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The Cheaters
Can an unhappy wife be a happy mistress?
- GenresPulp
194 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1960
5 people are currently reading
47 people want to read
About the author
Orrie Hitt
221 books30 followersOrrie Edwin Hitt was born in Colchester and died from cancer in a VA hospital in Montrose, NY. He married Charlotte Tucker in Pt Jervis, NY (a small town upstate where he became a lifelong resident), on Valentine’s Day, '43. Orrie & Charlotte had 4 kids—Joyce, Margaret, David & Nancy. He was under 5’5″, taking a 27' inseam, which his wife altered because no one sold pants so short.
Hitt wrote maybe 150 books. He wasn’t sure. “I’m no adding machine”, he answered on the back cover of his book Naked Flesh, when asked how many he’d written. “All I do is write. I usually start at 7 in the morning, take 20 minutes for lunch & continue until about 4 in the afternoon.” Hitt wrote a novel every 2 weeks in his prime, typing over 85 wpm. “His fastest & best works were produced when he was allowed to type whatever he wanted,” said his children. “His slowest works were produced when publishers insisted on a certain kind of novel, extra spicy etc.”
Most of Hitt’s books were PBOs. He also wrote some hardcovers. Pseudonyms include Kay Addams, Joe Black, Roger Normandie, Charles Verne & Nicky Weaver. Publishers include Avon, Beacon (later Softcover Library), Chariot, Domino (Lancer), Ember Library, Gaslight, Key Publishing, Kozy, MacFadden, Midwood, Novel, P.E.C, Red Lantern, Sabre, Uni-books, Valentine Books, Vantage Press, Vest-Pocket & Wisdom House.
He wrote in the adults only genre. Many of such writers were hacks, using thin plots as an excuse to throw tits & ass between covers for a quick buck. Others used the genre as a stepping stone to legitimate writing, later dismissing this part of their career. There were few like Hitt, whose writing left an original, idiosyncratic & lasting mark even beyond the horizons of '50s-mid 60s adult publishing. What made him unique was his belief he was writing realistically about the needs & desires, the brutality (both verbal & physical), the hypocritical lives inside the suburban tracts houses & the limited economic opportunities for women that lay beneath the glossy, Super Cinecolor, Father Knows Best surface of American life. He studied what he wrote about. Wanting to write about a nudist camp, he went to one tho “he wouldn't disrobe”.
His research allowed him to write convincingly. S. Stryker, in her Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback, says, “Only one actual lesbian, Kay Addams, writing as Orrie Hitt, is known to have churned out semipornographic sleaze novels for a predominantly male audience.” She thought “Orrie Hitt” a pseudonym, & “Kay Addams” a real lesbian author! Orrie’d like that one.
It wasn’t just about sex. It was also about guts. “The characters,” Hitt’s protagonist–a movie producer complimenting a screenwriter on her work–says in the novel Man-Hungry Female, “were very real, red blooded people who tore at the guts of life. That’s what I’m after. Guts.” If anyone knew about guts, it was him.
Life started out tough for Hitt. His father committed suicide when he was 11. “Dad seldom spoke of his father, who'd committed suicide, because it was a very unpleasant chapter in his life,” said his children.
After Father’s death, Orrie & his mother moved to Forestburgh, NY, where they worked for a hunting-fishing club. He started doing chores for wealthy members for $.10 hourly. Management offered him a better job later, at .25 hourly. Eventually, he became club caretaker & supervisor. “Dad talked a lot about working as a child to help his mother make ends meet,” his children recalled. “He wanted his children to have a better life while growing up.”
Tragedy struck Hitt again during those years. His children explain: “Dad’s mom died at her sister’s house on the club property during an ice storm, so Dad walked to the house to get his mother & carried her back to his car"
Hitt wrote maybe 150 books. He wasn’t sure. “I’m no adding machine”, he answered on the back cover of his book Naked Flesh, when asked how many he’d written. “All I do is write. I usually start at 7 in the morning, take 20 minutes for lunch & continue until about 4 in the afternoon.” Hitt wrote a novel every 2 weeks in his prime, typing over 85 wpm. “His fastest & best works were produced when he was allowed to type whatever he wanted,” said his children. “His slowest works were produced when publishers insisted on a certain kind of novel, extra spicy etc.”
Most of Hitt’s books were PBOs. He also wrote some hardcovers. Pseudonyms include Kay Addams, Joe Black, Roger Normandie, Charles Verne & Nicky Weaver. Publishers include Avon, Beacon (later Softcover Library), Chariot, Domino (Lancer), Ember Library, Gaslight, Key Publishing, Kozy, MacFadden, Midwood, Novel, P.E.C, Red Lantern, Sabre, Uni-books, Valentine Books, Vantage Press, Vest-Pocket & Wisdom House.
He wrote in the adults only genre. Many of such writers were hacks, using thin plots as an excuse to throw tits & ass between covers for a quick buck. Others used the genre as a stepping stone to legitimate writing, later dismissing this part of their career. There were few like Hitt, whose writing left an original, idiosyncratic & lasting mark even beyond the horizons of '50s-mid 60s adult publishing. What made him unique was his belief he was writing realistically about the needs & desires, the brutality (both verbal & physical), the hypocritical lives inside the suburban tracts houses & the limited economic opportunities for women that lay beneath the glossy, Super Cinecolor, Father Knows Best surface of American life. He studied what he wrote about. Wanting to write about a nudist camp, he went to one tho “he wouldn't disrobe”.
His research allowed him to write convincingly. S. Stryker, in her Queer Pulp: Perverted Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback, says, “Only one actual lesbian, Kay Addams, writing as Orrie Hitt, is known to have churned out semipornographic sleaze novels for a predominantly male audience.” She thought “Orrie Hitt” a pseudonym, & “Kay Addams” a real lesbian author! Orrie’d like that one.
It wasn’t just about sex. It was also about guts. “The characters,” Hitt’s protagonist–a movie producer complimenting a screenwriter on her work–says in the novel Man-Hungry Female, “were very real, red blooded people who tore at the guts of life. That’s what I’m after. Guts.” If anyone knew about guts, it was him.
Life started out tough for Hitt. His father committed suicide when he was 11. “Dad seldom spoke of his father, who'd committed suicide, because it was a very unpleasant chapter in his life,” said his children.
After Father’s death, Orrie & his mother moved to Forestburgh, NY, where they worked for a hunting-fishing club. He started doing chores for wealthy members for $.10 hourly. Management offered him a better job later, at .25 hourly. Eventually, he became club caretaker & supervisor. “Dad talked a lot about working as a child to help his mother make ends meet,” his children recalled. “He wanted his children to have a better life while growing up.”
Tragedy struck Hitt again during those years. His children explain: “Dad’s mom died at her sister’s house on the club property during an ice storm, so Dad walked to the house to get his mother & carried her back to his car"
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 4, 2012
This is a classic pulp novel which was first published in 1960, set on the wrong side of town, populated with lots of lusty, seedy characters who are trying to scratch out a living legally or illegally. Some of them, inevitably, are well-endowed women and there's a fair amount of sex that is described in a way that would seem fairly tame now but which was doubtless pushing the limits fifty years ago.
Clint Mayer drifts into the port town of Wilton with his live-in girlfriend and finds a job working as a bartender in a dive down by the docks. His boss, Charlie, runs a number of prostitutes from the bar and pays off a particularly obnoxious detective named Red Brandon to look the other way. Charlie has a number of other business interests and early on offers Clint a chance to buy the bar. Clint would love to be his own boss and jumps at the chance, but the offer turns out to have a lot of strings attached.
The situation is complicated by Charlie's much younger wife, Debbie, who is one of the afore-mentioned well endowed ladies and who "drips sex like a faucet." Before long, Clint is in over his head on virtually every front and there seems to be no good solution to his endless chain of problems.
This is a good story, although anyone who has read many of these books will see all of the plot twists coming well ahead of their revelation. Still it's a fun read and those who like many of the books from this era that have been republished as part of the Hard Case Crime series should certainly enjoy it.
Clint Mayer drifts into the port town of Wilton with his live-in girlfriend and finds a job working as a bartender in a dive down by the docks. His boss, Charlie, runs a number of prostitutes from the bar and pays off a particularly obnoxious detective named Red Brandon to look the other way. Charlie has a number of other business interests and early on offers Clint a chance to buy the bar. Clint would love to be his own boss and jumps at the chance, but the offer turns out to have a lot of strings attached.
The situation is complicated by Charlie's much younger wife, Debbie, who is one of the afore-mentioned well endowed ladies and who "drips sex like a faucet." Before long, Clint is in over his head on virtually every front and there seems to be no good solution to his endless chain of problems.
This is a good story, although anyone who has read many of these books will see all of the plot twists coming well ahead of their revelation. Still it's a fun read and those who like many of the books from this era that have been republished as part of the Hard Case Crime series should certainly enjoy it.
November 26, 2018
Orrie Hitt has been referred to as the king of sleaze pulp. He wrote something on the order of 150 books from the 50s to the 70s. At the height of his writing career, Hitt would churn out a book every two weeks, working twelve-hour days and chugging ice coffee at his kitchen table as he furiously typed. His books were all capped with racy, lurid, tawdry covers. The men in his books are all con artists, grifters, shady characters that could charm the skirts off any woman and the women in his books were lushes, tramps, etc.
The Cheaters is not about the type of suburban couples that the title would suggest. Rather, it is a story about Clint and Ann who drifted from town to town working resorts and ended up in the Dells, a neighborhood whose name equated with slums. Clint “wanted a job tending bar as much as [he] wanted three legs in [his] pants but when you’ve got ten bucks in your pocket and a girl waiting for you in a rented room you don’t argue with anything that comes your way.” There’s no glamour here, just hard-luck life. Clint takes a job tending bar and Ann takes a job in a restaurant. The real money in this bar comes from the girls who work it, but there is a crooked cop that wants his cut and his cut just keeps getting larger and larger. The guy who owns the bar wants to move on to other things and offers to sell out to Clint with Clint paying him a fee every month. The real problem just as in most of these pulp novels is the baggage that comes with the bar owner – his wife- Clint “could say she had the face of a movie doll and not miss the target by much.” “Any guy was apt to be unsteady when a dame like this walked in on him. You took one look at her and you saw a bedroom.” Clint is head-over-heels for her and nothing can quench that fire, not even Ann getting pregnant in a world where single girls in desperation sought back-alley abortions if they had the three hundred it cost.
Of course, Debbie – the femme fatale wife of the bar owner – has a price and that’s the insurance proceeds that would come from the bar owner’s death. Yes, the familiar Double Indemnity theme from James Cain is here as in many pulp novels of the fifties. The plot is not terribly complicated, but Hitt makes it his own, drawing the reader into the desperation of the characters in it. No one in his books is wholly good or pure or faultless. His characters are, however, real people living real lives and propelled by forces they cannot control.
Between the crooked cop who has his hand in the till and keeps upping the ante, the bar owner who wants to get paid, and the bar owner’s wife who has Clint dancing like a marionette, it all comes to a head later in the book.
It is a top-notch example of fifties pulp and is quite easy reading. Simply calling it sleaze pulp doesn’t do it justice because Hitt’s world is more than that. It contains these real people who can’t control themselves. They are desperate for money, for love, for a future that is more than they have. And, little by little, the life is squeezed out of these people.
Good stuff.
The Cheaters is not about the type of suburban couples that the title would suggest. Rather, it is a story about Clint and Ann who drifted from town to town working resorts and ended up in the Dells, a neighborhood whose name equated with slums. Clint “wanted a job tending bar as much as [he] wanted three legs in [his] pants but when you’ve got ten bucks in your pocket and a girl waiting for you in a rented room you don’t argue with anything that comes your way.” There’s no glamour here, just hard-luck life. Clint takes a job tending bar and Ann takes a job in a restaurant. The real money in this bar comes from the girls who work it, but there is a crooked cop that wants his cut and his cut just keeps getting larger and larger. The guy who owns the bar wants to move on to other things and offers to sell out to Clint with Clint paying him a fee every month. The real problem just as in most of these pulp novels is the baggage that comes with the bar owner – his wife- Clint “could say she had the face of a movie doll and not miss the target by much.” “Any guy was apt to be unsteady when a dame like this walked in on him. You took one look at her and you saw a bedroom.” Clint is head-over-heels for her and nothing can quench that fire, not even Ann getting pregnant in a world where single girls in desperation sought back-alley abortions if they had the three hundred it cost.
Of course, Debbie – the femme fatale wife of the bar owner – has a price and that’s the insurance proceeds that would come from the bar owner’s death. Yes, the familiar Double Indemnity theme from James Cain is here as in many pulp novels of the fifties. The plot is not terribly complicated, but Hitt makes it his own, drawing the reader into the desperation of the characters in it. No one in his books is wholly good or pure or faultless. His characters are, however, real people living real lives and propelled by forces they cannot control.
Between the crooked cop who has his hand in the till and keeps upping the ante, the bar owner who wants to get paid, and the bar owner’s wife who has Clint dancing like a marionette, it all comes to a head later in the book.
It is a top-notch example of fifties pulp and is quite easy reading. Simply calling it sleaze pulp doesn’t do it justice because Hitt’s world is more than that. It contains these real people who can’t control themselves. They are desperate for money, for love, for a future that is more than they have. And, little by little, the life is squeezed out of these people.
Good stuff.
April 14, 2012
Got to love that cover! My version of The Cheaters is one of a two-fer published this year by Stark House Press. Kudos to Stark House Press for releasing some of these hard-to-find and/or forgotten paperback classics from the 50's and 60's drugstore racks. The Cheaters is a fairly generic story about a man, Clint Mayer, caught in an ever-tightening trap between a crooked cop, a bad woman, and his saintly girlfriend. Add to the mix a handful of prostitutes and you've got yourself a sleaze/noir party. I'd rate it between 3 and 4 stars, giving it the benefit of the 4th star because of its entertainment value. This is mens stuff going on around here...and I ain't above liking it.
April 7, 2013
A Goodis-like noir full of lust, desperation, and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. For Orrie Hitt’s characters, there is no way out of the slums he so deftly portrays in THE CHEATERS, only a less painful way to make ends.
Cheating is commonplace, an accepted pastime in The Dell, one that has kept young woman off the streets and in beds on their backs, and hapless men without coin to feed their families for favouring sins of the flesh. Clint, a bartender who also runs a small prostitution business on the side takes full advantage of this, much to the dislike of his pregnant girlfriend.
Wanting to live as straight and narrow as able given his occupation, Clint easily succumbs to the curves and pretty face of his bosses wife, before long he’s paying off cops, contemplating murder, and leaving his girlfriend.
THE CHEATERS is a highly addictive novel that emphasises all that is noir through a whisky stained glass. It’s brimming with bad people in a bad place with little or no redeeming qualities. Much like Goodis, Orrie Hitt is fast becoming one of my favourite noir/pulp authors.
This review is from THE CHEATERS as appears in the Starkhouse double feature THE CHEATERS/DIAL M FOR MAN: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14...
See my 5 star review of UNFAITHFUL WIVES here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
This review of THE CHEATERS also appears on my blog: http://justaguythatlikes2read.blogspo...
Cheating is commonplace, an accepted pastime in The Dell, one that has kept young woman off the streets and in beds on their backs, and hapless men without coin to feed their families for favouring sins of the flesh. Clint, a bartender who also runs a small prostitution business on the side takes full advantage of this, much to the dislike of his pregnant girlfriend.
Wanting to live as straight and narrow as able given his occupation, Clint easily succumbs to the curves and pretty face of his bosses wife, before long he’s paying off cops, contemplating murder, and leaving his girlfriend.
THE CHEATERS is a highly addictive novel that emphasises all that is noir through a whisky stained glass. It’s brimming with bad people in a bad place with little or no redeeming qualities. Much like Goodis, Orrie Hitt is fast becoming one of my favourite noir/pulp authors.
This review is from THE CHEATERS as appears in the Starkhouse double feature THE CHEATERS/DIAL M FOR MAN: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14...
See my 5 star review of UNFAITHFUL WIVES here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
This review of THE CHEATERS also appears on my blog: http://justaguythatlikes2read.blogspo...
September 24, 2015
"The Cheaters" is an entertaining and fast paced noir about a loser that finds a job in a seedy bar in a grimy town and becomes sexually obsessed with the owners wife. The sexuality was probably fairly salacious for 1960, but is very tame in comparison to modern erotica/romance novels.
October 22, 2020
Clint doesn't have the brains to tangle with dirty cops and filthy prostitutes. He's a big ox with a weakness for melons. Orrie doesn't give the reader enough false hope that this chump will come out on top. There's not much sport in being a punching bag.
"He had me in a spot, my back against the wall, and he was hitting me in the guts when my hands were down."
April 29, 2016
The Sleaze-Noir label is kind of funny, but I like it, and this is a fun sleazy read about a guy who buys a bar to get rich running a string of hookers and also to get his hands on the 40DDs of the wife of the guy he bought the bar from. Enter stage right, the crooked cop seeking protection money. It gets a bit repetitive at times because nearly all of the action is centered in the bar, but this is one of Hitt's better books. It's in the first person from Clint's point of view and that seems to free Hitt's prose from the lecturing, moralizing tone that a lot of his third-person narratives have.
December 27, 2025
“That was The Dells for you – sex, poverty and booze”. Sub-“Postman Always Rings Twice” amusement with an alcoholic, sex-addict, wannabe pimp who gets played by every single person around him. There is some illicit fun to be had watching the cosmos play with this oik while he loses his shit over every glimpse of Debbie Fletcher’s strategically deployed bazumbas but Hitt over-plays his hand as to what is actually going on and as such you don’t need tea leaves to figure out how this thing is going to land.
Hitt writes well and has an eye on wider social ills but his productivity compromises his plotting. Caveman protag is Clint Mayer, glugging rye, ditching his good girl partner, howling at the moon whenever anyone in a tight dress comes near him, financially handcuffed to a slum bar and pimping out young girls in an attempt at big bucks and making ooh-la-la with sex pot Debbie Fletcher who everyone tells him is playing him like a violin. Clint, as you may deduce, is not joining MENSA any time soon and that’s a problem; Hitt never makes us believe any of this bozo’s plans might succeed. Nevertheless, initial chapters spent in Clint’s misanthropic company (“He was a big, fat hunk of flesh and I didn’t have any use for him”), particularly since he is so obviously being set up to be knocked over, are amusing rather than throw-it-across-the-room repellent although you obviously wouldn’t want to go anywhere near him in the real world. The “sleaze” that we know and love is the usual moral quagmire rather than anything explicit and beyond Clint treating women like sex objects there is a palpable sense of darkness and seediness throughout the novel. It’s also obviously not specific to the era and if Clint had a mobile phone and got suspiciously bequeathed a Wetherspoons in his twenties this thing could have happened yesterday. A pregnant girlfriend, a designing sex pot, a bent cop, there is a universality to Clint’s preoccupations and Hitt is in tune with the working man’s desperate hopes for sex, money and happiness. It’s just a pity he never makes us believe Clint will succeed, though.
Meanwhile, the usual genre elements are in play: a diabetic hubby, a trophy wife who wants his life insurance, a bent cop twisting the knife with his financial demands, a working girl with a heart of gold. The dank bar Mayer is bequeathed and the action taking place mostly after dark or by the fetid river – it’s a wonder Hitt doesn’t call it the Styx – creates a nice sense of creeping evil. Indeed customers wash up at Clint’s bar as if by the shore of the river and once activity at the bar stops a union strike causes activity on the river to stop too. Alas Hitt doesn’t really have Mayer do anything of interest when these shadows fall. There is much sitting at the bar quaffing shots, a lot of scampering up to the above-bar flat to make nice with Debbie while she talks about life insurance and the gun permit hubby has and every chapter or so bent cop Red Brandon turns up, spits on Mayer’s shoes and demands another few thou. The last third of the novel sags as Hitt runs out of things for Clint to do but with the river being so central to the town and plenty of mentions of the striking dock workers it’s possible to squint and see the seeds of season 2 of The Wire.
By the end Hitt is palpably eager to tie this thing up and move onto his next sale so we get a far too neat bucolic fairytale ending which Mayer, after his appalling treatment of girlfriend Anne, in no way deserves. It’s formulaic and mechanical and doesn’t leave us with anything other than the conservative status quo reasserted but I suppose Hitt wanted to put another ribbon in his typewriter and send this baby out. Thus, “The Cheaters” ends up much like Clint’s own seedy bar: adequate for a short stop off and maybe even a shot or two but there’s not much else to make you linger. “This, I concluded, just wasn’t my night.”
Hitt writes well and has an eye on wider social ills but his productivity compromises his plotting. Caveman protag is Clint Mayer, glugging rye, ditching his good girl partner, howling at the moon whenever anyone in a tight dress comes near him, financially handcuffed to a slum bar and pimping out young girls in an attempt at big bucks and making ooh-la-la with sex pot Debbie Fletcher who everyone tells him is playing him like a violin. Clint, as you may deduce, is not joining MENSA any time soon and that’s a problem; Hitt never makes us believe any of this bozo’s plans might succeed. Nevertheless, initial chapters spent in Clint’s misanthropic company (“He was a big, fat hunk of flesh and I didn’t have any use for him”), particularly since he is so obviously being set up to be knocked over, are amusing rather than throw-it-across-the-room repellent although you obviously wouldn’t want to go anywhere near him in the real world. The “sleaze” that we know and love is the usual moral quagmire rather than anything explicit and beyond Clint treating women like sex objects there is a palpable sense of darkness and seediness throughout the novel. It’s also obviously not specific to the era and if Clint had a mobile phone and got suspiciously bequeathed a Wetherspoons in his twenties this thing could have happened yesterday. A pregnant girlfriend, a designing sex pot, a bent cop, there is a universality to Clint’s preoccupations and Hitt is in tune with the working man’s desperate hopes for sex, money and happiness. It’s just a pity he never makes us believe Clint will succeed, though.
Meanwhile, the usual genre elements are in play: a diabetic hubby, a trophy wife who wants his life insurance, a bent cop twisting the knife with his financial demands, a working girl with a heart of gold. The dank bar Mayer is bequeathed and the action taking place mostly after dark or by the fetid river – it’s a wonder Hitt doesn’t call it the Styx – creates a nice sense of creeping evil. Indeed customers wash up at Clint’s bar as if by the shore of the river and once activity at the bar stops a union strike causes activity on the river to stop too. Alas Hitt doesn’t really have Mayer do anything of interest when these shadows fall. There is much sitting at the bar quaffing shots, a lot of scampering up to the above-bar flat to make nice with Debbie while she talks about life insurance and the gun permit hubby has and every chapter or so bent cop Red Brandon turns up, spits on Mayer’s shoes and demands another few thou. The last third of the novel sags as Hitt runs out of things for Clint to do but with the river being so central to the town and plenty of mentions of the striking dock workers it’s possible to squint and see the seeds of season 2 of The Wire.
By the end Hitt is palpably eager to tie this thing up and move onto his next sale so we get a far too neat bucolic fairytale ending which Mayer, after his appalling treatment of girlfriend Anne, in no way deserves. It’s formulaic and mechanical and doesn’t leave us with anything other than the conservative status quo reasserted but I suppose Hitt wanted to put another ribbon in his typewriter and send this baby out. Thus, “The Cheaters” ends up much like Clint’s own seedy bar: adequate for a short stop off and maybe even a shot or two but there’s not much else to make you linger. “This, I concluded, just wasn’t my night.”
March 23, 2012
Orrie Hitt is classified as "sleaze noir" but I think that's a little unfair. His depictions of small time life, the grifters and hustlers, are great. He wrote these novels in a few days on an old-fashioned type writer in modest homes in Port Jervis, NY. The least interesting parts of these books are the soft-core sex scenes.
October 7, 2013
Orrie Hitt has a unique style and his pulp fiction novels are an easy read. Too bad many modern day writers lack this skill.
"The Cheaters" is centered around a bar where sex is exchanged for money and the police force is corrupt. Breaking out of this cycle is tough to achieve and the risks involved are high.
"The Cheaters" is centered around a bar where sex is exchanged for money and the police force is corrupt. Breaking out of this cycle is tough to achieve and the risks involved are high.
April 17, 2012
Really, really good.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews