Wed 28 Jan 2015
A Review by David Vineyard: ORRIE HITT – I’ll Call Every Monday.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Reviews[14] Comments
ORRIE HITT – I’ll Call Every Monday. Red Lantern Books, hardcover, 1953. Avon #554, paperback reprint, 1954.
I was trying to think how I would describe Orrie Hitt’s writing style, and I went through quite a few ideas such as ‘post war spicy pulp’ or ‘hard-boiled soft-core,’ but I finally came up with the most accurate description I could think of.
Orrie Hitt wrote in paperback covers.
Read that passage above and tell me if you can’t see that cover by Avati, McGinnis, or Saber. The man wrote in paperback covers.
That’s not a knock. It’s a vivid and entertaining style with a flavor of the pulps but adapted to the post war hard-boiled paperback original industry he worked in. He isn’t a lost master, but he wrote professional readable books sometimes a bit above the average and there were actual plots between the not quite sex scenes.
It is difficult to remember how hot this was when written. Today it’s at worst frustrating. It’s the fifties juvenile kind of sex where the hero wants to see the girl naked, but he’s not quite sure what to do when she is. When anything actually does happen, you have to go back and reread the passage to be sure it did.
I’m not complaining that it is not more graphic, only pointing out that it is hard to believe you had to read this with a flashlight under the sheets or hide it in your treehouse from your parents.
This one was published by Avon. Beacon or Midwood were more often his style.
The hero of this one is Nicky Weaver, a bit of a drifter, the usual WWII veteran of popular fiction of the era.. As the novel begins he’s selling insurance in Devans a small town in upstate New York USA.
If you get the idea early that Nicky is a poor man’s Walter Neff from Double Indemnity you wouldn’t be far off; the film version anyway with that mouthful of Chandleresque wiseacre observations; first person Smart Aleck. The girl with the accordion is a sweet kid who lives where he does.
That’s Sally, the accordion girl, and another paperback cover moment. There are several of them along the way with her and others.
The chief female in question appears shortly after. She has a husband and she’s buying life insurance on herself, for now. She’s Irene Shofield, wife of Shepard Shofield:
Irene does things to Nicky:
As you might guess Shepard really needs life insurance. You see, in New York State if the wife is insured for over $1,000 the husband has to have coverage as well. That must have come as a surprise to Irene, such a thing would never occur to her. Whether that was true or not about the insurance, Hitt sells it and writes believably about what Nicky is all about, not only in his pants, but in his work. His attention to the details of the business weaving in and out around Nicky may remind you of John D. MacDonald, a lesser John D. MacDonald, but still.
The book moves well, is well plotted, and if no surprises it has no disappointments either. Hitt’s not in the class of a Ed Lacy, a Harry Whittington, or a Day Keene, and he’s a shade on the sleazy side, but he’s the king of what he did.
While Nicky struggles with his itch for the troubled close to illegal Sally and the seduction by the gorgeous Irene a colleague, Dell Waters, dies, and Dell told his wife that Nicky was a good guy who could help her, and of course she is attractive and represents the healthy side of Nicky’s libido. I can’t say she mourns very long though.
Bess and her kids are Nicky’s salvation, if Irene doesn’t drown him in desire and her plans. Irene is a shade on the sociopathic side. Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity is pure as the driven snow compared to Irene.
There are a good many complications and situations for hot breathing and some panting with Sally, Bess, and especially Irene, and Irene will show her true colors with Nicky having to make the big choice between her and murder.
There’s even a plot and several sub-plots that don’t quite get in the way of the panting, but the tame sex that seldom gets beyond a kiss, a bit of groping, loose clothing, and the temperature of the woman-in-question’s body under her clothes. “Pointed breasts†is about as graphic as it gets. This is much tamer than anything in Spillane’s work, whatever kind of hound Nicky is.
The difference is the sex is really what this and most of Hitt’s books are about. The plot is incidental to that paperback cover style of writing.
It’s a fairly standard paperback original suspense novel, Hitt a bit better as a writer than some, at least enough to be memorable. If you didn’t already know that he was a collectible writer from the era, you would likely read another one by him. This one is what John D. MacDonald might have written if he was just a paperback original writer and not John D. MacDonald. It’s what people thought Gold Medal was giving them, when they were giving them so much more in most cases.
Something is missing though, and it escapes me exactly what it is. The same plot, the same level of writing in other hands didn’t feel trashy, and this does. I’m not saying it’s bad trash, though. I enjoyed it for the hour and fifteen minutes it filled. I’m just not sure I’ll remember much of it a month from now or be able to distinguish it from another Orrie Hitt book.
There is a mystery involved here as well. Sometime later Hitt wrote a book called Ladies’ Man. That book is in the third person and features a hero named Nicky Weaver who used to sell insurance and takes a job selling advertising for a small radio station in a new town, gets involved with a woman and a bit of embezzlement, and ends up a murderer being arrested as the book ends. If he’s the same guy, he’s bi-polar at the least.
I’ll leave that one for someone else to solve, but it’s also written in paperback covers.
January 29th, 2015 at 1:41 am
I’LL CALL EVERY MONDAY is one of only two books by Orrie Hitt in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction bibliography under his own name, the other being DIAL “M†FOR MAN (Beacon, 1962), but I’d say that there should be quite a few others that have enough crime content that should also be included.
At the top of the list, from what you say about it, David, is LADIES’ MAN. Sounds like a crime novel to me. I’ve never been a collector of Orrie Hitt’s fiction, so I’m hoping that some of the people reading this will suggest others.
But here’s something else that I found interesting. I don’t know how many books Hitt wrote under pen names, but one of them was … Nicky Weaver. Two of the titles he wrote under that name are in Hubin. Note that Nicky Weaver was also a character in both:
WEAVER, NICKY; pseudonym of Orrie Hitt, (1916-1975) (chron.)
*Love or Kill Them All (Kozy, 1963, pb) [Nicky Weaver]
*Love, Blood and Tears (Kozy, 1963, pb) [Nicky Weaver]
January 29th, 2015 at 1:44 am
Following up on that first comment, Davd, I really liked your statement that Orrie Hitt wrote paperback covers. Of course, it then becomes quite ironic that MONDAY was one of a handful of his books that appeared first in hardcover.
And with what I’d call a lousy cover. How much better the cover of that Avon reprint is!
January 29th, 2015 at 1:53 am
I have found a blog devoted to Orrie Hitt, and in the little time I’ve had a chance to read the reviews that are there, I can tell you that I was right in suspecting that many, if not most, of Hitt’s novels have a crime of some sort involved, usually murder, or at least murder in mind.
Here, for example, is what is said about TORRID CHEAT (Chariot Books #212, 1962):
“… 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.”
Read more reviews for yourself at
https://orriehitt.wordpress.com/
January 29th, 2015 at 5:00 am
Now that erotic writing has gone the way of All Flesh I rather miss the coy self-censorship of the old days. Without the Guilt and Repression it’s just not as much fun.
January 29th, 2015 at 11:45 am
Al Hubin was always pretty liberal in deciding if there was enough crime in a book for him to list it. Better be safe than sorry, I suppose. It’s probably a good thing there are many avenues to information on authors and books today. Or maybe not.
January 29th, 2015 at 1:37 pm
David’s statement that “Orrie Hitt wrote in paperback covers” is spot on. He was the undisputed king of soft core paperback porn in the 50s and 60s. And as such a pretty good line to line writer, as David indicates.
I’LL CALL EVERY MONDAY was his first published novel, and as far as I know, the only one from a vanity publisher to be bought for reprint by a major paperback publisher of the period. Red Lantern Books was one of the vanity imprints sponsored by Jack Woodford, others being Valentine, Vixen, Woodford Press, and possibly Arco. Hitt’s second novel, LOVE IN THE ARCTIC, was also published as a Red Lantern hardcover. Two others appeared under the Valentine imprint, including DEVIL IN THE FLESH (1957), a “blood-tingling tale of violence” in the James M. Cain vein.
A number of Hitt’s paperback originals also qualify as crime fiction. In addition to DIAL “M” FOR MAN:
LADIES’ MAN (Beacon 1957) — extortion and murder
HOT CARGO (Beacon 1958) — gun-running and murder in the Hemingway style
UNTAMED LUST (Beacon 1960) — about “a man of strange, untrammeled passions…of urges to hurt and kill anything and anybody defenseless enough”
I PROWL AT NIGHT (Beacon 1961) — the activities of a Peeping Tom
The “Nicky Weaver” books are all crime novels featuring a hard-boiled private eye named…yep, Nicky Weaver.
January 29th, 2015 at 2:13 pm
David:
Hitt was inordinately fond of the name Nicky Weaver. In addition to the Nicky Weaver PI series and the protagonist of LADIES’ MAN, the leads in at least two other of his ppbk originals also have the same name. Maybe it had some significance for him. Or maybe he was just lazy when it came to naming his characters.
January 29th, 2015 at 2:45 pm
Steve, Bill,
Thanks, the thing about LADIES MAN was that the character was so close. I wouldn’t have been as curious if not for the mention that the other Nicky Weaver had been in insurance and the setup in another small town.
Both this and LADIES MAN are crime novels by any definition.
With the exception of some of the big names who wrote under pseudonyms in the same market, Hitt is about as good as that level of book gets. Bill’s ‘line to line writer,’ describes him perfectly. The book only breaks down at the thematic level where all the elements have to tie together as a whole.
Individual scenes can be very good, even the dialogue (usually a big downfall in this type of book) is at the least believable, it’s only when it comes to a unified plot things get sketchy. There’s a good deal of loose thread at the end of the book and the others I’ve read by Hitt.
Part of the ‘paperback cover writer’ remark was that he writes in scenes, but the scenes don’t always have a natural flow. It’s a bit like a film that needed editing in order to really work.
What saves this one is in reading it most will be using the Fred MacMurray Walter Neff character for reference and read that performance into Nicky even though the character is not as well drawn or consistent.
It’s almost a sort of short hand to get the reader to react to Nicky as Hitt wants without having to do all the work himself to get that reaction.
January 29th, 2015 at 3:53 pm
David:
Absolutely right that Hitt’s books break down at the thematic level, leaving any number of inconsistencies and loose ends. His inability to construct cohesive plots was a primary reason why his work never rose above the Beacon/Novel Books/Kozy Books level.
Hitt toiled in the insurance business for many years, which explains why so many of his fictional characters are similarly employed. Write what you know.
January 30th, 2015 at 2:32 pm
I probably shouldn’t be surprised by this but plenty of Orrie Hitt’s books are available as ebooks–some of them free downloads. Bill Pronzini is absolutely right about Hitt when he wrote, “His inability to construct cohesive plots was the primary reason why his work never rose above the Beacon/Novel Books/Kozy Books level.” That pretty much sums Orrie Hitt up.
January 30th, 2015 at 9:32 pm
Somehow reading Orrie Hitt in an ebook edition, not a paperback, just doesn’t seem right to me.
January 30th, 2015 at 10:14 pm
Steve, George,
This was the free e-book edition. Luckily with that nice Avon cover. I agree it isn’t the best way to read Orrie Hitt, but it’s nice to be able to adjust the size of the print and not worry about breaking the spine or ruining a collectable reading it.
January 30th, 2015 at 11:19 pm
Yes, I’m sure the print in the Avon edition is awfully small, smaller even than the Beacons, Midwoods and the others. The Gold Medals I’ve been reading this month are the same way, but I do love the smell of pulp wood paper in the evening, just before bed.
January 31st, 2015 at 3:14 pm
Steve.
I love it too, just not when it crumbles all over the sheets like literary dandruff.