1951-64, and a handful of badly written books from 1965-1967.

Failing health could have attributed to the decline of quality, as well as being burnt out and the demands of his publishers for trash, rather the political commentary his books from Novel and a few from Beacon had.

We wonder if there were any unpublished books left around when he died, and which books out there were stolen manuscripts published by fly-by-night companies that he got duped into, for the need of a check.