Torrid Cheat by Orrie Hitt (Chariot Books #212)

 

This a fairly rare, hard-to-locate Hitt. Like Panda Bear Passion and Cabin Fever, we have looked high and low for this title; the unstoppable kind Lynn Munroe found one for us, and we were delighted with the tawdry cover.

Torrid Cheat is a curiously uneven novel from Hitt, and obviously there were deep editorial cuts: the book is a slender 128 pages, maybe 40,000 words.  It has 11 chapters, unlike Hitt’s usual 13-14 chapters and 50-60,000 words. About 3/4th into the story, we can tell there was a 10-15K word chunk sliced out by the red pen, making the jump uneven.

Rare, but alas not a remarkable story from Hitt, with a lot of his usual tropes: the younger woman marrying an older man with some money and property, and her scheme to kill him and get her hands on it. Usually, these Hitt femme fatales find a guy to be the patsy; in this case, she’s the killer and the guy figures out her murder plot.

The protagonist is Frenchie, a 19-year-old regular guy who works in a bottle factory during the work week and on the weekends, a p/t job at a gas station owned by a 50-year-old ,man, Pops.  He dates Pop’s 18-year-old daughter, Betty. Betty gets pregnant and they marry.

Pop’s recently re-married to a sultry redhead who is 28 named Bertha. On his wedding day, Frenchie gets seduced by Bertha and they carry on the affair for months.

One day Bertha and Pops go to the lake for a swim and he drowns. The whole thing seems suspicious. Yeah, his wife killed him, that much is obvious.

An okay read.

A good book for any collection as a rare item and a cool GGA cover.

Libby Sin by Orrie Hitt (Chariot Books, CB1617, 1962)

The titles ol’ Orrie did for Chariot Books (and later New Chariot Library when the outfit moved to Los Angeles) tended to be mediocre, manuscripts he probably was unable to sell to Beacon or Midwood…or they were revised versions of other books about hotel managers, nudie pic models, and tough guys.

Libby Sin is about a 22-year-old voluptuous stripper who acts like she loves men on stage, but loathes them off, preferring the sexual interest of women only.  This mostly has to do with her two bad experiences with men when she was younger: one a rape and one a broken heart.

But that could change with Harry Gordon, the owner of a club that’s hired her traveling act for a longer stay.  He’s a lonely, wealthy man whose wife contracted polio and is bedridden, almost comatose, having had two heart attacks.  He is too noble to have turned his wife away to a home or nothingness.  This touches Libby, and she thinks she could go straight with him, until the night she gives herself to him and he flips out, calling her a whore, a tramp, everything else for “seducing” a married man and being easy…

Now she knows why she prefers women…one is a new girl that Libby is training to be a stripper and sharing Libby’s motel room, then bed…although the girl is confused about the third sex…

Not one of Hitt’s best, but not his worst either. He does spend some quality prose time getting into the head and motivations of Libby.

One cool aspect of the Chariot Books is that they often included interior photos of models…

Wild Bride by George Simon (Chariot Books #190, 1960)

As noted, George Simon was the pen name of one Carlson Wade, whoever he was, or perhaps Keith Ayling, attributed to Arthur Adlon.

And he wasn’t a bad writer. Wild Bride is a nifty surpise: a pretty good novel with some depth and layers.

Not to forget that this is a “sex” novel, but it’s a cut above, in the same quality category as Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block, Orrie Hitt, or March Hastings.

The cover is classic, as I have seen it re-used a number of times on posters, cups, and albums.

It opens with a forlorn fellow named Larry getting drunk in a bar and trying to forget that the woman he loves, Gracie, is about to get married to another man.

But — she doesn’t.  She phones him at the bar and says the groom never showed, he got cold feet, and she needs to see Larry right away. he knows he shouldn’t, but her lure is too great.  They get together and she finally gives him what she’d denied him for years: her virginity.

But she can’t stay there in their small North Dakota town.  When she went to get a marriage license, she discovered she had no birth certificate. And then the woman she’s known as her mother all her life, an ex-Broadway actress named Marta, tells Gracie she’s not her real mother, that her real mother was a friend and former lover of her boyfriend, and she raised Gracie as her own.

So Gracie tells Larry she has to go to New York to find her real parents, to find out what happened, to find out who she really is.  She meets up with a number of colorful characters — an old actress who runs a house for artists; a gay painter; a talent agent who knew her folks, and two men who want to rape her — one she winds up killing in self-defene and gets into some trouble over.

Meanwhile, Larry is left behind and he begins a relationship with a loose woman whose always had it bad for him, and she vows to never sleep with a number man but him, if he’ll have her.

The narrative jumps back and forth between the two but leans more toward Gracie’s story.  In an odd way, this reminded me of early Don DeLillo, like Players or Maus II, how DeLillo tells stories of an event between a man and a woman, and how they drift off onto sepearate paths after the event.

Not to say that Simon/Wade is on par with DeLillo, but the narrative technique is similar and I wonder where it comes from…did not Candide and Cunegone drift apart after a grand event and have their own adventures before returning together?

DeLillo-esque is now a term in the OED.

I digress…

Not a bad little novel, this Wild Bride. A B-.

Campus Hellcat by David Challon (Robert Silverberg), Bedstand Books, 1960

Not a review yet, but a note to note that I have finally located a copy of this book and glad I did.  I see that it is a collection of a couple of novellas and short stories, similar to Illicit Affair by Mark Ryan Bedstand, 1960).  I wonder if it was Sileverberg’s or Bedstand’s idea to publish a collection rather than a novel for both?  These are all previously published works from various pulps and men’s magazines in the 50s.

I have one fnal Challon to locate, Suburban Affair, and then my David Challon/Robert Silverberg collection will be complete —

French Sin Port (Bedstand, 1959)

Campus Love Club (Bedstand, 1959)

Campus Hellcat (Bedstand, 1960)

Suburban Sin Club (Bedstand, 1960)

Suburban Affair (Bedstand, 1960)

Man Mad (Chariot, 1959)

Unfaithful Nympho Wives: Unwilling Sinner by Loren Beauchamp and Man Mad by David Challon (Robert Silverberg)

Two books about unfaithful nymphomaniac wives, by Silverberg’s Beauchamp and Challon pen names.

Midwood published Unwilling Sinner in 1959 and then reprinted it a few years later as And When She Was Bad. It’s told in the first person by Ellie, a small town upper New York state girl, nineteen, and a nympho…she’s been a nympho since she was fifteen, although her parents and anyone who first meets her think she is a sweet, virginal kid.  The boys in town know otherwise: all they have to do is start touching Ellie and she’ll fuck them.

She is ashamed of herself — her actions, her reputation. But she cannot help herself; every time a man touches her, a fire builds up inside and she needs sex, only to feel dirty, shameful, and sin-ridden after.

A new fellow comes to town to take over the grocery store for a syndicate: Dick, twenty-seven (is the name supposed to be a pun?). He asks Ellie out for a date.  He has no idea about her rep. She tries to keep him at bay, to not lose control.  They fall in love. They get married…okay, so a nympho marries Dick, haha.

In her new home, while her hubby, Dick, is at work, Ellie gets vistors: the boys she has slept with. They know she cannot say no, and they blackmail her: if she doesn’t give in, they will tell her husband about her sordid past.

So it goes on for months: five boys round robin, visiting her 2-3 times a week. One brings a friend who whips her with his belt.

Then her husband walks in on her with one of them — to add insult to injury, he is beaten up by his wife’s lover, who laughs about it.

He wants a divorce.  There’s a problem — she’s pregannt and doesn’t know who of the five men and her husband could be the father.  She tries to kill herself by jumping in front of a car going 50 MPH.  She doesn’t die, she breaks some bones and ribs, and loses the fetus.

In the hospital, a doctor determines why she’s a nympho.  It is outlandish and I have no idea if there is any medical truth to this, but seems she has a tumor near her adrenal gland, and whenever she gets emotionally worked up, the tuimor presses on it and releases too much adrenaline, which causes the fire in her, the “unnatural” need for sex.  This may be as absurd as Deepthroat, a woman with her clit in her throat.

I just checked online, and it seems that such a tumor by the adrenal gland is indeed a cause for nymphimania.  You learn something new every day.

So the doctor says he can cure Ellie and Dick decides he will not divorce her, knowing her promiscuity is not her fault.

Silverberg/Beauchamp usually create sympathetic characters but I could not side with Ellie in this. She disgusted me.  Remidned me of Jay MacInernay’s Story of My Life — a 1980s Breakfast at Tiffany‘s that fell short; at least we cared about Holly Golightly.  Ellie is just a dumb hick kid, and the story was not as engaging as other Beauchamp Midwoods.

I don’t have a cover scan for Man Mad by David Challon, Silverberg’s pen name (along with Mark Ryan) for Bedstand Books.  This is Chariot Books #143 — I thought Chariot might be an imprint of Bedstand, but according to Sin-a-Rama, was a short-lived company.  I have found only one other Challon with Chariot.

Man Mad‘s front and back covers do not coincide with the novel.  On the front is a lusty GGA, on the back a real photo of some go-go dnacing stripper, with men and women watching her, and this blrub: “What happens when anymphmaniac marries for love” and “compulsive sex turned her life into a nightmare.”

The protagonist, however, is Paul Edmonds, a publisher in his late 30s.  He has an “open” marriage with a wealthy woman, similar to the situation in Beauchamp’s Love Nest (Midwood).  His wife, Elissa, has to have many lovers, and he has his; she’s not as much a nympho as she can’t stand to be alone and, in her aging, needs men to like her.  Her money, invested into Edmonds small company seven years ago, has turned his company into a large publishing house, and made him rich and powerful in the literary community.

This is a pretty good novel, bordering on fine literature about the publishing industry, like Bright Lights, Big City or Elbowing the Seducer. I had a hard time putting this one down.  Edmonds falls for a young actress; his wife’s current lover, a playwright, also falls for her.  There’s a lot of jealousy going around.  When Edmonds is lonely, he hires a high class call girl, Harriet, to spend time with.

It has a semi-happy ending…Edmonds finally decides to divorce his wife and the actress sort of says yes, she will be his next wife…

This is a novel Silverberg should be proud of, but he probably doesn’t even remember writing it.  It is defintely one that should be reprinted.