"The Town Square" by Orrie Hitt (Swank, May 1964)

"The Town Square" is one of the few known short stories published by prolific novelist Orrie Hitt, and it appeared in the May 1964 issue of Swank. The story is about Ricky Norden, who grew up in Anderson City where his father raked leaves in Fletcher Park. When Ricky’s high school fling, Dora Jackson, announces she is pregnant and he is the father, he quits school to get a job. After the baby is born, a blood test proves who the real father is, and Ricky promptly punches the man responsible and then hitches up with a traveling carnival as a boxer. Ricky's performance catches the eye of trainer Maxie Lord who sees big potential in Ricky. Maxie's daughter, Sharon, also sees big potential in Ricky, especially his paychecks. But as Maxie continues to pay off fighters to lose, and Sharon's habits get more and more expensive, Ricky realizes that he's being used by both father and daughter, and it's only a matter of time before things come crashing down.

Stylistically, this reads like the outline to a novel, rushing from scene to scene, with only the most essential details necessary. But if one criticizes it for being too fast and brief, perhaps that is because what is sketched is a damned good yarn that would have made an excellent novel. As is, it’s Orrie Hitt noir distilled to its barest, basest, most essential elements: a man is doomed to fail from the beginning, he is exploited by those around him, and he is cursed by his own desires. 

    There's a clock near the park, one of those temperature and time things some building and loans have, and because my watch is in a hock shop it's a help.

    My lunch period is from twelve to one and the boss checks on me every one in a while.

    Sometimes I wish I had an office job but I honestly don't mind the work.

    All I have to do is rake leaves.

    Just like my father did.

    Poor guy.

    Real dumb.

    But, hell, who isn't?

"A Rage of Desire" by Clayton Matthews (Monarch Books 1960, Black Gat Books 2026)

A Rage of Desire, the debut novel of Clayton Matthews (originally published by Monarch in 1960, and recently republished by Black Gat Books/Stark House Press), is proto-sunshine noir, where the bright California sun contrasts with the dark and desperate urges of its characters. But instead of Hollywood glitz and glamour, or beach-front luxury, Matthews dumps readers in Los Angeles’s decaying Figueroa Street, where middle-aged WWII vet Mitch Sutton is the sales manager for a used car lot whose neighborhood had seen better days.

“Figueroa Street was not the street it had been during, and for several years after, the war… but the memory of Figueroa Street as it once had been, the tempo of the fast buck, the fast deal, the eager customers; all this spiced Mitch's reveries. He could not bring himself to leave the street. The best days of his life had been spent there. Then, too, there was the diminishing hope that the affluent days might once more return to the street.”

Mitch Sutton is married with two kids, a boy and a girl. He’s got a house and car, and while the car isn’t anything fancy, it runs. After a couple stints in jail for rowdy behavior, he’s come to accept he can’t handle his liquor and now sticks to beer. He should be happy and content—but then he sees a Jane at the bar drinking scotch and soda, and his life starts to unravel. After his attempted one-night stand doesn’t go as planned, he still can't forget her. And then she walks back into his world—as his boss's new wife. But even that isn't enough to get her off his mind. And, as it turns out, Jane can’t get Mitch off her mind, either.

Mitch is a perfect example of noir’s “self-made loser” (as opposed to the all-American “self-made man”). With each passing page, Mitch digs his own grave a little deeper. By the opening line of the second chapter, he’s already as good as dead: “When Mitch awoke, he was cold and stiff.”

For a debut novel, A Rage of Desire is impressively constructed, borrowing elements from James M. Cain’s doomed affairs and from Orrie Hitt’s suburban passions, but Matthews is no mere copycat, and he brings plenty of novel twists to proven formulas. Plenty of times I thought I had nailed down exactly where the story was headed, only to discover that Matthews was one step ahead.

“Basically speaking, there is a certain number of plots going back several hundred years that are still in use,” Matthews explained of his working method. “All a new book is is a different version of the same story. There are no new stories. Somebody might come up with an original punchline for a short story, but in the novel field, all the stories have been written. It is the way the thing is put together that makes it different, if you succeed, that is.”

Where Matthews excels is his depiction of middle-class, middle-aged ennui. The symbol of the second-hand car is a perfect metaphor for the tattered illusion of the American dream that Mitch is pursuing—the best he can get is somebody else’s discarded past.

Before turning to writing full-time, Clayton Matthews worked at various times as an animal trainer, carnival barker, construction worker, railroad gandy dancer, surveyor, taxi driver, and truck driver. While he doesn’t make excuses for Mitch’s poor decisions, he clearly has sympathy for the working man’s blues. Mitch wanted a better life—but, like most noir protagonists, he thought OTC meant over the bar counter and mistakenly thought a stiff drink and a fast dame would restore his life. Boy, was he mistaken.

Hopefully A Rage of Desire won’t be the last of Stark House’s forays into the works of Clayton Matthews.

Sources:
Thomas Fox, “Paperback Writers,” The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), February 10, 1980, Section G, p. 6.
Dick Lochte, “Book Notes,” The Book Review, Los Angeles Times, October 18, 1981, p. 2.
“Fiction Writing Duo Make Home in Bonsall,” The Enterprise (Fallbrook, California), December 15, 1983, p. B-9.

"A High School Rifle Club" by Orrie Hitt (New York State Education, May 1934)

As a teenager, Orrie Hitt not only wrote for outdoors publications like Hunter-Trader-Trapper and Fish-Fur-Game, but he was also an officer in local organizations, such as the local Port Jervis American Trappers Association, which was established in February 1934. Only seventeen years old at the time, Hitt was elected their first secretary.

Hitt was also one of the founders of the Port Jervis High School Rifle Club, which he helped establish in 1933, and for which he served as Range Officer. Hitt wrote about the club for a special issue of New York State Education, a publication of the New York State Teachers Association. Entitled "Children's Numbers," the May 1934 issue gave the opportunity for students across the state to submit articles about their own extracurricular activities. 

Ephemera such as this might not seem immediately related to Hitt's later paperbacks, but this information is important in helping flesh out the man who wrote those books, and it gives insight into his youthful ambitions and interests. As Orrie related, this article was a decisive moment in his life.

"During that last year in high school I was told that an educational book published once a year in Albany would consider articles on school subjects from students and teachers. I wrote about our rifle club and mailed the material to them. The teacher who told me I couldn't write selected some other subject. My article was published and the teacher's article was rejected. After that I was pretty sure that, right or wrong, the guy I saw in the mirror when I shaved was the man whose advice I'd follow." (Orrie Hitt, “My ‘Sex’ Books [part 1]” Men’s Digest, no. 31, October 1961, pp. 38.)

I think it's also fascinating to compare the cynical viewpoint of human nature and urban/suburban America in Hitt's later novels with the more rustic, outdoorsy, Americana of his teenage years. After the death of his father, Orrie worked at a hunting lodge to help keep the family afloat, so I know these must have been very difficult years both financially and emotionally for Orrie and his family, and the outdoors seems to have provided a haven for young Hitt, a place in which to find community, to practice writing, and to come of age. 

Sources: 

Edwin Hitt, “A High School Rifle Club,” New York State Education, vol. XXI, no. 8, May 1934, pp. 596–597.

“New A.T.A. Local Formed,” Fur-Fish-Game, April 1934, p. 47.

Orrie Hitt, “My ‘Sex’ Books [part 1]” Men’s Digest, no. 31 (October 1961), pp. 37–39.

1934 Port Jervis High School Yearbook. 

"Cabin Fever" by Orrie Hitt (Hunter-Trader-Trapper, January, February, and March 1935)

Some of Orrie Hitt’s earliest published writings were in the pages of outdoors magazines like Fur-Fish-Game, Hunter-Trader-Trapper, and National Sportsman, where he would write articles and submit letters that reflected the young man’s naturalistic knowledge and experience.

In addition to his nonfiction contributions, the young Hitt also wrote a short story, “Cabin Fever” (under the name Edwin Hitt, as he signed his work at that time), serialized in the January, February, and March 1935 issues of Hunter-Trader-Trapper. Frequent H-T-F artist Edwin Bolenbaugh provided illustrations for the story.

After his parents died, Jerry Judson was entrusted to the care of his uncle, who cheated the young boy out of his Ozark property inheritance. Fed up, the teen fled to the North of Canada, where he built a cabin and lived as a hermetic trapper, with only his two dogs as companions, one a Collie and the other a St. Bernard named Loyal. His three closest neighbors are fellow trappers, Carter Blake, Dave Soles, and Alex Winter. But their idyllic Northern life is threatened by Alex’s increasingly erratic and violent behavior, and the others fear that he has been stricken with “cabin fever”:

“They knew what was wrong with him; he had gone mad from living alone—the silence of the Arctic wastes had been too much for him. Many men are driven out of their minds by the silence and the loneliness of this vast wilderness, and Alex Wilson was a victim of that which those who live in the land of solitude know as ‘cabin fever.’ It makes men want to kill without any reason for so doing; to murder at random either friend or foe.”

While “Cabin Fever” seems more indebted to Jack London and other writers of frontier and wilderness fiction, there’s an elemental sensibility to the characters that foreshadows Hitt’s later novels. Instead of base passions, his characters here express other primal characteristics: life, death, greed, murder. There’s also a cynical view of the world that would pervade Hitt’s later suburban novels: Jerry flees an exploitative family member who lied and stole his nephew’s inheritance, and find himself in an Eden tainted by treachery and murder. There's also a timeless quality to “Cabin Fever,” and it is so devoid of modernity and its ephemera that it is hard to tell whether the story is set in 1935 or 1835.

Nearly two decades later, Hitt would publish a novel called Cabin Fever (Uni-Books, 1954), however it is unrelated to the earlier short story, and only shares the title.  

Sources:

Edwin HItt, “Cabin Fever [Part I],” Hunter-Trader-Trapper, vol. LXX, no. 1, January 1935, pp. 8–10, 32–33.

Edwin HItt, “Cabin Fever, [Part II],” Hunter-Trader-Trapper, vol. LXX, no. 2, February 1935, pp. 13–15, 41.

Edwin HItt, “Cabin Fever, [Part III],” Hunter-Trader-Trapper, vol. LXX, no. 3, March 1935, pp. 17–19, 47.

"Academy Award" by Orrie Hitt (Screen & Radio Weekly, September 4, 1938)

 

More than a decade before he would chronicle the decadence of suburban America, Orrie Hitt bared the bruised soul of an aspiring songwriter clashing against Hollywood in the aptly named short story "Academy Award." Among his earliest publications (and featuring his middle name "Edwin" in the by-line), "Academy Award" appeared in September 1938 in the pages of Screen & Radio Weekly, an entertainment supplement from the Detroit Free Press that was syndicated in various newspapers across the country, including the Atlantic City Press, Sacramento Union, and the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. 

The story begins as Susan Hale gets out of a limousine for the biggest night of the year in Hollywood. She's up for an award for her performance in the musical Forget Me Not, and arrives in a car belonging to the film's director, Milton Kristt. Standing near the red carpet is Susan's old stock theater partner, the songwriter Tony Fellows, who gave up his own career to be her agent, and then almost tanked hers when he advised her to go on strike for a better salary. And it was Milton Kristt who rescued her career and made her a star. But on this big night, Tony knows something that neither Susan nor Milton knows. 

Tony swore under his breath. He must have been crazy to come here. For an instant, he was tempted to get up and show: "Listen, I'm the guy who wrote those songs! And that doesn't make me a jinx any more, does it?"

While it runs only one page, and on the surface doesn't resemble the more lurid paperbacks for which he is best known, there are still many traces of Orrie Hitt in this early tale. Already, he is displaying a cynical view of American industry and society, and focusing on human exploitation. (It's not hard to picture a seedier version of the Tony-Susan-Milton love triangle in one of Hitt's later novels.)

Hitt also greatly sympathizes with Tony as an outsider artist facing an uphill battle in fear that his own artistry will be lost in anonymity. At such an early stage in his career, perhaps Hitt was using Tony as a way to channel his own anxieties about how to enter an industry all-too-eager to take advantage of young and idealistic artists.  

***

Orrie Edwin Hitt, "Academy Award," Screen & Radio Weekly (section of the Detroit Free Press), September 4, 1938, p. 4.

"Test Tube Baby" by Sam Fuller (1936)

Test Tube Baby is the second novel from Samuel Fuller (here credited as “Sam Fuller”). Published in 1936 by Godwin, Publishers, it is among the rarest of Fuller’s publications, never having been re-printed. Thanks to a friend, I was able to borrow a copy to read it, and I’m glad I did. Test Tube Baby offers a fascinating glimpse into the growth of an artist. After a slow start, there’s a spark in the middle of the book where Fuller’s voice suddenly comes to life. This is the sort of book that only Fuller could have written: a nitro-tabloid stylized melodrama about the moral struggles of a good boy who wants to be bad, infused with petty con-men, punch-drunk ex-boxers, Park Row news-hawks, and tramps. The plot might be sensational—and nonsensical—at points, but Fuller, fresh from his tenure on the New York Evening Graphic, sees the world through a front-page lens, and tells his story through all-caps headlines. Test Tube Baby is wild, and perhaps uneven in quality, but as a Fuller devotee, I treasure the insight this offered into his artistry.

"The Pitfall" by Jay Dratler (1947, re-published by Stark House Press 2022)

While the 1948 film Pitfall has risen to be regarded as a film noir classic, Jay Dratler’s original 1947 novel The Pitfall has been unjustly neglected. Stark House Press, re-releasing the book for the first time since 1956, reveals that Dratler’s novel is darker, sleazier and less forgiving than the film it inspired. A brutal portrait of blind lust and self-destruction that out-Cains even James M. Cain, Dratler’s The Pitfall deserves to known as a stellar example of 1940s American noir. Stark House’s edition, which includes introductions from the author’s son, Jay Dratler, Jr., as well as novelist Timothy J. Lockhart, will hopefully restore the novel’s rightful reputation.

In the novel, Jon Forbes is a successful screenwriter who seemingly has it all. He has a daughter, Ann, devoted to him; and his wife, Sue, is pregnant with their second child. And he works his own schedule—afternoons and evenings—at home, where his secretary Kate takes dictation. He even has a friend on the police force, Mac, who gives him insider tips for his scripts.

And all it takes is one whisper from Mac about Mona, the wife of a purse snatcher named Smiley currently serving three months, to sink his entire life. Mac wants Jon to cozy up to Mona and pave the way for him. Jon disagrees at first, but can’t get Mona out of his mind. Pretending to be a friend of her husband, Jon arranges to have a drink at a hotel bar. And from the moment they meet, Jon’s doomed fate is sealed—if only he were smart enough to realize it.

"Beach Bodies" by Nick Kolakowski (2022)

Beach Bodies, the latest novel from Nick Kolakowski, is a mind-trip, genre-bending twist on the home invasion scenario, and its swiftly-moving 139 page pack a whole lot of weirdness.

The set-up is straightforward: Julia is working as caretaker to a billionaire prepper’s bunker located at a remote beach-front area. Staying with her is her ex-boyfriend Alec, a wanna-be crypto bro recovering from a shrapnel injury obtained in Ukraine. When the motion detectors sense intruders, Julia investigates and finds three people, one of whom is badly injured. Her job forbids her to let her in—but these people won’t take no for an answer.

What ensues is decidedly not-so-straightforward. Every time I thought I had an inkling of what was coming around the corner, Kolakowski defied expectation, and took the story into marvelously messed-up places I never saw coming.

Bless Kolakowski and his warped imagination, who offers moments of high-octane thrills; gross-out comedy; Cronenberg-y body horror; a bar-sex scene set to a Rudolph Valentino-Nita Naldi silent film I never knew I wanted so badly; and, in the quiet moments between the batshit craziness, there’s perceptive scenes about two young lovers who are shitty to themselves and each other because they still have a lot to learn. 

This is gonzo noir, and I love it.

"The Paris Manuscript" by Joseph Goodrich (2022)

I was fully enraptured by Joseph Goodrich’s The Paris Manuscript, a historical noir set at the dawn of the fabled Années folles that is at turns dark, whimsical, nostalgic, and deeply moving. Structured like an on-rush of memories, the book begins in 1979 when elderly widower Ned Jameson goes through an old trunk while deciding whether to move in with his daughter, the contents of which send him back to 1919, in the years following World War I, where he lived with his wife, Daisy. Tormented by memories of the war, he worked as a journalist, and Daisy as an illustrator. Intrigue overtakes their lives when Daisy’s brother is blackmailed into becoming a saboteur. After the blackmailer is found murdered at a party they were attending, Ned begins to suspect Daisy is behind it—and he sets out to find the truth with an unlikely amateur detective, Marcel Proust, who volunteered at a hospital during the war.

When Proust enters the picture, The Paris Manuscript takes on a wonderful air that’s almost magical realist at times, but Goodrich keeps it grounded, making Proust a believable character within the drama at hand. When one thinks about it, isn’t In Search of Lost Time the underlying theme of so many noir works? In this sense, Proust makes a natural, though not obvious, sleuth proxy. Through Proust, Goodrich also makes a strong case for the detective-as-artist (or, is it, artist-as-detective?). “My asthma made it impossible for me to leave the car,” Proust recalls. “…I had to content myself by feeding upon what I could see. But what I can see is never enough… I must extrapolate. I am predisposed to the art of detection by illness… What I do as an artist is not so very different form what I do when I discovered [a clue which you’ll have to read the book to find out!]”

New Acquisitions: November 19, 2022

 Aviation pulp, anyone? Time for a deep dive into the early work of David Goodis. Here's a large pile of Fighting Aces that I've amassed recently.

New Acquisitions: Nov. 14, 2022

A few recent additions to the library: Beach Bodies (2022) by Nick Kolakowski, Say Goodbye When I'm Gone (2020) by Stephen J. Golds, and Corruption City by Horace McCoy (1959).

Got a Light? In Search of the Samuel Fuller Matchbook

Anybody got a light? Not that I smoke, but I am looking for a special matchbook created by Samuel Fuller to commemorate the publication of his 1936 novel Burn, Baby, Burn. According to the Pottstown, Pennsylvania Pottstown Mercury, one million of these promotional tchotchkes were produced. Maybe one of them is out there, somewhere.

(Pottstown Mercury, January 21, 1936, page 4)

Pulp Modern: Halloween Horror Issue (vol. 2, no. 9, Fall 2022)

The latest issue of Pulp Modern (vol. 2, no. 9, Fall 2022), edited by Alec Cizak, subtitled Halloween Horror Issue, is a terrific collection. I greatly enjoyed all the pieces, and appreciate Cizak's curation, which brought together a nice variety of fiction, non-fiction, and illustrations, all of which complement each other in how different they are, and together celebrate the breadth of the horror genre. Among my favorites were the opener (Ramsey Campbell's "Out of Copyright") and closer (Stanley Rutgers' "Rejection"), which both offer macabre takes on the publishing industry. In "Out of Copyright," an unscrupulous editor gets more than he bargained for when he republishes a rare text, and in "Rejection" a frustrated writer will do anything to get published in his favorite magazine. Bookending the issue with both stories was a clever and effective editorial choice not only for the obvious thematic similarity, but also because they highlight something key to horror: desire, and most specifically what happens when one is confronted directly with desire. 

Recent Acquisitions: A Trip to the Mysterious Bookshop

I decided to make an out-of-the-way pit-stop at the Mysterious Bookshop on my way home from work to pick up a signed copy of Lawrence Block's The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown. As expected, I found a couple other things I had been looking forward, and several I didn't know that I had been looking for but clearly should have been. Stark House Press/Black Gat's reissue of Robert Silverberg's Killer, a whole ton of vintage A.A. Fair paperbacks, a reprint of Day Keene's Homicidal Lady that I didn't have, and lots more.

From Gil Brewer to Harry Whittington

I'm suffering from some serious book envy today. Royal Books has a first edition hardcover of Gil Brewer's The Red Scarf for sale, inscribed from Gil to Harry Whittington and his wife Kathryn with some writerly tough-love motivationFor Harry and Kathryn:

Harry, if you don’t sit yourself down and write the honest to God book of your guts very soon, I’m sure as hell going to bash you over the head with a sledge hammer.

I mean it.

Since I can't afford this treasure, I'll have to be content with the images posted by the seller.