Orrie Hitt (1916-1975) wrote around 150 novels, most of them sleaze fiction. But the Orrie Hitt brand of sleaze fiction had its own flavour. It was sleaze heavily laced with noir. In fact it was often a lot more noir than sleaze. Hitt deserves to be regarded as one of the premier noir writers of the 50s and 60s but he has never gained the respect due to him.
You couldn’t wish for anything scuzzier and grimier and more noirish than The Cheaters.
Clint (the narrator) and his girlfriend Ann have just blown into town. They grew up on farms which is why they now want nothing whatever to do with farming or farm country. They both need jobs badly and Clint gets lucky. Tending bar usually pays fifty or sixty bucks a week but he lands a bartending job that pays seventy-five. Ann is delighted. Soon they’l be able to afford to get married. What she hasn’t realised yet is that Clint has no intention of ever marrying her. Clint is no good but she hasn’t figured that out yet either.
Charlie Fletcher owns the bar. The bar is in the Dells, the worst part of the city. It’s a slum, and a particularly pestilential slum. Nobody who lives in the Dells is any good. Clint doesn’t like the Dells at all but in fact he’s as rotten as all its other inhabitants. Most of the bar’s profits come from prostitution rather than selling liquor. It’s a very profitable business. The one fly in the ointment is Red Brandon. He’s a cop and even by the standards of corrupt cops he’s a nasty vicious piece of work. He demands, and gets, a big slice of the action. But even after paying off Brandon the bar is a major money-maker.
Charlie is married to Debbie. She’s thirty years younger than Charlie. Debbie has the most impressive breasts Clint has ever seen. All Clint can think about is getting her into bed.
Charlie wants to sell up his business interests. He offers Clint a great opportunity to take over the bar. It’s a goldmine. He’ll still have to pay Brandon but Clint doesn’t think that will be a problem.
Clint’s life gets very complicated. Ann gets pregnant and starts pressuring him to marry her. Clint has started a torrid affair with Debbie Fletcher. He wants her to divorce Charlie but she won’t do it. Brandon wants bigger and bigger pay-offs. The city starts a crackdown on prostitution. There are rumours of a docker’s strike (which will cut into Clint’s liquor sales). What seemed like a golden opportunity now seems more and more like a trap. The walls start closing in on Clint. And he starts to think about desperate solutions.
When we talk about noir we have to bear certain things in mind. Nobody in 1960 was consciously writing noir fiction, just as nobody in the 1940s was consciously making film noir. The idea that there was such a thing as film noir did not gain currency in the US until the 1970s and the concept of a noir fiction genre is even more recent. We can look at a book like The Cheaters and agree that it ticks most of the noir fiction boxes but when he write it Orrie Hitt would have thought he was just writing a hardboiled crime story with enough sleaze content to get it accepted by Midwood Books. The Cheaters does however very definitely tick most of those noir fiction boxes.
Clint is a very unsympathetic protagonist. He’s a drunk. He isn’t very honest. He treats Ann very badly (and she really loves him). He’s having an affair with another man’s wife. And in between he sleeps with some of the prostitutes operating out of his bar. We feel that a lot of his troubles are his on fault but as those troubles multiply we can’t help feeling a bit sorry for him, just as we would feel sorry for a rat caught in a trap.
There aren’t very many admirable characters in this tale. Ann perhaps, and Martha (one of the whores working out of Clint’s bar).
When we talk about noir we have to bear certain things in mind. Nobody in 1960 was consciously writing noir fiction, just as nobody in the 1940s was consciously making film noir. The idea that there was such a thing as film noir did not gain currency in the US until the 1970s and the concept of a noir fiction genre is even more recent. We can look at a book like The Cheaters and agree that it ticks most of the noir fiction boxes but when he write it Orrie Hitt would have thought he was just writing a hardboiled crime story with enough sleaze content to get it accepted by Midwood Books. The Cheaters does however very definitely tick most of those noir fiction boxes.
Clint is a very unsympathetic protagonist. He’s a drunk. He isn’t very honest. He treats Ann very badly (and she really loves him). He’s having an affair with another man’s wife. And in between he sleeps with some of the prostitutes operating out of his bar. We feel that a lot of his troubles are his on fault but as those troubles multiply we can’t help feeling a bit sorry for him, just as we would feel sorry for a rat caught in a trap.
There aren’t very many admirable characters in this tale. Ann perhaps, and Martha (one of the whores working out of Clint’s bar).
The book deals with sleazy situations but the sex scenes are incredibly tame.
The Cheaters is prime Orrie Hitt. Highly recommended.
The Cheaters has been reprinted by Stark House in a double-header paperback edition (paired with Dial 'M' For Man).
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