Saber Books – Sex Life of a Cop – Sanford Aday

This nifty little Saber Books novel, Sex Life of a Cop, was instrument in putting its publisher, Sanford Aday, in hot water and almost behind bars.

Aday was an unsuccessful novelist — out of his ten written manuscripts (housed in the special collections at Cal State, Fresno, only 2 were published. Part of it was his books were too racy for the mainstream,.  Frustrated, he started his own press, with three imprints: Vega, Saber, and Fabian.  These books often pushed the enveloped when it came to incest, homosexuality, and detailed sex acts.  As such, the cops and goveerment were after him for obscenity.

He  vigorously fought against censorship. He faced several charges in Hawaii, Arizona and Fresno. Then, as a jab to the local cops, he published Sex Life of a Cop, by an alleged former cop, publicizing the book as being a true account of how cops are crooked and take liberties with the law and sex.

Well, you don’t do that without pissing off the powers that be, so they really went after him. In the 50s-60s, the First Amendment and freedom of opinion/expression did not exist when it came to the law guys — after all, Jim Morrison was arrested on stage in New Haven when he made fun of the cop who maced him backstage.   Lenny Bruce would get arrested when he made fun of the cops in the clubs where he he did his act.

Saber and the other imprints mostly seemed to publish unknown pen names. They did publish one Orrie Hitt, Love Princess, and one by John B. Thompson, Hard Way.

He was eventually tried and convicted along with associate Wallace de Ortega Maxey for shipping an obscene book into Michigan in 1963. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison and fined $25,000.

The conviction was eventually overturned.

Sex Life of a Cop by Oscar Peck was the only book of seven deemed obscene by the jury.

Other Saber Books —

Orrie Hitt Book Blog

Some people suggested it…and Hitt has way too many books when this blog’s intent was to focus on Silerberg and Malzberg (the Bergs!), with some Shaw and Hasings and Ellis…

So, I have started the Orrie Hitt Blog...why the hell not?

I will announce any new posts there, here.

Hired Lover by Fred Martin (Orrie Hitt), Midwood #13

Accoridng to Lynn Munroe’s richly informative article on Midwood’s beginnings:

Amazingly, just 5 men wrote almost all of the first 40 numbered Midwoods. This hard-working group (Beauchamp, Lord, Marshall, Orrie Hitt and Don Holliday) carried and established Midwood until [Harry] Shorten was able to build his own stable of regulars –- names like March Hastings, Dallas Mayo, Kimberly Kemp, Joan Ellis, Jason Hytes and Sloane Britain.

Beauchamp was, of course, Robert Silverberg, Lord was Lawrence Block, Marshall was Donad Westlake, Holliday was Hal Drenser, and Orrie Hitt was himself.

Hired Lover is Midwood 13, published in 1959, although there are some early un-numbered Midwoods. Fred Martin was a one shot name for Midwood (and seems to have written one for the short-lived Magnet Books), and the style is easily identifiable: this is an Orrie Hitt book.  You can’t mistake Hitt for anyone else: the set-up, the dialogue, pacing, wrap-up.  Silverberg also did an early one shot, Immoral Wife by Gordon Mitchell (Midwod #11), that I discussed in this blog a while ago.

The question is: why these one-shot names?  Was it Midwood’s idea, to look like they had more than the same writers, or Scott Meredith’s, since the mauscripts came from the agency blinded as to the true writer’s identity. After all, Silverberg did an early Midwood, #7, Love Nest by Loren Beauchamp (see my review), and Beauchamp was his continued name for a dozen more titles from 1960-1963.

Munroe also notes:

Although nobody at Midwood knew it then, most of the books were by the same writers turning out the Nightstands. For example, Loren Beauchamp (Robert Silverberg) would become Don Elliott a year later at Nightstand, Sheldon Lord (Lawrence Block) would become Andrew Shaw. Some of the writers, like Alan Marshall and Clyde Allison and Al James, used the same name for both.

I have another early, un-numbered Midwood, Call Me Mistress by Tomlin Rede, and I wonder who wrote this one.  I haven’t read it yet but on quick glance, the style seems like early Westlake/Alan Marshall.

Call Me Mistress is a crime noir set in Hollywood and among syndicate crime lords, wuth a dash of lesbiana tossed in.  I will be getting to this book soon after I do my reading stint of campus sex books and lesbian titles.

Back to Hired Lover — yes, one of many Orrie Hitt’s novels but the name is not listed among Hitt’s pen names (Nicky Weaver, Kay Addams).  I have two Kozy Books by one “Walter Feldspar” (Loose Women and Squeeze Play) that look like they may be Hitts (there’s also a Beacon Hitt book called Loose Women) — Feldspar only penned two books, and for Kozy, and Hitt wrote many for Kozy as himself, Weaver, and Roger Normandie…like Lawrence Block and Robert Silverberg and others, there are pen names used that are not always associated with these writers, either overlooked by bibliographers or not admitted to by the writer (or remembered).

Hired Lover is a first-person tough guy story — Mike has left Los Angeles after a bad incident and is in Chicago, where he has ties.  He’s working as a driving instructor when one day a gorgeous dame in her mid-20s, Kitty, is his student…she takes him to her mansion, gives him booze and fucks him.  She’s married to a rich old man — short fat,bald and ugly — whom she met when she was a nurse and he was in the hospital in diabetic shock.

As luck would have it, the rich man’s chaueffer just quit and he needs a new driver. Kitty suggests her hubby hire Mike — he can live in the apartment above the garage, where she can visit him for illict sin and lust.

While Kitty and hubby are away on a trip, Mike looks up an old business buddy who runs a stripper club.  One of the strippers has her sister, Ruth, with her — new in town, fresh from Ohio farmland, 18, a virgin, and ignorant of the big bad ol’ world of strippers, whores, booze and crime that her sister is involved with.  Mike manages to talk her out of going down that road — he’s no hero, since he also gets her drunk and takes her virginity, being 10 years older than the girl.

Right off, we know that Mike will end up with Ruth as his wife in the end.  This is typical of Hitt’s novels, mostly for Beacon — similar to the set-up of The Promoter, that I talked about last week.

(An aside: Beacon and Softcover seemed to require, as with lesbian novels, that the hero or heroine redeem and depent tgheir sinful ways by book’s end, married and in the arms of someone good, man or woman.  This does not seem to be the case with Hitt’s titles for Sabre and Novel Books — in fact, Novel gave Hitt carte blance to “take the gloves off” and write what he wanted, free of market and genre constraints.  I will be talking about a few of those in the near future.)

The set-up for Hired Lover isn’t new in sleazecore: the wife convinces the lover that they have to murder the old rich husband so they can be together and get rich.  That never works out, of course, and the wayward wife gets hers in the end — in this case, she has set up Mike in cahoots with the head butler/valet of the mansion. And the hero repents and finds love in the arms of a younger, less gutter-drivem woman, in this and other Hitts.  Mike, on the run from the set-up murder, is aided by young Ruth.  The cops wind up arresting the wife and the valet, but Mike is still guilty for the murder, and had helped plan it.  He married Ruth, but is dying from tetnus due to a untreated gun-shot wound.  The novel ends with Mike on his deathbed, confessing the murder to a Catholic priest, and holding his young wife’s hand, whom he has impregnanted so she will have something of his left.  It’s a sad ending, in a way.

Hired Lover is a great read, however, and if you dig Orrie Hitt, you will dig this — and it’s too bad that Hitt fans may miss this one,  so this blog/review will serve as a pointer for anyone doing research on Hitt.

Now that I am an Orrie Hitt fan  (where was he all my life?), and have bought several dozen books now, expect much discussion of his work here.

I have also found another promising sleazecore writer, Brain Black, who wrote a handful of Beacons, pen names for Western pukp writer Robert Trimnell. The books look good on first glance:

Ursula Grant and Other Pseudonyms

I ordered these two Ursula Grant Midwoods because I liked the covers.  She only did a couple stand alone movels and a few doubles, but looking at th style, this is obviously Joan/Julie Ellis writing under this pen name. Odd, as the name is not listed as attahed to her, like Linda Michaels and Jill Monte are.

Ellis’ style is too distinct, easy to recognize, and the themes of the above are classis Joan Ellis: the college hellion and the woman going for the younger lover.

I will review these two down the line…but next: an early Midwood by Fred Martin, Hired Lover, that is obviously Orrie Hitt…

Also found out that Barbara Brooks was a female pen name for William Coons, who penned some Andrew Shaws and Don Hollidays at Nightstand…

Sin Doll by Orrie Hitt (Beacon Signal)

The covers above are the 1959 and 1963 editions.  There is a 1971 photo cover edition that I will skip posting.

Still not sold on being an Orrie Hitt fan, but close.  I have a few more here to read, and I have ordered some with great covers and titles, like Love Princess and Tramp Wife.

Sin Doll is one of Hitt’s young-woman-exploited-in-the-50s books.  Cherry lives in a small town, is 20, has adopted parents and dreams of New York or Hollywood — anything.  She can sing and she has a killer body. 

She also has trouble making good money — she has a $40/week receptionist job at a photo developing lab and sings several nights a week at a cafe for $15/set.  She needs at least a grand or two in the bank to move to NYC.

She loses both jobs and all she can find is factory work.  Her ex-boss at the photo lab lets her in on his real business: he takes nude pictures of women, and makes stag reel films, for buyers. He says he can pay her $200 week to pose nude.

She has other problems: the buy who has been bugging her to marry him forced sex on her without a condom, so she would get pregnant and forced to marry him, stuck in this town.

She does the photos…she drinks to deal with it…she becomes an alcoholic…she has a lesbian affair with another model/stripper, and she styarts sleeping with the photographer, her married ex-boss who wants to get a divorce and marry her.

Then they all get busted by the police for lewd acts of sin.

True to Beacon Books, there is a happy ending where she and her boss/lover learn that they must reprent from this sleazy sin, and when he gets out of jail, she will marry him and have his babies.

Sometimes these quaint cheesy happy endings are funny — they come out of the blue, like in Loren Beauchamp’s Connie or Sheldon Lord’s April North. People who hardly know each other fall in love and run off to the chapel and live good mid-American Christian lives after wallowing in the gutter of filth and sin.  Ah, the 1950s.

The Promoter by Orrie Hitt (Beacon Books #142)

I may have become a fan after reading this 1957 novel by Orrie Hitt.  The (great!) cover art and cover copy is misleading — it seems to indcate that it’s about a sleaze merchant in female flesh but it’s not, really, or: the guy on the cover is not the narrator.

The narrator is Bill Morgan, a freelance magazine writer who specializes in pieces for car magazines.  He heads into a small New Jersey town to interview a church minister, Dr. Call,  who has boys re-build cars, believing it keeps them off the streets and getting into gangs and crime.  There he meets the minister’s daughter, Judith Call, who is on her way out of the small town with her dreams for New York City and the high life.  She uses the distraction of the writer being there to slip out and run away.

Dr. Call and the church elders wish to hire Morgan for an information job — they have heard about sleaze tabloids, the selling of nudie pictures, an underworld of sex and sin in New York, but in their isolated lives, they have no idea if it is hyperbole or true.  They want to know the truth, what kind of people are behind such sleaze, in order to keep their young ones away from it all.  Morgan takes the job — and oh, the minister tells Morgan that his daughter ran away to NYC and would he find her?

It has a Big Sleep set-up feel — the wayward teenage daughter, the naive older man with money, the taking of nude photos.  It is obvious Hitt was influenced by Chandler, as many were at the time.  Hitt’s style is smooth, but his sentences can get convoluted, not unlike Chandler.

But it has a different angle — Morgan becomes a detective, but he’s not a private eye, he’s just a writer.  But he’s hardboiled and tough enough, and knows his way around the streets.  He does’t know about the syndicate sex world, mobbed up, bogus model agencies that lure young women into being prostitutes and sex toys, drugged up and chewed up by a strange cabal of rich people — remidned me of the movie Eyes Wide Shut in some ways.

In the 1950s, still photos of women naked or partially undressed was a curious business — it’s what Betty Paige fell into.  Hitt seems to have tackled the subject in a few other books: As Bad as They Come and Sin Doll, probably more, he seems to write a handful of books on the same subjects, like peeping toms.

Morgan sleeps with half a dozen women in the process — like all hardboiled heroes, the dames and dolls just throw themselves at then, even if they are all slutty models and drugged up babes.  Morgan has an odd sense of justice, wanting to take the sex rackett down — his motive: the ghost of love.  The woman he was to marry died in a skiing accident a few years ago and he is emotionally messed up still.  The minsiter’s daughter happens to look like a younger version of that woman, and she seems to have vanished without a trace after meeting some man about a secretarial job.

He finds her in a mansion one night at a syndicate sex party — many young women, drugged up on pills, are there to be used by a bunch of men, photographed…and Judith Call is there, drugged out of brain, taking one man after the other.

He saves her.  Bullets fly.  In the last sentence, we are told of an unlikely marriage.

Cool Covers

No reviews this post, just cool covers of books I will be getting to in the next month or so.

Orrie Hitt — Who Was He?

The name Orrie Hitt has come up several times the past week that I thought I’d address the topic briefky.

Like Max Collier, Mike Avallone, Carter Brown, Don Elliott, J.X. Williams, and John Dexter, Orrie Hitt published hundreds of sleazecore novels in the mid 1950s to the early 1970s.

In an email, Barry Malzberg wrote to me:

Orrie Hitt was a real guy in Mississippi, big jolly fat guy Gil Orlovitz told me who wrote this stuff to put his daughters through college.  They got through college and he quit.  Later he died (in his 50’s).  I don’t know if that’s true but it sounds reasonable.

(A curious side note: a fellow Malzberg fan told me that a bookseller we shall not name once had a Mel Johnson/Orrie Hitt Softcover Library double novel set at a high price and would not slash the price down, claiming that Malzberg penned the Hitt book, that Malzberg was (1) either Orrie Hitt or (2) borrowed the pen name.  “You’re getting two Malzbrgs in one book!” said vintage bookseller who apparently did not know his vintage writers. Malzberg has confirmed to me that he did not pen any Hitt book, like others penned Carter Browns or John Dexters.)

Doing the nifty Google search, one hit on Hitt from a blog has this to pontificate:

Orrie Hitt Wrote the Great American Novel– Over & Over/ Why “Confidential” Continues to Thrill/ The Sweet Ride of Mail Art/And Which Mayors Are Married to the Mob?

Who the Hell was Orrie Hitt? Orrie Hitt wrote “racy” pulp fiction in the 50’s and 60’s. Most of it published in PBO’s (paperback originals). Skipping the hardback route, premiering in ephemera that sported covers alive with totally killer babes and guys in various states of mayhem. Married with children, Hitt wrote from a trailer in upstate New York, tossing back iced coffee and tapping out classics of sleaze on a battered manual in a matter of days. Meanwhile, angst ridden authors in cultural Meccas sweated bullets to produce a novel every seven years or so. God made the world in six days but Hitt made his in less. Again and again.

Here’s a Hitt bio in less than 100 words:

Hitt had a grinding regimen, twelve-hour days in front of an aged Remington Royal perched on the kitchen table, surrounded by iced coffee, noisy children and Winston cigarettes, pausing only for supper or to watch wrestling or Sergeant Bilkoon the television.

Hitt produced a novel every two weeks, for which he was paid as little as $250.

—Lee Server in Over My Dead Body: The Sensational Age of the American Paperback: 1945-1955

Another blogger writes:

…How many young men in the 1950s and 1960s poured over the Orrie Hitt novels published by Beacon and Midwood with titles like DORMITORY GIRLS? I went on line and found a Orrie Hitt novel titled THE SUCKER. The back cover blurb had the headline “One Damn Girl After Another.” In this day of explicit sexual content on television, it is hard to imagine the time when this sort of thing was borderline legal. On that back cover there is the wonderful rundown of the women the hero knew including one with whom he “…conspired by day and perspired by night.” My goodness, the writer who came up with that should have been carried out of the room on the shoulder of his or her peers.

For years I assumed that Orrie Hitt was a “house name” as it seemed unlikely that any writer could be that prolific. Few writers put their real names on Beacon or Midwood paperbacks. Michael Avallone was one exception. Mike came up with the best soft porn title THE CUNNING LINGUIST but he did use his Troy Conway name for that one.

So years ago I was surprised to learn that Orrie Hitt was a real person

Other stuff on Hitt here and especially here by a blogger who says he is a “Hitt man.”

You get the pic, dig on the Hitt.

I’ve heard mixed things about Orrie Hitt.  Gil Fox, talking to Lynn Munroe, said: “Orrie Hitt wrote absolute drivel! Have you ever tried to read an Orrie Hitt book?”  Hmm…Gil Fox wrote as Paul Russo, Kimberly Kemp, and Dallas Mayo, and some of them aren’t all that good, and some are pretty good.  Any prolific writer is bound to be a mixed bag of the good, the bad, and the ugly — true for Earl Stanely Gardner, Issac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, Barry Malzberg, and Lawrence Block.

Hitt wrote for just about every sleaze paperback publisher — Beacon, Softcover, Newsstand, Kozy, Midwood, Boudoir, Saber, Novel, Chafriot, Oracle, and I think he did a couple for Nightstand.  Most seem to be for Beacon and Kozy. He used the pennames Kay Addams an Nicky Weaver, yet preferred his own name on the covers, without an agent, typing away at home and sending his stuff out, starting out at $250 a book in the mid-50s (about $2000 in then-time money).  I guess he didn’t have any fear of the FBI coming after him — “Orrie Hitt” sounds like a pen name, like Saber Books’ “A. Bunch” or Cornith’s “A. Schole.”

The Promoter came in the mail today.I have a few others (see below).   Glancing through them, Hitt has a hardboiled voice wth snappy dialogue and shame dames in trouble.  The men tend to be blue collar workers, sleaze masters, cheating husbands, with come cheating wives, hookers, and lesbians.  Hitt write three or four peeping tom books, perhaps a passion of his?  I will be reading him and adding him to this blog soon.

I got The Cheaters for the Rader cover alone.  Seems to be about a hardboiled bartender and this married woman…

And how could books with these titles and covers be ignored?