Suburban Sin

by Orrie Hitt

Infidelity was a way of life with the split-level dwellers! It's 1959. The town of Clinton, just a short train ride from the Big Apple, is awash in sexuality. There's Olive, who feels the urge to merge with Sally, but fears her lesbian lust is an abomination. Olive's long-suffering husband Jerry seeks solace in the arms of his bombshell sister-in-law. And why did Sally's husband Fred disappear with Ruth Archer at the hottest party on Morris Drive every Saturday night? Pulp sleaze master Orrie Hitt hits another bullseye with this shocking tale of tawdry affairs in mid-century America.

187 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Orrie 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"

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

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. Lurid, salacious, scandalous at a time --1962-- when people would
hide such things in briefcases and in newspapers.

What was Hitt up to? Besides paying the bills. Scratch the surface and suburbia ain't what it was advertised to be.Jerry and Olive met at a party and married after three months. Although he works in the City for a sleazy Men's magazine featuring scantily clad young ladies, they move out to the new development in Clinton. Olive finds the town dull. Nothing to do but drink. She is bored
with Jerry and finds her neighbor Sally stimulating. Jerry finds his wife frigid and rides the bus instead of the train because he has his eyes on a lady who lives down his street - Betty. Rather
than head home, he maneuvers Betty into having drinks with him.

No one else In suburbia seems to be happy with their crappy jobs, their screaming kids, or their spouses. Fred claims he goes bowling with the guys every Friday just so he can sneak off to see Ruth while Harold stays late in the city where Sally assumes he's meeting some girl from the office.

Throughout this crazy soap opera, once you get past the salaciousness, you realize how utterly miserable most of these characters are. And, it's not just their romantic lives either. Olive's father borrowed too much and lost every penny and then some. Betty married a bum who couldn't hold a job and took a settlement from his rotten family to walk from their rotten marriage. Unlike some other Orrie Hitt books, there's no con game or scheme going on. Just people struggling with the middle class dream. Yes, it's dated in attitudes and mores and assumptions, but it's a scandalous
Dimestore paperback from the early sixties so whaddaya expect.

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

The action takes place on Morris Drive but it might as well be Peyton Place or Melrose Place in this melodrama of suburban affairs. Another one of Hitt's trashy novels. No crime-noir in this one and the plot would have benefited, as Suburban Wife did, if there had been. Originally published in 1959 so the sex scenes are sanitized or omitted and the book would have been improved if that were not the case. The writing here is typical Hitt: smooth, direct, and 4th grade reading level. No nuances. No ambiguity. No poetry. No attempts to make language do anything other than describe in the most basic way what is going on and why. In that sense, it is quite interesting to study from a writing perspective. I wouldn't necessarily say an example of "how not" because it served its purpose in 1959 (and was reprinted in 1962) in a form fits function kind of way. But it is easy to take a book like this and systematically go through it and show how to elevate the writing.

[Phrodrick slowed his growing backlog · Rating 4 out of 5]

It may just be possible to develop a taste for Orrie Hitt. A highly prolific author of what another reviewer called lurid trash. One can find a lot of lables for him, they all include the word trash. I am in the middle of my third trashy OH novel. Suburban Sin is what we will summarize as another of his scandalous, crime free pre-Peyton place sex teases. The plot revolves around a number of very neighborly neighbors in a community, commuting distance from New York. There is a weekly party wherein they almost have swinging parties, and continuously threaten to have a key exchange. Parties where the wives are matched up with which ever male neighbor gets the key to their door. There is a visiting sex pot sister and a secret lesbian, almost expressed lust.

Something for everyone. Ok, maybe only something for every 1950-1960’s male seeking something not prosecutable as pornography. The symbolic train does not symbolically thrust into the symbolic tunnel rather than portray actual doing it. Such doing of it that does get done is just out of sight while there is a near continuous thinking about it.

This is part of what makes Orrie Hitt novels different period trash from non-Orrie Hitt period trash. His characters, most of the males a few of the females actually think about what they are doing, or might be doing. They have both interior dialogs and discussions with each other, Actual wife sharing is not consummated as much as talking about why or why there should not be wife swapping. The Community single woman has her sex life, but is not going to be a push over for the hovering married men.

If for some reason you are seeking literature. Really? This is basic, pulp fiction. Advance vocabulary and complex construction are not on the menu. As for what is on the menu? Way too much drinking. And the sex? Mostly unconsummated and all is what we would now call plain vanilla. No cuffs, furries or alien sex slavery. As for billionaires? Common this was the 50’s. No one could count that high.

Gotta love the covers.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Suburban Sin is a little out of the ordinary for Orrie Hitt. I even wondered if it had been ghost-written by someone else, but there are enough stylometric markers of his in it to satisfy me that he did indeed write it.

Rather than being set upstate, this novel is set in a town close enough to be considered a suburb of New York City. The dénouement is a "key party" (where everyone's keys are dropped in a bag and each person draws out a key and goes home with the person who's key they've drawn).